How to Use Customer Education to Improve Customer Experience

The customer journey doesn’t end once a purchase is made. Reducing customer churn and developing strong, long-lasting relationships is about ensuring users have a positive experience with your brand.

The most successful organizations prioritize the customer experience before and after the deal closes. They don’t wait for customers to ask questions or have problems. Instead, they’re proactive about customer success and help users get the most out of the product or service.

Customer-focused companies are 60 percent more profitable than those that aren’t. Using customer education to improve customer experience allows you to create positive relationships, develop customer loyalty, and turn users into brand advocates. 

Try these four customer education best practices to improve customer satisfaction and experience.

How to use customer education to improve customer experience

Prioritize customer onboarding 

You understand the importance of an employee onboarding program. Employee turnover costs organizations millions of dollars each year, and an effective onboarding program can help you retain talented employees. But what about customer turnover? The reality is that increasing customer retention by as little as five percent can increase your profits between 25 percent and 95 percent. 

The key to effective customer onboarding is creating a standard process that every user follows through the customer lifecycle. This ensures every user receives the same excellent experience, customer service, and the opportunity to understand the benefits of your product or service. You can map out this learning path just as you do your customer journey mapping.

We recommend using an all-in-one learning platform to host your customer onboarding program. Then, you can keep it current, adjust based on customer feedback, and add or remove modules as needed. 

When users understand how to get the maximum benefit from their purchase, they will not only be more satisfied with your product or service, but they will also spend less time troubleshooting with customer support and get up to speed on your product faster. 

This translates into a positive customer experience, making users more likely to recommend your solutions to others.

Read more: 5 Tips for Building a Partnership Enablement Framework

Showcase the most popular features 

Specific features are key selling points. For example, when you offer a demo, there might be particular functions that users are most excited to see or a specific use case that drives interest in your product.

After the sale, continue to capitalize on this interest. Host product demos or customer engagement sessions to showcase how these features allow customers to solve problems. 

Why spend the time and money to continue to do this once a sale closes? Because the customer may not be done buying. You never want a customer to be susceptible to a competitor because they didn’t understand the full capabilities of your solution.

Building a successful customer education program can help you develop a positive relationship with buyers that allows you to sell additional products and services. You can also ask them to join a referral program, promote your product online, and more.

For example, Qualified used WorkRamp to create their customer education program. They tracked results and found that trained accounts were at least 2x more likely to renew and could better use the pipeline solution. 

Tony Vaughn, Director of Customer Education at Qualified, used the drag-and-drop editor to create videos, quizzes, and certifications and used WorkRamp for customer education and sales enablement. 

“We’re creating fantastic learner experiences to engage employees, customers, and partners in a completely different way,” Tony says. “Our goal is always to find new ways to help our customers put a culture of learning and growth at the core of their business.”

Use on-demand learning to make customer education accessible and affordable

Pre-pandemic, many companies did customer education in person. Some teams traveled to the client’s location, and others hosted in-person events to train multiple customer teams simultaneously.

However, there are some disadvantages to this approach. First, it’s challenging to scale in-person training events. If your company expands, you won’t be able to offer high-quality training in a timely manner. That could cost you clients and revenue.

Second, events are expensive. You have to pay for travel, food, lodging, and more. In addition, the customer may have to send reps to your event or pay for part of your team’s travel expenses.

It’s also important to realize that this type of customer training isn’t accessible to everyone. Some people may be unable to travel or train in person. 

Many companies have realized that working and learning remotely is just as effective. That’s why 92 percent of buyers prefer virtual sales interactions over in-person ones.

Measure the impact of your customer education program

Your stakeholders and business leaders want to focus their spending on efforts that drive growth, revenue, and profitability. Therefore, the ability to showcase the ROI of customer education is essential to maintaining the process and continuing to offer support for your customers.

What can you measure? Start with the training program itself.  

• What are the completion rates for the different customer education modules? 
• How many members of your client’s team are engaging with the content? 
• How do customers rate and react to the training content?
• Are there consistent questions about specific topics?

Next, look at the results from the training process.

• Are trained customers using more features than others?
• Are trained customers renewing, upgrading, or otherwise making additional purchases compared to non-trained customers?
• Are trained customers less likely to call customer support, cancel their purchase, or have serious complaints?
• Are trained customers more likely to promote your company on social media, share your product or service with colleagues, or participate in your referral program?

These metrics will help you measure the impact of your training process. If you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, consider asking customers what’s missing.

 You can ask, “What would make you more likely to join our referral program?” or “What topics do you wish were covered (or covered better) in training?”

The best measure of your customer education program is your customers’ success. If they’re winning, they’ll be excited to tell others about your solutions and will make full use of your products and services.

Read more: 7 Customer Education Metrics to Measure Program Success

Use customer education to improve your customer experience

These best practices will help you create customer education programs that enhance the customer experience and drive revenue and profitability for your organization.

Discover how to use the Learning Cloud to enable your customers and partners. The Customer Learning Cloud can help you centralize customer learning and deliver world-class customer experiences from onboarding to advocacy. Contact us to schedule a free, personalized demo.