Where Does Customer Education Fit in a Company Structure?

Customer education programs teach users how to get the best value from your product or service. This approach leads to satisfied, happy customers who feel empowered by your product, leading to higher customer retention, better customer experience, decreased churn, lower support costs, and increased product adoption and revenue for your business. 

Customer education also offers additional benefits for your organization, such as improving the alignment between internal departments like your sales and marketing teams. 

But the question is, where does customer education fit in a company structure for maximum benefits and results?

By strategically positioning customer ed, you can smash silos and create a collaborative, communicative, cross-functional working environment where your people are aligned and can excel in their roles. So, where does customer education fit in a company structure? In short, it belongs at the nexus of your teams—and the core of your business strategy. 

Discover how customer education can (and should) work with other teams across your organization to help you reach your business goals. It will also explain why customer ed matters for businesses and discuss some metrics you can use to measure performance and impact.

Why is customer education important?

Customer education programs are crucial—arguably now more than ever. Not only does customer ed boost user satisfaction, creating superfans who will zealously advocate for your brand—it’s also a major driver behind growth. 

For example, data shows that companies prioritizing customer education achieve 1.7x faster growth than competitors, providing an invaluable advantage to brands investing in customer education. Creating a robust program lets you develop and curate effective customer training to help users get the most out of your products and services.

In another survey, roughly three-quarters of the respondents—about 74 percent—described customer education as an “important, very important or extremely important” contributor to revenue. Creating a robust program lets you develop, curate, and provide 

Meanwhile, data from Salesforce shows that most customers—about 66 percent, in a survey of over 6,000 participants—”expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.” By neglecting customer education and not providing educational content users need, not only are you losing opportunities to leverage the benefits—but you’re also in danger of failing to meet customers’ basic expectations. 

Need more convincing? Here are five reasons your business should prioritize customer education:

1. Customer education provides a better onboarding experience. Customer ed makes the onboarding process more efficient, engaging, and enjoyable, increasing the speed and ease with which users find value in your product or service.  
2. Customer education reduces training costs. Traditional training methods can be costly and time-consuming. You can update online content as necessary, and users can access training on-demand, offering a more nimble, accessible, and cost-effective alternative. 
3. Customer education frees up bandwidth for your customer support team. Customer education content creates knowledgeable, confident users, translating to decreased support tickets and increased customer satisfaction. 
4. Customer education boosts adoption of, and engagement with, your product or service. Customers are more likely to adopt and engage with your product or service when they understand its uses, know how to navigate its features and feel confident they’ll get exceptional value. An effective program delivers these outcomes by equipping users with in-depth, on-demand training throughout the customer lifecycle. 
5. Customer education boosts revenue. According to data from HubSpot, “Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t.” 

These are just a few examples of the advantages customer education can deliver for your organization or brand. Learn more about the benefits of customer education, then explore some practical strategies for building successful programs. 

How do you measure customer education?

Customer education programs are cost-efficient to create yet can deliver impressive long-term results for businesses, including improved customer retention, increased product adoption, and more.

However, a program that is ineffective or out of alignment with your goals will merely waste company resources. 

So, how do you know if your customer education program delivers the expected outcomes? In short, how do you measure success? 

This is where data and metrics come in. When you’re armed with data that proves your program is working, it’s easier to get (and maintain) funding, and the data also acts as a guide to help you improve and optimize your program. 

But what specific metrics should you be tracking to gauge customer education success? 

There are two basic types of metrics: program metrics, which deal with program performance, and business impact metrics, which deal with costs and revenue. 

Program metrics are helpful for CSMs, training managers, and instructional designers, while business impact metrics are more useful to C-suite executives and VPs of marketing, sales, and customer support. 

For example, tracking views or popularity can help your instructional designers build more engaging and helpful content for users. Meanwhile, your VP of Sales might be more interested in the cost-per-lead or number of leads generated. 

Here are 10 more examples of metrics that can help you assess—and improve—the performance and impact of your program: 

• Course enrollment and completion rates 
• Customer retention rates 
• Customer satisfaction scores 
• Hours spent in training 
• Number of customer renewals 
• Number of customer support tickets
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) 
• Total users enrolled in training 
• Training revenue 
• View counts and most popular content 

Where does customer education fit in a company structure?

The benefits of customer ed are clear, from boosting customer engagement and retaining more customers to spending less on training. 

The bigger question is, where does customer education fit into your overall business strategy and structure? Or, how can you leverage customer education to support departments across your organization to reach your goals? 

For instance, how could customer education empower your sales team to convert more prospects? Or enable your customer support team to spend less time dealing with repetitive support tickets? 

Read on to learn how customer education can be harnessed to help various teams perform their functions more effectively, including marketing, sales, and customer support. 

Sales

Sales reps can achieve greater success in converting prospects into satisfied, loyal customers if they receive adequate tools and support, which is the function of a sales enablement team. 

Here are three ways your customer education team can work with sales enablement to support your reps.

1. Providing sales reps with a deeper knowledge of the product or service, including what value it can provide and the pain points it can mitigate or resolve
2. Discussing potential obstacles or hurdles to product adoption so your sales team is better prepared when prospects raise doubts or ask questions 
3. Sharing their expertise so sales teams can provide prospects with more compelling and engaging product demos

Marketing

The core function of marketing is to boost brand awareness to increase sales and drive profits. Since your marketing team is responsible for creating promotional content and generating buzz around your brand, there’s a natural intersection with customer ed, which—like marketing—aims to get more customers to adopt, use, and spread the word about your product. 

Customer education should be incorporated into your marketing strategy to establish and build customer trust. By providing useful and relevant knowledge to prospects, customer education works as a valuable content marketing tool. 

Customer support

Customer support is responsible for resolving questions, concerns, complaints, and other issues about your product or service. 

Customer education creates the perfect opportunity to address commonly-occurring issues or pain points. This alleviates the burden on your support team, allowing them to handle other tasks while delivering a smoother, easier customer onboarding experience. 

For example, if your customer support team repeatedly receives questions about the same issue or topic, your customer education team can develop content addressing that topic in detail. 

Aligning customer education with business goals

It’s vital to align your customer education strategy and metrics, such as retention or lead generation, with your organization’s overall goals and priorities. Doing so will help you get the best ROI from your customer education program, demonstrate the program’s value to stakeholders, and generate the buy-in you need to get (and keep) the program running smoothly. 

How WorkRamp can help you create a successful customer education program

Drive product adoption and engagement, create a cross-functional learning environment, and reach your business goals with a customer education program tailored to your organization’s needs. With drag-and-drop editing, flexible theme options, custom data reporting, and advanced integrations, WorkRamp’s Customer Learning Cloud makes it easy to build and track scalable programs that deliver quantifiable wins, from reduced customer churn to higher lifetime value.

Ready to take customer experience to the next level? Contact us for a free, personalized demo.