Daniel Quick
Barry Kelly
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Dedicated to the Thought Industries team, our customers, and the broader customer education community.
In today's subscription economy, your business is unlikely to survive if your customers aren't gaining value from your products. This is a sound argument for developing great products, of course, but that's not enough. After all, how can customers gain value from something they don't know how to effectively use? For your customers to achieve their desired outcomes, you must teach them what they need to know. Enter customer education, a rapidly evolving field that focuses on teaching customers the right things, at the right time, so that they find value from your products and become advocates of your brand. An educated customer is a satisfied customer that delivers long-term value to your business.
Here's a secret. Customers are always learning, and they are learning at every stage of their lifecycle. Whether they are learning how to solve their problem, why your solution is better than others, or how to develop mastery with your product, customers are being educated and educating themselves, for better or for worse. Left to their own devices, customers will often struggle through this learning process; many will fail to adopt your product, much less become masters of it. Without a customer education strategy, learning will happen anyway – just not the kind that positively impacts your business. You don't want customers learning the wrong things; that your product is “difficult to use,” for example, or “doesn't offer value to someone like me.”
Whether you think you are or not, you're probably already investing in customer education. If you're putting money into content marketing, account managers, or customer support – you're educating your customers. The question is, are you educating them successfully? Are you simply reacting to events as they occur, or are you able to plan ahead so that you can proactively empower your customers at each stage and optimize your business for scale?
At Thought Industries, we are seeing more and more companies looking to create a more strategic plan for their customer education. After all, companies who are leaders in their categories, like Salesforce, Gainsight, HubSpot, Motorola, and 3M, all invested early in customer education as a way to maximize and scale lifetime value, and this paints a compelling picture. There is an immense amount of untapped value lying unclaimed on the table.
However, that doesn't mean that developing a customer education strategy is easy. As a new field, practitioners often lack prior experience, and there are very few resources to help them achieve success in their roles. They can't even reliably look for guidance from their managers, who – lacking experience themselves – will usually expect customer education specialists to simply “figure it out.” In this reality, how can new customer education functions (1) form and pitch their strategies; (2) effectively communicate their goals; (3) identify the optimal formats for their content; and (4) distribute, measure, and monetize the training they create?
These early-stage challenges are so great that many organizations find themselves caught in a sort of inertia. According to our 2020 State of the Customer Training Report, 96 percent of companies believe that customer training is important to their organization. The value of training is not in question here. However, almost half stated that they are struggling to measure the impact of training programs, and only 14 percent believe a majority of their customers are adequately trained.
With our finger on the pulse of the industry, and a combined 50 years in the industry, we recognize that educating customers might be essential, but that doesn't make it straightforward, especially as no two customers are the same. They are all learners, but they all need something different. Effective customer education requires an investment. Yes, that means investing in technology for delivering engaging customer learning rather than relying on a traditional, internal-facing learning management system (LMS) that is more suited for employee and corporate training. However, more importantly, we've seen how essential it is to invest in a cohesive, central strategy that pulls all the different elements of a successful program together.
The Customer Education Playbook: How Leading Companies Engage, Convert, and Retain Customers, the bulk of which comprehensively discusses a framework we call the Customer Education Playbook, will help you develop that strategy. In Chapters 1–2, we'll define customer education and discuss how to operationalize it in your business, whether you're just getting started or hoping to mature your program. In Chapters 3–14, we'll cover the 12 steps of the Customer Education Playbook, all of which are based on research conducted from speaking to hundreds of customer education professionals and executives across multiple B2B industries. Finally, in Chapters 15 and 16, we'll explore the phases to achieving a mature customer education function and give you our thoughts on the future of the industry.
Our hope is that the Customer Education Playbook will help professionals on the ground to develop a clear and structured approach that leads to impactful, engaging, and measurable customer education programs. As you read the following chapters, you'll learn the answers to all of those questions you've previously been expected to “figure out on your own,” and you will get practical and actionable advice on how to effectively target and educate your customers – transforming them from prospects to champions.
Your customers are the center of your universe. The survival of your business hinges on their choices – whether they buy or churn, renew their subscription, tell their friends about you, or become a drain on your support teams.
As the center of your universe, your customers deserve your research, your dedication, your focus, and a deep level of understanding into their behavior at every stage of their journey.
The emphasis on “Customer is King” is far from a new idea, but over the past decade, there has been a slow shift toward understanding how important it is not only to know the customer but also to educate them. This evolution has been accelerated with drivers from three directions.
The focus on educating the customer may have started out as the route to customer success, but what began with an emphasis on improving customer experience has quickly proved itself to be an economic imperative, an approach that pays dividends across the customer lifecycle.
The concept of an Educated Qualified Lead (EQL) is simple – a lead that is already knowledgeable about your product and what it can do for them before they reach out to show curiosity or interest. By educating the market, generating leads becomes easier, and the quality of those leads is much improved, with many ready to move into the second phase of the sales cycle even before they reach out. These inbound prospects that come through your door already have some idea of what gap you can fill for them, and therefore they can ask better questions and already have a foundation for learning.
Your interested customers have now become true prospects, and at this stage you might be channeling them into some kind of trial. Customer education offers a route to optimizing trials for success by focusing on the value proposition and controlling the flow of information so that customers don't feel overwhelmed. Examples might include offering the customer a tool to learn new vocabulary at the start, using visual aids to shape thinking, or breaking down the trial into smaller sections where customers can really kick the tires. The trial stage is a really sensitive moment in the customer journey, and customer education allows you to curate experiences that work for individual personas and roles. You can also extend the benefits of education to your channel partners, from distributors to resellers. The quicker and easier you can get these important stakeholders trained and confident with your product, the more likely that they will achieve results on your behalf and the less you will need to micromanage those relationships behind the scenes.
Education also allows you to scale and streamline your trial and onboarding processes far beyond what you could achieve with customer success managers (CSMs) and sales teams alone. If your prospects can walk themselves through a trial experience or an onboarding journey, complete with tutorials and education built for any points of friction, you are immediately reducing your customer acquisition costs (CAC) while increasing the number of simultaneous customers that you can onboard.
Congratulations! Your prospects have become customers. They've signed on the dotted line, onboarded your product, and passed the line into a post-sale relationship. But don't make the mistake of seeing that line as a finish line – in reality, it's more like your starting point. At this stage, marketing and sales often drop out of the relationship, and the baton is regularly passed over to customer support or customer success. Without a strong educational strategy in place for proactive support, CS teams can become a reactive presence, waiting for problems and troubleshooting as they occur.
While you can use your CSMs to train or support a single customer easily, once you hit a certain threshold, it becomes much more difficult to scale. How can a single CSM effectively manage training for many customers, all of whom will be at different stages of adoption with your product, and still have time to build relationships and drive value? Moreover, what happens when CSMs leave your organization and you haven't yet trained new ones to manage accounts? As your growth relies on deeper product adoption and customer satisfaction, you need a scalable path to customer onboarding so that they realize value as quickly as possible and can access the help they need on their own terms.
Customer education can be used to deflect support tickets and even turn support interactions into training interventions at the moment of need. Instead of onboarding new CSMs to handle an ever-increasing number of tickets, you can strategically place education where known pain points occur in your product, or you can develop a robust knowledge base so that customers can resolve their own problems. As customers become more confident that they will find the answers, your support costs drop, even as the number of customers you onboard increases.
Your customers are now achieving increasing levels of comfort and mastery with your product, and they're getting there faster than ever, speeding up overall time to value (TTV). Providing opportunities for customers to gain deeper mastery will lead to an increase in net promoter scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT), because you're creating brand ambassadors who have used your product to become more effective in their role. The more legitimacy you gain in the market as an expert in your field, the more opportunities there are to grow direct revenues through paid education, such as courses and paid eLearning.
Today, skills-based learning and certifications are highly relevant and increasingly in demand. Customers are happy to pay for applicable and significant credentials that bolster their resume. Companies who can leverage this and create certifications that become known as the industry standard are carving out a competitive advantage, alongside a new line of revenue.
One of the first questions that you'll likely ask yourself is: When is the right time for your business to start investing in customer education?
To answer this question, we want to touch on the idea of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle by Geoffrey Moore, as seen in Figure 1.1.2
As your customers move through the lifecycle, they expect an increasing amount from your company. Innovators and early adopters, by nature, are likely to be more enthusiastic and self-motivated to learn and play with your product. On the business side, you have a lot more time on your hands at this stage to offer a white-glove experience when they need support. In contrast, as you cross the chasm into early-majority and late-majority adopters, your customers will start to expect more hand-holding and an established strategy for training them in how to be successful with your product. The profile of these kinds of customers dictates that they are going to be less comfortable or successful going it alone.
Figure 1.1 Crossing the Chasm
Conventionally, as companies feel this pressure – the need for customer education becomes clear. When you arrive at this point, as you cross the chasm, your business will need to have a sound strategy in place for education if it is going to successfully scale.
Let's take this even further and highlight the benefits of creating this strategy earlier in your maturity. As already outlined, customer education is beneficial throughout the customer journey, so why not bring it in at the beginning of your business maturity? Don't just view education as a function that will solve the learning needs of late-majority customers when they ask for help. Rather, also leverage education as a scaling function for content marketing and lead generation, as well as to support early adopters who might not traditionally need education as much but for whom low-effort content such as short, engaging videos can really deepen their engagement with the product. In that way, education helps your company to move from early market to mainstream, effectively facilitating the crossing of the chasm rather than merely reacting to it.
This attitude may sound like we're conflating education with the marketing function of the business – and that's okay! There is a lot of overlap between the two. If the goal of marketing is to drive awareness and to attract and convert new customers, customer education can play a big role in that if you start your education function early. It's never too soon to be thinking about your customer learning strategy and journey, identifying the moments of their customer lifecycle and crafting a content strategy around teaching the right education at each of those moments. Increasingly, customers expect production-quality education, thanks to the likes of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more, so getting education involved in marketing projects can be a great way to boost marketing campaigns, too.
Ready to get started? In the next chapter, we will discuss how to define the scope and responsibilities of your customer education team, including where to place your team to get the most value and how to choose the portfolio of education programs that will drive behavioral change across the customer lifecycle.