Category: Customer Education

5 Key Strategies to Scale Customer Education and Training [Methods & Tools]

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date October 4, 2022
No Comments on 5 Key Strategies to Scale Customer Education and Training [Methods & Tools]

Customer education and training are critical components for success with any product or service. It gives customers the knowledge they need to use your product or service effectively, which in turn helps you to generate more revenue. There are many aspects of customer education and training – creating content, building messaging platforms, deciding on mediums and formats, and providing them with content that will be helpful to them and their team.

Key Strategies That Can Help You to Scale Your Customer Training Effort

Automation: Automating your customer training and education can help you save time and ensure that everyone is getting the same level of information.
Gamification: Gamifying your training and education can help keep people engaged and motivated.
Social Learning: Leveraging social media can help you reach more people and provide a more interactive experience.
Self-Paced Learning: Offering self-paced learning can give customers the freedom to learn at their own pace.
On-Demand Learning: Offering on-demand learning can help customers access information when they need it most.

Blended Learning Approach: This means using a combination of online and offline methods to provide training. For example, you could use online video tutorials, along with in-person training sessions. This would allow you to reach more people with your education and training programs. One is through paid advertising. This can be in the form of online ads, traditional print or television ads, or even sponsoring events. Another way to create customer awareness is through PR and thought leadership. This involves getting your company and its solutions featured in the media and in industry publications. You can also speak at conferences and events to

Create Detailed Manuals and Guides: Create detailed manuals and guides that customers can refer to when they need help. These should be easily accessible and easy to understand. They should also be updated regularly to ensure that they are accurate and up-to-date.

Provide Customer Support Services: Provide customer support services that can help customers with any questions or problems they may have. This could include a phone line, email support, or live chat. By providing these services, you will be able to scale your customer education and training programs more effectively.

Creating Customer Awareness: It is the first step to scaling customer education and training. Once you have created awareness, you can then start working on getting customers interested in your solutions. You’ve just hired a new customer service agent. Great! But now what? How do you make sure they’re getting the right training and education to help your customers?

It can be challenging to scale customer education and training, but it’s essential if you want to provide the best possible experience for your customers. That’s why we’ve put together 5 key strategies to help you get started.

Key Strategies That Will Help You Scale Your Customer Education and Training

Online training
In-person training
Self-paced learning
E-learning modules
Social learning

Once you have a good understanding of who you’re targeting and what you want them to achieve, you can start developing your strategy.

1. Identify Your Audience – Objectives

Let’s start by defining your audience and objectives. Who is your target customer? What do you want them to learn? Be specific in your goals, and make sure they’re measurable. What type of customer are you targeting? What do you want them to know?

Once you have your objectives in place, it’s time to create a plan of action. This is where you’ll decide on the best way to reach your target audience and how you’ll measure success.

There are many different ways to educate and train customers, and the best approach will vary depending on your business, product, and target audience. But here are five key strategies that will help you scale your customer education and training.

2. Create Content Strategy – A Personalized One

You need a content strategy.

What does that mean? It means you need to come up with a plan for how you’re going to deliver your training and education materials.

It’s not enough to just wing it when it comes to customer education and training. You need to have a plan in place, so you can systematically roll out new content and make sure your customers are getting the most up-to-date information.

Which Things Customer Training Strategy Must Include?

A content calendar
A process for creating new content
Guidelines for who creates the content
A process for approvals
A way to track how well the content is performing

A guide for your content writers on what tone and style to use
The types of content you’ll be creating (videos, articles, tutorials, etc)
Who is your target audience?
The channels you’ll use to distribute your content (social media, email, blog, etc)
How often you’ll be publishing new content?

3. Select the Right Technology Platform – Checkout Tips to Find One

You need to select the right technology platform to scale your customer training and education. It needs to be easy to use and navigate, with a user-friendly interface.

With the right tools, you can make it easy for your team to access the resources they need and for customers to find the information they’re looking for. Plus, it needs to be scalable so that you can add more users and courses as needed. And it should be affordable so that you’re not breaking the bank.

Finally, make sure the platform you choose is reliable and has a good track record. That way, you’ll know you can count on it to help you deliver quality customer training and education programs.

When selecting a technology platform, you’ll want to consider factors like ease of use, scalability, and affordability. You also want to make sure that the platform you choose is compatible with your existing systems and that it can grow with your business.

The right technology platform can make a big difference in the success of your customer education and training initiatives. Make sure you select one that meets your needs and that will help you achieve your goals.

4. Implement an Assessment & Certification Program

How to Implement an Assessment and Certification Program?

Define Your Objectives: What do you hope to achieve with your assessment and certification program?
Choose the Right Assessment Tool: There are many different types of assessment tools available, so make sure you select the one that’s best suited for your needs.
Create Your Assessment Questions: The questions you ask in your assessment will help you determine whether or not someone is qualified to be a customer representative.
Assess and Certify Your Employees: Once they’ve successfully completed the assessment, certify them as customer representatives.
Track and Maintain Your Data: Make sure you track the data collected through your assessment and certification program so you can measure its effectiveness over time.

5. Measure Your Success

Are you seeing an increase in customer satisfaction? Are more customers sticking around? Are they buying more products or services? You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why you need to track the success of your customer education and training initiatives.

If you’re unsure where to start, there are a number of tools and resources to measure. Customer retention software, for example, can help you identify which customers are at risk of churning and then provide you with the information you need to coach them back to health.

Measuring your success is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to customer training and education. You need to be able to track how your team is doing, identify areas where they need improvement, and see what’s working well so you can replicate those successes.

There are a number of ways to measure your success. You can look at things like customer satisfaction rates, engagement levels, or the number of support tickets that are resolved. But no matter which metrics you choose, make sure you’re tracking them consistently and using that data to make decisions about your training program.

Conclusion

You’ve come a long way in your customer education and training initiatives. But as your company grows, so too does the need for a scalable solution. Here are five key strategies to help you get there. Automate where possible – Leverage learning management system (LMS) – Sync training across channels – Embed learning into your product – Gamify the learning process.

Until next time, keep improving 🙂

Tags Customer Education, Key Strategies to Scale Customer Education

Blog Customer Education

How to Use Customer Education As a Marketing Tool [Tips & Checklist]

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date July 26, 2022
No Comments on How to Use Customer Education As a Marketing Tool [Tips & Checklist]

Customer education, in the simplest term, is a marketing strategy. This doesn’t mean other strategies are an unreliable fit to upscale your ROI. But with global disruption and customer thought-process shift — actively “pulling” information to support their purchasing decisions, you need a more inclusive marketing strategy.

Customer education solely depends on your objectives. Whether you want to increase product adoption, generate demand for your product, increase conversion rate (free to paid users), or even prioritize having a talent pool of qualified people that uses your product. If your priorities are amongst any of above mentioned, your education must report to marketing & sales reps. So, shall we start to know about how to use customer education as a marketing tool [tips & checklist].

Importance of Customer Education

In the digital-savvy and information-driven culture, customer education is a valuable asset for any marketing team. Gone are the days when worn-out sales pitches fueled the ROI of any organization. Because, nowadays, customers are putting their necks out to educate their buying decisions. So, it all drips down to how aware are the customers of your product and services.

Recent research by New Century Media suggests that companies who invest in customer educational assets foster consumers 29 times, who are likely to buy. The best example of this is Hubspot Academy, the people who take their courses or even read their blogs are more likely to buy their offerings. So, it is not rocket science.

It is a question of consumer thought-process shift — actively “pulling” information to support their purchasing decisions. This shift in the digital culture has created a context in which consumers feel the need to engage with your products, and your services, through a deeper & meaningful, bite-size education.

Furthermore, Forbes former contributor, Steve Olenski, articulated in his Education-based Marketing blog that;

“Today’s consumers won’t do business with people they don’t trust.”

As consumers expect immediate gratification, it gets harder for them to buy unless it’s on their terms and timetable. Hard fact, but true! So, for them to trust you, they need to feel assured that they are dealing with the right company that has their best interest in mind.

How to Implement Customer Education as a Marketing Tool?

1. Align Your Goals

To launch any successful customer education program, you need to understand the dynamics of the business impact it has. And to figure that out, you need to align your goals on every level of your company functions.

So, what are your priorities? To generate demand for your product? Increase your product use? Increase conversion rate (Free to paid users)? Or do you want to create a talent pool of qualified people to use your product?

After establishing above mentioned priorities for your organization — align your set goals within every hierarchy level of your organization.

Business Goals: Conduct a whiteboard session with top leaders & decision-makers of your company to discuss traction metrics such as customer acquisition, lifetime value (LTV), and other metrics. Without the top-bottom sync, the customer education program won’t get very far.
Departmental Goals: The impact of customer education is felt across different degrees in different departments of your company, be it, sales, marketing, and customer success team. To acquire proven results, you need re-assure what they are using as proxies for customer success, currently. Therefore, customer education will become a helpful user-level metric for them as well.
Team Goals: Team goals are all about your sync impact. To create a win-win situation while implementing customer education, you need to convey synchronous efforts — think user-level metrics. Aligning a singular set focus & consistency will bring a great impact on your engagement rates & course completion.

2. Allocate Resources

The bluntness about customer education is you’re not going to reach your dream state, right away. Optimizing your customer education program for your unique set goals & message will take time. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the first step. To create a solid foundation and reach an educational state like the academy, you might face hurdles like lack of resources & unsatisfied response gaps.

But focus on gains, not gaps. Avoid fixing your eye on global-class academies like Hubspot when you are just starting. Focus on your gains. Be it the smallest effort today, your needle should be moving in the right direction. Because, if you’re constantly peeking out on others’ examples, you’ll struggle on your grounds. That being said, it’s cool to have an idea of what’s going around about features and resources, it’ll help you to keep the tap on current trends.

Creating your academy doesn’t necessarily mean that the resources and tools required must come from your repository and budget. Allocate resources by borrowing useful material from other departments, that might have expandable resources, you can use. For example, for any subject matter topic, you can use your specialists to shoot a quick 5-min explanatory video session.

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Never underestimate the power of words. Have round-table sessions (virtual works too) with your teams weekly or monthly to discuss the progress. Host theme-based events to bring & connect different departments on the same page. Yeah, you can use event fliers & memes, and paste them around the wall to let the message roll. Eventually, the intent is to bring visibility to create momentum.

3. Create & Deliver

Now you already know what kind of goals sets and business outcomes you’re aiming to drive, so the question comes, what sort of objectives will help your customer achieve through your educational assets — that’ll eventually lead to your business outcome that you’ve identified?

In technical terms, this is called “Learning Objectives”. After you have nailed down your learning objectives, you can start laying out the entire journey that your customer will have to accomplish their objectives. Most importantly, when you are in this stage, consider the following:

Subject Matter: Subject Matter is perhaps the most significant decision in your customer education program, it means what you are going to educate your consumers about. As the simplest example, let’s say you wish to educate your customers about your products. But, don’t you think that’s a broad topic.

So, work with your subject matter experts to narrow down your content scope, at the start, and find priorities. Them be it in a specific feature or even a function you feel helpful.

Content Mix: In this process, you need to conduct white sessions with your instructional designer to decide the type of content (or platform) you are going to produce. Most learners don’t respond to a heap of words, including videos, infographics, and slideshows to foster the fast-learning cognitive capacity of your consumers. The purpose is to create a dynamic learning environment, so the more creatively exciting mix it gets, the more easily it is absorbed.
Content-Length: The concept of your perfect content mix works this far. The reality of consumers nowadays is that most of them don’t have time to sit back and invest hours at end to learn. This is why you need to find a short & snappy way to get into a 5-10mins window. Creating 7 short video sessions is way better than 1 long webinar session.
Delivery Process: Once you align your goals, find ways to get the resources, and create the right mix & length of your content, and its delivery time. Delivery is about enabling a system that supports scaling your mapped-out customer education program. To make use of this, you need a tech stack integration to operate your education program while deploying the resources that you’ve developed earlier. Don’t forget to engage with your customer in their learning stages while you reach the last step to measure their progress.

4. Measure

Feedback time. Gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback to improve your customer education program. Your efforts here are to know what your customers think about your program, so keep your doors open for any kind of suggestions or feedback. You can embed survey forms at the end of each course completion section or even mail them up.

Keep on assessing your customer education progress at deeper levels, by looking into learning proficiency, operational impact, relationship growth, and even ticket cost.

5 Tips to Strategize Your Education-Based Marketing

1. Use Omnichannel Strategy to Spread Your Brand Message

To drive diverse audience interest, you need to have an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, to provide a myriad of multiple mediums (social media, website, direct mail, review websites, publicity, and even phone calls). Establish a meaningful and close connection with your consumers by reaching them where they are, mostly. An easy way is to fetch a Social Media Marketing (SMM) buyers persona in place, that will help you to segment your audience (gender, educational background, age, industry, goals, challenges, etc)

2. Ask for Reviews & Feedback from Your Learners

You got to encourage your consumers to leave feedback or review that will help to revamp your education program strategies & progress effectively. Remember to make it a fun activity by employing gamification instead of forcing their experience with your program.

3. Create an Engaging Content Mix (Blogs, Videos, Infographics, etc)

Your customer education program is simply to transform/create a perceptive about how you do business. So, don’t rely on heaps of information instead make it an exciting & engaging mix of content. (Employ Social Media Strategies aligning your content mix)

1. Have a mobile-friendly website interface (Optimize accordingly)

For any website interface to be mobile-friendly, you need to have a session with your UI/UX experts or try with your developers to fill out the gaps. Your consumer is expecting an easy-to-access & guided navigational journey, so remember to optimize your page loading time & navigable elements to be mobile-friendly.

2. Invest in building Education Applications

Applications are the safest way to produce proficient learners. It offers a sense of convenience in the learner’s journey. Creating an education-based app can help you maximize your ROI while building a community of talent – ready to use your product.

Customer Education Process

The customer Education program can take up many forms. As it’s evolving with time — your approach should be unique like your product and services. As different companies have different objectives, customer education varies timely. Let’s say as we discussed your objective is to create a talent pool of proficient people that uses your product. So, options like instructional content, infographics, guidebooks, interactive weekly sessions, case studies, and product tours are super scalable educational resources to accomplish the above-mentioned objective.

Fundamentally, the question about the customer education process lies in both the educational & learning objectives. So, there is no such thing as the right format or process. Once you think about the user’s journey, your customer education must shape that perceptive of understanding the stages that consumer goes through when they are using your product.

After you have decided “why” you want to educate your customers, it’s time to understand “how” you’ll educate them. In this segment, you’ll need to consider different consumer journeys. If your ultimate goal is brand loyalty, there are likely various ways to get there.

All you need to create digitally-savvy and engaging educational resources and deploy them using the right technology.

Customer Education Process Checklist to Get Started

Set SMART goals
Create relevant content (Mix to engage)
Strategize before launch
Keep on Measuring
Employ the right technology
Evolve & Progress

Why to Use Customer Education Software in SaaS Companies?

When you streamline your educational resources, you need a suitable technology that supports your academic foundation. Getting the right technology doesn’t mean the absolute “right” but it boils down to your right or suitable tech needs.

Artificial Intelligence: Every consumer has a broad sense of understanding of different products & services they want to use/buy. So, to narrow down such a broad sense, you need an intuitive system to analyze your audience (wherever they are) & simulate your message without human error.
LMS (Learning Management System): Customer education is not any lesser than conducting training sessions. Without a proper dynamic system in place, information is just like words with no purpose. So, from streamlining your content and segmenting your audience (learning goals, progress meter, gamification, and objectives) to deploying your educational program (insights, content authoring tools, simulations, and big data repository) — Learning Management System becomes a necessity for any success to happen.

Depending on the objectives you want to accomplish with your customer educational program, you can employ the right technology that suits your needs.

How Does Customer Education Impact on ROI?

Customer education has the potential to impact any organization’s ROI with consistent efforts & strategies in place. In the recent studies, it was found that on average companies reported a 6.2% increase in revenue whereas a 7.4% increase in customer retention led to a 6.1% decrease in customer support costs.

While customer education is observed to boost marketing & sales results, it’s just a matter of strategic effort that high-success companies leverage such educational strategies to outperform the average and low-scale companies in every category, by the whopping rate of 30%, in over a year or so.

Customer Education can have an impact in different degrees, not limited to sales, but resulting in brand advocacy and an increase in LTV.

So, after such compelling evidence, a customer-first approach is needed to boost to a 16X higher increase in customer retention/satisfaction rate.

Conclusion

Regardless of the nature of your business, or your industry, customer education is the competitive edge & need of the hour for every company to adapt to the global disruption. In this blog, if you have any queries regarding the right technology to get you started with your customer education program, do let us know, we’d love to give you a free demo.

Customer Education

4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education for SaaS Companies

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date June 23, 2022
No Comments on 4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education for SaaS Companies

A majority of individuals stop consuming a product or service not because they do not find it useful or because it is not capable of solving their issues. Rather, they stop consumption because they find it challenging to get habituated to it.

People look for products and services that are easy and capable of solving complex issues. And, as a SaaS company, you must cater to their needs. Regrettably, few such businesses have come to the realization and have been able to successfully implement it.

According to a recent study,

“About 40% to 60% of consumers who sign up for an unpaid trial are likely to utilize a company’s products and services and never return.”

It is just 2.7% percent of those who continue to stick to these services after the trial. So if a user abandons your company, either they have not used your product enough to like it or they didn’t like it at all. So in the cases where the problem is in your hands, you must try to address them.

When customers sign up for a service or a product, they do so only when they are sure about its capability of solving their problems. Thus, among the several reasons for users leaving, poor onboarding is one of them.

SaaS businesses tend to make several such mistakes while providing customer education, which overall decreases their ROI and reduces the value of their products among customers.

So, to prevent you from taking any steps that hinder the growth of your venture, we are here to share some of the key mistakes that you must avoid.

In this article, we will take you through the entire process of customer education and share some of the essential aspects associated with the same.

So, without any further delay, let’s dive in to know 4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education For SaaS Companies.

What is Customer Education?

Customer education refers to the content that is created for onboarding, engaging, as well as retaining existing and novel customers. This content is delivered through on-demand and in-person channels, based on the requirement of the consumers.

Also called customer training, it aids the users to get a better comprehension of the services and products of a SaaS business and find reasonable value in the same.

Based on the level of knowledge of users, the complexity of products, target audiences, and the business’s goals, a company may provide customer training in varied formats.

Customer Training Formats

1. Knowledge Checks, like Quizzes

Knowledge checks help the company and the consumers both since they aid in measuring the consumers’ level of comprehension. Also, the scores can further motivate the users to remain engaged with the content for a longer period.

2. Slideshows

By uploading previously used content during in-person training, businesses can indulge the users greatly.

3. Infographics

To recycle current marketing content, infographics in the form of PDFs are helpful for companies and customers. Businesses can simply provide fast facts and overviews related to their products and services.

4. Recorded Screenshots

One of the best ways to train customers is by providing them with step-by-step instructions for complex processes and configurations.

5. Recorded Webinars

The most engaging content in customer training is through webinars. Customers can get an overview of the interface of a product.

By producing engaging content in varied formats based on the needs of users, companies can get many benefits, which are highly advantageous for their growth.

Importance of Customer Education in the SaaS Industry

While several businesses may not realize it, customer education can be highly profitable for their overall growth due to its positive influence on essential metrics from support contact rate, to the adoption of products and services, to marketing leads.

A more detailed illustration of the reasons for its importance is provided below.

1. Improved Customer Satisfaction

Higher customer satisfaction implies customer loyalty, which further indicates higher profitability. So by training customers, a company teaches them how to use their products and services, which increases the overall probability of satisfaction among customers.

2. Increased Customer Engagement and Adoption

A business’s customer training program directly impacts the following:

Customer satisfaction
Customer independence
Product usage rate

When the customers master the products and services of a company, the overall level of engagement and adoption augments.

3. Enhanced Expansion, Renewal, and Retention Rates

Several factors like competition and poor onboarding can result in customer churn. However, when a business invests in customer education, the customers get access to tricks and tips that offer them higher value.

Educated customers are more likely to expand and renew, thus, increasing retention rates.

4. Enhanced Product Development

When users raise support tickets, their questions will be of higher relevance to the kind of implementations and improvements that the product needs. Thus, their feedback will aid in product development.

5. Decreased Support Tickets

Investing in customer training can help businesses save on customer support tickets. The most common questions that are asked by customers can be provided to them in the form of help articles.

6. Higher ROI

Customer education results in customer retention since they value the products and find them useful once they understand their importance. So, when you spend lesser on gaining new customers through marketing and are rather focused on customer retention, your company’s return on investments or ROI is simply higher. Also, a satisfied customer is likely to make the business more profitable in the long run.

7. Quicker Customer Onboarding

By being able to provide a smooth onboarding process to your customers, you will:

Build the customer’s trust
Gain higher reputation
Educate several customers
Make sure that all users begin with the same information
Create a consistent understanding

How to Start With Your Customer Education Process?

Based on the extent to which customer education is important for a SaaS business, you might now be willing to know how you can start with the process. Well, given below is a basic step-by-step guide to provide you with an idea.

Step 1: Define Goals

By setting up the goals you wish to achieve through the training program, you will be able to define your objectives and measure the program’s progress.

Step 2: Situation Analysis

Based on your goals, perform an audit of your present learning material in case you have an ongoing customer education program. You must conduct an audit of your customer’s experience after purchasing as well.

Step 3: Check Resource Availability

Apart from your existing learning material, you will require several other resources. Allocate the budget and decide time boundaries as well.

Step 4: Consider Learning Styles of Users

Based on the kind of audience you have, think about the learning styles and spaces that will be the most suitable for them. Consider the amount of time they will spend, the tone of voice for content, and the requirement for visual elements.

Step 5: Decide Your Medium

Once you have understood the learning styles of your consumers, you are ready to decide on your medium of training. There is a wide variety of choices. For instance, it can be a YouTube video or an in-store demonstration.

Step 6: Regular Checks on Program

Set quarterly or annual checks on your training program to measure the progress that the customers are making. The metrics will help the program evolve based on the feedback and overall review.

Why use Customer Education Software in SaaS Companies?

When a SaaS company decides to use customer education software, it is opting for several benefits, which include the following:

1. Improved Security

If you want your business to keep growing, you cannot risk the personal information of your consumers and allow any kind of data theft or breaches. So when you use software for customer training through an authorized vendor, you get higher security.

2. Monetization

If your team of trainers possesses important knowledge associated with your products and services, you can sell it in the form of a course and thus, earn money.

3. Enhanced Reporting

The software will provide you with information regarding users’ progress, the content accessed by them, data visualization, the impact of training on users, and much more.

4. Choices for Offline Learning

Some vendors provide software that allows users to download and access content in offline mode as well.

5. Mobile-Friendliness

With a majority of the world’s population using smartphones to perform daily activities, the software training program must be mobile-friendly. By opting for such software, you will augment the users’ activity and indulgence.

6. Dynamic Education

Similar to the recommendation of videos on YouTube based on previous activity, training software suggests content to customers based on their learning. Also, the customers can define their learning paths, which cater to their necessities. This enhances retention and adoption of knowledge in the longer term.

Top Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Education for SaaS Companies

To make sure that your customers get the best learning experience and also begin to value your products and services like you want them to, these are the top mistakes that you must avoid.

1. Poor Relation Between Educational and Business Goals

Based on the goals of your business, you must set the goals for your customer education program. For instance, if the aim is to decrease the number of support tickets raised, you must make an FAQ section on your company’s website addressing the commonly asked questions.

2. Poor Customer Training Strategy

If your strategy is not clear and goal-oriented, it will be short-lived. Thus, to avoid this, you must form a step-by-step plan based on your goals and define the metrics that the company will utilize for measuring progress.

3. Disregarding KPIs and Metrics

When you disregard KPIs and metrics, you will never know the areas of customer education that need improvement. So, measure the engagement rate, net promoter score, customer lifetime value, and customer churn.

4. Poor Choice of Customer Education Medium

A poor choice of medium for customer education implies a waste of time and money. To avoid this, you must consider the type of audience, their educational needs, and your educational goals.

Quick Checklist to Educate Customers in SaaS Companies

Before beginning your customer education program, you must ensure that all the crucial aspects have been taken into consideration. For your ease, we have made a checklist for the same:

What kind of customers do you have?
What are the business goals?
What are the goals of the customer education program?
Who is responsible for ensuring the smooth functioning of customer education?
What are the required resources?
Which mediums will be used for educating customers?
On what basis will the success of the program be evaluated?
On what basis will the software be chosen?
How will the Learning Management System be managed and implemented?
How will the customers be informed of the LMS?
Which teams are involved in educating customers?

Once you have answers to all these questions, you are ready to start educating your customers about the products of your company.

How Does Customer Education Impact ROI?

By educating customers, companies get loyal and satisfied customers. For these reasons, the rate of retention is high and so is the return on investments. Customer education impacts ROI in various ways, which are as follows:

1. Higher Rates of Customer Retention

Acquiring a new customer is five times more costlier than retaining an existing customer. By educating customers about the use of your products, you enhance value, which leads to customer retention.

2. Higher Customer Satisfaction

When customers have a proper understanding of the utilization of your products, they are likely to be more satisfied. And higher customer satisfaction means renewal of services, which leads to a higher ROI.

3. Word-of-Mouth Publicity

Happy customers are likely to recommend the company’s products and services to their friends and family. This method of advertising is highly beneficial for businesses since it does not require investments and the possibility of customer acquisition is high.

Conclusion

Customer education is a crucial part of SaaS businesses since it makes the users understand the proper use of products and services and makes them comprehend their value. However, the extent to which companies make mistakes while running a program of customer training makes it unworthy of time and money.

In this article, we discussed some of the most prominent mistakes that you must avoid to have a successful training program. By choosing the right software, and the most suitable mediums, valuing metrics and KPIs, and relating your business goals with educational ones, you can get great ROIs through customer education.

Tags 4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education For SaaS Companies, Customer Education

Blog Customer Education

Top 6 Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce

Post author By Ivy Lobo
Post date April 27, 2022
No Comments on Top 6 Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce

Let’s Know About the Top 6 Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce

In this blog, you will learn how a new-age hybrid workforce demands the change in learning content strategies for L&D departments. By creating an adaptable learning strategy – your customer training program can stay progressive for the long run.

All of us know about the importance of best strategies for creating customer education content. If you implement best strategies for creating customer education content in your customer education program then you will get more impactful result. So let’s learn which are the best strategies for creating customer education content.

Also, the factors about how enabling a learning management system (LMS) in your content distribution strategy can become your access to wider audiences. Know the best strategies to create your learning content through – 6 best strategies for customer education content creation.

You can also download this free blog for later touchpoints in your content strategic stage with your L&D team and project managers.

To give you an outlook of how dedicated SaaS companies are in structuring their future hybrid work model, Here is how Hubspot is planning to manage its new hybrid workforce:

From January 2021 they allowed employees 3 work options.

From the office: You come into a HubSpot office 3 or more days per week. You have a dedicated desk for your laptop, monitor, family photos, and anything else that makes your workplace truly yours.
The Flex: You come into a HubSpot office 2 or fewer days per week. When you come to the office, you’ll be allocated a “hotel desk”, which will be organized by the team when possible.
From home: You work the majority of your time in a HubSpot-approved entity.

Why mention all these plans & timings?

Two reasons:

1. Customers are changing their work environment.

2. Access to remote working support.

Here Are the Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce You Can Use.

1. Adapt to Blended Learning

Creating a learning experience for a hundred thousand people and million-plus learning items and planning to execute it in a personalized way is not an easy task. Moreover, if it is not deployed at the right time for the right person – your entire efforts and time spend on curating content becomes useless.

“Our leaders are building their strategies to connect to those who are better & faster in building digital content & give our people access hands-on.” -Simon Brown (Chief learning officer, Novaris)

To create a variance of learning content in the age of the hybrid workforce, you need hands-on learning solutions to cater to your different sets of customers.

Here’s why the only 1:1 learning in your L&D course deployment might not be the best strategy:

60% of SaaS companies are adapting to remote culture post-2021.
16% of employees in Top SaaS companies prefer WFH to in-office.
91% of remote job posts grew on Linkedin post-March 2021.

It is not that 1:1 interaction or classroom learning won’t be of any use shortly. Many companies believe that L&D courses are best catered to once they are deployed in person.

Also, an employee retains at a higher level when they are in a classroom environment. But, not to forgot how times have changed the entire corporate working paradigm – Your L&D needs blended learning courses to execute your customers where ever they are.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended learning is an approach to educate your customers with both online learning materials & traditional classroom methods inclusive of online interactions. It requires a physical presence of a student & a trainer, with some elements of student control over time, place, and medium.

Benefits of Blended Learning (Companys’ Perspective)

Reduced 1:1 Training Courses Cost (Travel, accommodation, and printed training material) .
Better learner engagement: Online gamification and webinars.
Greater ROI.
Easy to track learners’ training completion or pending status.

Benefits of Blended Learning (Learners’ Perspective)

Self-paced learning: Convenient & flexible for remote learners.
High comprehensive understanding: According to academic research.
Social learning is supported: Interaction with trainers, instructors, and fellow learners.

2. Enable LMS – Planning, Development, and Distribution (Continuous L&D model)

If you have a hybrid workforce – you need to update your distribution model. You need a continuous adaptive strategy that applies both for remote workers and office ones.

Typically, the customer training program is owned by a single team – The customer success team. But, that doesn’t mean that other teams shouldn’t get involved.

Planning out a combined effort to deploy your customer education content covers each area of how well you know your customers. As an example:

Customer success team: creating course content while developing & managing the LMS.
Sales team: Subject matter experts & customers insights.
Customer support team: Improvement through customer insights.
Design team: Course design creation.

How LMS becomes a need in a Hybrid environment?

Single-channel distribution for different working environments.
Curate diverse learning content for specific training through AI support.
Self-paced learning programs designed for different working profiles.

How you will create your learning content depends majorly on how you distribute it. So, updating your distribution channel will ensure that your remote learners don’t feel left behind & envision their career progression wherever they are.

3. Update Your Content

It real tricky to understand sometimes what type of content would be best for your customers. Therefore, it’s best to create a content audit to identify where your organization’s content strategy stands.

Start by asking few questions:

What type of training resources are we currently giving our customers?
What teams are involved in the customer training process?
What tools are we currently using to train our customers?
What is our internal data telling us?
What are internal teams and our customers saying about the training program?

After you create a full content audit basis on such questions – develop learning objectives. When you have an overall goal in your online training strategy, you can easily plan out training courses that will have a definitive outcome for learners as well.

Researching and planning your learning content on basis of customer-centric goals helps your organization in the long run. From curating and streamlining training courses to defining KPIs, it is the stage that will boost your chances of getting the training right.

For example, if you are training your customers on how to use your emailing software, the objective of your course could be that the customer can add a CSV email list to your system.

In simple terms, one objective is that a customer can build a course using our provided solution. This sounds simple, but it makes creating your training courses much more straightforward.

From here, you can now branch out your content in form of slide decks with images, creating course PDFs, and other easily build text to image formats to help customers develop their skills easily.

You can also use videos using tools like Camtasia or a fully fletched content authoring tool. Because it’s good to develop a mix and match content type to cater to different customers’ choices.

A good LMS can provide you to add multiple content formats into your courses. Also, by doing this you will keep your learners engaged.

Don’t forget to dig into the resources you already have – you have a gold mine already. It can be an eBook written by your marketing head, or decks handed out by your sales guys, or even internal guides. Take a keen look at your current assets to check if the content fits for repurposing into training courses.

4. Be Accessible to a Wider Audience

Many SaaS companies are opting for freemium membership of their education program to reach the broader new customers and existing audiences. Beyond boosting customer engagement, this strategy also helps generate brand awareness during challenging times – goodwill in social impact.

Also, make sure that you employ the right technology while curating your content strategy so that you can scale, improve and repurpose your training impact later on.

For example, Moz, a marketing analytics software company, offers free courses on its training academy to help marketers and other contributors to develop & improve their search engine optimization (SEO) skill sets. By scaling training programs on such a level, Moz is immensely broadening their impact of training impact.

5. Stay Updated

Since Covid-19 has hit, industries have seen an increase in remote work demand. Some SaaS companies are adapting to use technology to curate their hybrid workforce training content and some are still managing flexible classroom schedules as an L&D course deployment option.

But, those companies who opted for online learning are now understanding the value of updating & the scope of engagement. Customer trainers and instructors are becoming proactive in seeking to understand the changing needs via 1:1 interview, zoom meeting coffee hours, and product & service usage analytics.

Once you keep all your ears up, building a learning content strategy for your training programs becomes an iterative process. Don’t get de-motivated if your training program is not deployed on time, or friction points coming now and then, or even you feel that this is not good.

Remember, no training program is perfect, that’s the best thing – It is a continuous process of improving.

The rule of your training program must focus on what is most important for customers? What are they finding value in? Keeping your approach in such a mindset will make the entire process more achievable and will allow you to improve while adding more value for your training courses in the long run.

6. Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The changing speed of L&D courses delivery and development caused many SaaS companies to align their focus on their minimum viable product (MVP).

In practice, it is the most authentic and impactful development strategy to curate your learning content around your high product value.

To create and distribute valuable content – companies are experimenting with new formats like videos and image-texted resources to put out their message as clear as possible.

Conclusion:

Educating customers is a continuous process once you understand the seamless results it gets as an experience for customers.

Friction within the training process is likely to happen in each & every training program. And, setbacks are meant to let you restructure your entire process, but re-creating through tools & strategy will evolve your entire organization dynamics.

To ensure your learning content is helping your customers to understand your products & services better – Bring a learning management system (LMS) as a tool to hammer & shape your content strategy according to customers’ needs. Employ the pioneering in learning technology to retain & delight your customers now.

Tags Customer Education, Customer Training

Blog Customer Education

5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date February 16, 2022
No Comments on 5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

Customer Education is the Most Powerful Weapon to Survive in the Market.

Irrespective of the business you run or the product or service you want to deliver, the goal is to add value to the customer base. Any business that wants to survive in the market continually strives to develop a product or service that meets the needs of the customers. They want to solve the pain points that the customers may have before using the product.

In this hyper-competitive market, where products are becoming complex and advancing technology, it is vital to keep the customers knowledgeable. But how do you keep them educated about these factors? The best way is to launch the right customer training program. It ensures that your product is successful in the market when customers adopt the training.

What is a Customer Training Program?

When you launch a program, product, or service, a set of programs are developed to offer the consumers and stakeholders the required skills, information, and abilities to use the product to its maximum capacity. The aim is to arm customers with the resources and tools they need to become more informed consumers or buyers of the service or product.

With the help of customer education, a company can engage, onboard, and retain existing and new customers. By developing the customer education program, you are helping to exist and potential customers recognize the product’s value. The customer training program intends to offer a positive experience for the consumers.

As a part of the process, it is often conducted in two phases, pre-sales assistance, and after-sale education. In the pre-sale, the program helps consumers to know about the various features of the product. The process also helps the company know whether the service/product meets the consumer’s needs. The after-sale customer education program focuses on techniques and knowledge for optimum usage of the product/service.

The Customer Training Program Course Can Offer the Knowledge to the Consumers in Several Forms and Formats, Which Can Range From the Following.

Written material like purpose and focused blogs.
Multimedia, which can have video content focusing on skills.
Interactive knowledge bases with the help of AI chatbots.
Webinars for a live session group instruction process.
Interactive assessments to monitor and help consumers to track their progress with quizzes and tests.
Contacting the consumers with your customer service reps.

It is quite likely that you can find all these in the content marketing of your business. If that’s the case, it’s wonderful because you already have the base for creating a customer training program. However, customer education takes this training a step further, where resources are offered to consumers to better tackle product/service-oriented concerns. Moreover, while providing the training, the program also equips the consumer with enhanced insights with methods and tools that they can apply to resolve broader challenges on their own.

The topics covered in a customer training program are more than just help-desk topics. Its core focus is on developing self-service while having an always scalable approach even when there are n numbers of users of your product/service.

Given that proper customer education helps with scaling the business, there are few more benefits that the training offers. The next section discusses five of the key benefits of using the right customer education program.

5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

It has been witnessed that customer education programs can create a practical and positive experience not only for the consumers but also for employees dealing with the customers. Here are five top benefits of implementing the right customer training program portal.

1. Scale & Educate Every Customer

Many companies are now employing dedicated customer success managers to help with the onboarding of customers and train them with the products. The job, however, often becomes problematic when each customer manager has to assist many of the customers per day.

With the customer training program online, the customer success manager will only be required to help those who need the extra layer. Only when a customer finds certain factors confusing or not finding the answers in the training program will the customer-facing employee be required to engage.

The process automatically frees the customer service employees to tackle more pressing issues than troubleshooting mundane problems. This enables better scaling of the program or service while facilitating the education.

2. The Same Level of Learning for Every Customer

All customers want to feel special. Without a customer training program, the chances are one consumer can get through training while the other just the basics. This can result in having dissatisfied customers. There is no chance of a lack of consistency across the customer training with a customer training program.

This hence ensures each customer has a similar onboarding experience. The opportunity to access the same material and similarly navigate the product. It allows the consumer to feel confident that everyone gets the same information from the company.

3. Increase Cost-Efficiency

Often the job of customer service employees is tedious with answering the same old questions of the customers. This often results in employee churning; thus you have to hire and train the new ones. The training cost is quite expensive for the companies.

Additionally, if you are one of those who offers 24/7 customer service, you have to hire people round the clock, which is once again expensive. With a customer training program, you can cut through all these by reducing the churning, hiring people for shorter periods while ensuring your customers get a valuable and satisfying experience. Overall you reduce your overall expense to keep the customers satisfied.

4. Increasing Customer Trust

Customers want to be taken seriously, and they want to solve the problem by themselves instead of running to the company all the time. When you educate them, this builds the customer’s confidence; in return, they start trusting your company more.

So, if you are afraid that by educating your customer, they will choose your competitor, you are wrong. Your customer-centric attitude will help in creating the loyalty that you seek from your customers.

5. Product Development Made Easy

With a customer training program, you get constant feedback from the users. You can use these as actionable data to develop your product or service better. So, when you develop a product that connects with your customer, you will find a natural marketing ally of your product. They will advocate your brand, and customer recommendations work wonders for any business.

Final Thoughts.

Customer education programs offer a host of benefits while helping you to develop a community of loyal customers who will help you increase your ROI. So, if you haven’t started your customer education program yet, consider developing one now. Visit the best customer training platform to learn more.

Blog Customer Education

Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date June 29, 2021
No Comments on Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Customer education is a very important part of every company. Every company must use a customer education strategy.

Here Are the Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Often in businesses, one’s worst enemy is itself. This is mostly true when a new product is launched in the market and is foreign to the users. With teams and members knowing the product/service almost inside out since they spend weeks, months, or years designing and developing it, they often forget that the consumer has no or very little idea about it.

In such an instance, customer education becomes vital. Without offering the consumers the right customer education platform, the chances of the product failing to make its mark is exponentially high. In this article, we will discuss the customer education program, the 5 effective key reasons to invest in Customer Education, and the benefits it.

What is Customer Education?

The processor discipline in which a company teaches its customers ways to find value and use the product is customer education. Even before sales, now companies are investing in customer education to equip the buyers about the product. The process ensures that the customer gets the most value of the product/service over time.

In the present day, the technology for customer education has become a central factor in which the materials are delivered through webinars, chats, chatbots, virtual classroom sessions, etc. But it is not about the specific action you take on how you educate your customer. It does involve all these, along with the overall progress of your brand and business.

The next section will discuss 5 effective key reasons businesses should invest in customer education strategy.

5 Effective Key Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Historically it has been witnessed that companies who offer average and middle-of-the-pack products and services are hesitant in educating customers. Of many reasons, the most often misnomer is that a knowledgeable consumer will look for different options and leave the product you are offering.

Customer Education Training

On the contrary, when you offer to educate the customers on the products/services you offer, the consumer is more likely to trust the company. Studies have shown there is enough evidence in which customer education strategy influences the customer’s buying decision while decreasing the customer churn.

You should invest in customer education for several reasons if you want to have a future-ready business. 5 effective key reasons to invest in Customer Education are the strategies which you should drive in the customer education marketing and forming a platform for it is as follows:

1. Increased Brand Loyalty

Despite the belief that educating the customers makes them less loyal to your brand, nothing could be farther from the truth. When you empower your customer with the knowledge on how to use your service/product, give them insight, you are adding value to the product.

They will be equipped to utilize the product/service to its full potential and draw them towards it instead of pushing them away. By educating the consumer and increasing their knowledge, a company is building something vital, which cannot be made or bought, i.e., trust.

According to the researchers, trust is the key differentiator that helps a brand or company stand apart and edge over its competitors.

2. Increase the Purchase Rate

Researches have proved a link between an increase in product/service purchase and customer education substantially. An article titled Consumer Education Produced High ROI revealed that consumers who got the consumer training are:

94% more satisfied with the purchases they make
93% likely more to refer the product and share their experience about it with associates
29 times more to buy the product than those who got the information from the media ads alone
5 times more likely to buy the service/product rather than when reached by direct marketing alone.

The figures itself reveals that investing in customer education platform prove to be quite beneficial for a company.

3. Forging Long-Term Relationship

When you have the loyalty and trust of your customers, you have built a strong relationship with them. With a customer education program, you offer an additional service or value that the customer will appreciate. This will also allow them to open up to you about their pain points about the service/product, thus becoming a key contributor to your improvement.

So, when you engage with them with customer training service and keep them updated with the latest information, you are building the loyalty and trust to support them and hear them. This eventually leads to less churn and easy onboarding of customers.

4. Position Yourself as Market Leader

By engaging your customers with a customer training program, you are willing to showcase your expertise while maintaining transparency. This leads to you having the ability to create a large consumer base. You share the industry-specific knowledge, where you offer guidance and advice that can convert visitors to consumers.

As a result, you can position yourself as the market leader in the industry with a strong follower base.

5. Increase Cost-Efficiency & Quality

When you invest in the technology for customer education, you are offering proactive solutions and training. This can help the customer support team to work on complex issues rather than mundane troubleshooting ones.

With the customers contacting the customer services less, your frontline customer care staff is free to work through the feedback loops that can help in improving the product/service. The process eventually increases the quality of work and product while making the service cost-efficient.

With any business having customer satisfaction in the center to become a successful one, investing in customer education strategy and empowering them will not only increase the loyalty, engagement, satisfaction, and trust in the product/service but eventually the ROI of the business. Thus companies must invest in customer education training programs.

Benefits of Customer Education

It would help if you also were mindful of creating a solid customer education program. It can be achieved when you invest in the content, offer hands-on training, and understand what your customer wants. Play on your strengths and work on your weakness when developing and investing in a customer education program. Some of the purpose build software like CXcherry can be used to deliver successful customer training organization-wide.

I sincerely hope you find our blog post on “5 effective key reasons to invest in customer education” useful.

Final Words

When one implements the customer education program, the company must ensure the material and training are understandable, easily accessible, and available when needed by the consumer. It is the product/service training that can make or break the product by enhancing the user experience.

Tags Customer Education, reasons to invest in customer eduction