What is a Customer Education Platform? Unlocking Success Through Customer Ed

A customer education platform lets you create, manage, and deliver educational experiences to customers and partners and centralizes and simplifies the training process, ensuring customers have a great experience with your products and services. 

But the bar for customer education programs is high. You can’t just adopt a customer education platform and think that your strategy and resources will take care of themselves. 

Organizations today are making significant investments in sophisticated programs in pursuit of meaningful business outcomes. 

In fact, some 75 percent of organizations secured a budget increase for customer education in 2022. 

That’s where your customer education platform comes in. The right platform can help you create a robust customer education program that transforms users into loyal brand advocates.

Learn the benefits of using a customer education platform and what to look for when choosing the best one for your organization. 

Why do you need a customer education platform?

A customer education platform helps you deliver scalable, high-impact training through the customer lifecycle. It drives customer acquisition, product adoption, and retention. 

With a platform like the Customer Learning Cloud from WorkRamp, you can bring your learning program to life in a fully white-labeled, inviting, sleek interface. 

Let’s explore a few other advantages of using a customer education platform. 

Streamline customer onboarding

By creating a customer education academy with customized training and content, customer onboarding is a breeze. 

You can continuously educate customers and partners, setting them up for long-term success. 

Helping customers and partners understand and experience the value of your products ensures they’ll stick around longer. Some 86 percent of customers say they will remain loyal if onboarding and continuous learning are provided.

An effective customer education platform makes onboarding easy and helps users engage with your product. 

A customer education academy, for instance, simplifies the onboarding process for a large-scale company with many partners, training them simultaneously with minimal human effort.

Read more: 5 Customer Acadmies That Drive Product Adoption

Increase revenue

Customer education contributes to more than just product adoption and onboarding.

Market intelligence firm IDC found that customer education brought an average revenue increase of 12 percent in 2021. A robust customer education program also helps you generate new revenue opportunities. For example, you can bring in new business through customer advocacy and drive upsells. 

Overall, by providing customers with high-quality, personalized education through a platform, you can keep them connected to the company and encourage more repeat business.

Reduce support costs

A comprehensive customer education platform can help you provide higher-quality support and reduce costs. 

Studies show the average customer education program drives a 6.2 percent increase in bottom-line revenue and a 6.1 percent decrease in support costs. 

For example, you can build a knowledge base for customers to troubleshoot common issues. Customer satisfaction increases, and your support team gets fewer repetitive questions. This means fewer inbound tickets and more resources to resolve other issues.

Help create a sense of community 

Customer education platforms are valuable for building community because they enable social learning. 

Social learning, a term that describes how people learn in informal situations, helps people learn better. It allows customers to collaborate, build relationships, and share knowledge with others.

When Harvard Business School introduced social learning, course completion rates increased to 85 percent. The programs focused on students working together to solve problems versus passively learning from an instructor. 

A customer education platform facilitates communication and collaboration among your customers and partners, allowing them to share best practices and insights.

It encourages customers to:

• Share updates on social media
• Engage within discussion groups
• Earn awards and badges
• Share responses to polls and give ratings

With the right customer education platform, you can reach more learners and spread your offerings wisely.

Read more: Do These 6 Things to Increase Customer Loyalty

Decreased time to value

The numbers don’t lie.

Trained customers:

• Use products more often (68 percent)
• Use more features (58 percent)
• Use the product more frequently (87 percent) 

An effective customer education platform helps you provide practical training at any point of need or in advance to speed up time to value. 

Increased product adoption

Studies show continuous training increases customer satisfaction and product adoption and boosts renewal rates. 

Customers who know how to use your product effectively will see results faster. You don’t want them misusing your product or getting fed up and logging out completely, never to return.

A customer education platform gives customers the necessary information from sign-up to advocacy, eliminating confusion and creating more confident users.

Create brand advocates

Advocacy is a powerful force for business growth without breaking the bank. It revolves around providing the best educational experience for customers and encouraging word-of-mouth referrals. 

“We want customers to market for us; they should be shouting from the rooftops about our product. Customer education is a type of marketing we can’t pay for. Your program can drive product adoption and build awareness.”

 

–Tony Vaughn, Former Director of Customer Education, Qualified

Customer education platforms help in many ways:

• They improve onboarding. This increases time to value and improves advocacy. 
• They provide good customer service. You can build a full-on resource center with video tutorials, webinars, and help articles
• They gamify the learning experience. Celebrate customer milestones and make learning fun.
• They collect customer feedback. Regularly understand your customer’s concerns across all touchpoints, and turn those insights into course improvements.  

As Dave Derington, Director of Customer Education at ServiceRocket, put it in his WorkRamp LEARN panel, “Learning a new product is really taking a journey into parts unknown.” 

If you can be the map that guides customers throughout their journey, they’ll reward you with brand advocacy and easier customer acquisition. 

What to look for when choosing a customer education platform

Supported content types

Online training doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Consider the types of customer education content you want to create and deliver when selecting a platform.

Make sure your platform supports your type of eLearning content, like:

• Training videos
• VR and AR simulations
• Slide presentations
• Quizzes
• Games
• Podcasts
• Assessments 
• Learning paths
• Blog posts

💡Pro tip: Simplify course creation with editable templates and prebuilt content to customize and launch in your LMS. It’s perfect when you don’t need to build an eLearning training course from scratch. 

Automated content creation

Did you know you can automate content creation with some customer education software? This unique feature allows you to build impactful programs at scale based on industry and role. 

The Learning Cloud, for example, offers WorkRamp Content powered by the corporate education hub, Go1. 

With WorkRamp Content, you can access prebuilt resources from industry experts and leaders on compliance, professional development, sales skills, and more. 

Choose from over 85,000-course resources, customize the templates, and deploy strategic content ready for business impact. 

Social and mobile learning

When choosing a customer education platform, there are several social and mobile learning elements to look for:

• Social learning features. Find a platform that incorporates discussion forums, chatrooms, and social media integration. These features allow customers to collaborate and learn from each other. 
• Interactivity. Seek a platform that uses interactive elements, such as badges, leaderboards, and quizzes. 
• Mobile compatibility. Make sure your platform is compatible with smartphones and tablets. Many customers prefer to access learning materials from their mobile devices. 
• Microlearning. Microlearning refers to small, bite-sized learning content, such as short videos, quizzes, and infographics. Microlearning can improve knowledge retention and make learning more accessible for busy customers. 

Overall, a customer education platform that includes social and mobile learning elements helps create a more effective learning experience for customers and contributes to the long-term success of your organization. 

Supported grading/certification system

Studies show certifications remain the top program tactic, with 47 percent of respondents using them, and an additional 23 percent planning to implement them. 

Aim to find a platform with a grading and certification system that aligns with your goals and objectives. 

A good customer education platform will have: 

• Certification options relevant to your customers’ roles and responsibilities 
• An assessment engine that enables you to create tests and quizzes 
• Various grading and scoring mechanisms to evaluate performance
• Full customization of certification programs to align with your brand’s messaging
• Recertification options to keep customers up to date on the latest skills and knowledge 

A customer education platform with grading systems enhances the value of your program. It gives customers recognized credentials, which turns customers into power users and increases loyalty and satisfaction.

Read more: Why You Should Create a Customer Certification Program

Analytics and reporting 

If you want to track training ROI and measure the impact of your programs, you’ll need good analytics and reporting. 

Look for a platform that offers:

• Detailed learner analytics, such as completion rates, test scores, and time spent on each activity. 
• Engagement metrics, like forum activity, quiz scores, and social media interaction. 
• Performance analytics, like training ROI and customer satisfaction scores. 
• Custom reporting allows you to generate reports based on specific filters, including location, job title, or course completion date.

Your customer education platform should integrate with other business tools, such as your Customer Relationship Management (CRM). 

With WorkRamp, you can push training data into systems like Salesforce for a complete view of business performance. 

How investing in a customer education platform can help reduce churn

The true ROI of customer education is not only related to faster onboarding or revenue generated from monetized education. In fact, IDC found a 19 percent increase in customer lifetime value from 2020 to 2022, thanks to customer education. 

Customer education platforms can reduce customer churn by making it easier for customers to understand and use a product.

It also helps:

• Build stronger customer relationships 
• Improve customer satisfaction with your product
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase retention 

Read more: How to Use Customer Education to Improve Customer Experience

You can keep customers engaged with your products or services by providing personalized and engaging educational materials. In addition, customer education software helps companies better identify and address customer needs, resulting in more effective customer service.

Organizations can experience a 19 percent increase in CLV with a customer education platform

The Learning Cloud is the customer education platform to help you increase revenue and customer retention

Some 77 percent of customer education programs integrate with their LMS platform. The Learning Cloud gives you everything in one place. 

With the Learning Cloud, you can build scalable customer training programs, educate and certify customers, and take advantage of analytics tools to prove the ROI of your training programs. 

Ready to see how the Learning Cloud can help you improve customer education and increase customer satisfaction? Contact us to schedule a free, personalized demo.