10 Warning Signs You Need a Customer Education Program ASAP

Most businesses offer some level of employee training, whether it’s formal and well-structured or on-the-job training that happens spontaneously.

But did you know that, in many cases, you need to train your customers as well? Just like employees, customers also need help mastering a product that has multiple features and use cases.

This “help” comes in the form of a customer training program – a set of initiatives like live or on-demand webinars, online learning courses, setup guides, and knowledge bases that support your customers’ journey.

The benefits of customer education for your business are undeniable. Customer education helps during the critical phase of onboarding and throughout the customer lifecycle, boosting loyalty and helping you build a business that withstands competition.

Similarly, not offering a customer education program can negatively impact core business metrics and your bottom line. But which metrics are tied to customer training? And what other parameters should you take into account?

If you’re unsure whether your business needs a customer education program or not (and let us tell you right now – chances are that it does), you’re in the right place. Here are 10 tell-tale signs you need to offer customer education now!

Is it Time for a Customer Education Program? Here’s How to Tell

The truth is that all businesses can benefit from a customer education program. But, in some cases, the need is even more urgent. If most of the following statements stand true for your business, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start working on one!

Low feature adoption is one of the most obvious signs that you need to offer customer enablement right now. When customers underutilize features, they are either unaware of them and their benefits or have trouble using them.

Low feature usage concerns both old and new features that go undiscovered by existing customers – which is a reminder of how customers need support throughout their customer journey and not just during the early stages.

💡 To accurately measure product usage, don’t forget to use analytics tools to check website and in-app user behavior. You can also use product analytics tools to measure the frequency of usage, number of clicks, and time spent with specific features. For more detailed feedback, you can roll out surveys and set up user interviews or focus groups.

If your customer support team struggles with a large amount of incoming tickets, that’s a clear indication that your customers need help navigating your product. Develop a customer education strategy with a comprehensive knowledge base with support articles and some step-by-step tutorials will take a load off your agents’ plates and reduce customer support costs.

💡 Speed and quality of responses is an issue that needs to be addressed urgently by any business. The level of customer support has a huge impact on customer satisfaction – something which is evident from the fact that most customer reviews, especially for tech products, comment very strongly on the level of customer service provided.

Perhaps your customer support team is not overwhelmed with tickets, but they still receive recurring questions on specific functionalities or use cases (“How can I…”). This is another case where you must develop training content to address the issue.

💡Your customer success team can also give you valuable insights into what customers repeatedly need help with. Make sure you have a proper documentation process in place to keep track of customer requests.

Does your list of free-trial users who never convert to customers grow longer and longer? That’s a surefire sign that they need more support during onboarding. Maybe they have trouble navigating the product or using specific features that are useful to them but hard to figure out.

An updated knowledge base with setup manuals and guides, support articles, and live or recorded interactive demos, are very helpful for successful customer onboarding.

💡To find out what’s wrong (and reverse the situation), include an exit survey where the user will give their reason for not signing up. Use product analytics tools to see which features prospective customers have used and which went unnoticed or were abandoned, as this will indicate areas they need support with.

Similar to low conversion rates, early customer churn indicates that new customers did not have the customer experience they were expecting and possibly need more support and educational content during their onboarding. While you should cater to every customer’s need, remember that customers on higher plans expect a personalized onboarding process in addition to self-service resources.

Customers who have signed up for your most advanced features might still not have the time or tech know-how to navigate them independently. Schedule one-to-one meetings with their CSM (Customer Success Manager) to shorten the time to value, ensure product adoption, and maximize customer retention.

Businesses that do not offer a customer education program are more likely to struggle with customer loyalty and notice a shorter customer lifecycle. Churn can be attributed to several reasons, so find out with an exit survey or interview: if customers report issues related to product complexity or usability, you need to start working on offering more support right away.

💡 Customer training fosters customer engagement and can not only prevent churn but also facilitate upsells and cross-sells. This ensures not only customer retention but also increased satisfaction and trust, leading to future purchases.

Not having clear instructions on how to use a product can quickly lead to a customer calling your product “hard to navigate” or “not intuitive,” usually backed up by the opinions of all users who are unhappy with your product and have collectively decided it was a bad choice.

💡 Don’t wait until you see a negative review posted publicly online! Conduct NPS and CSAT surveys soon after a customer signs up. Check in with the customers via their CSM or at least via email. Monitor user behavior closely and reach out to customers indicating low engagement. If customers mention they have trouble using your product, contact them for assistance.

Does your team report having trouble getting customers to sign up or securing renewals because customers don’t understand the product or haven’t found it as useful as expected? Product complexity, especially in SaaS products with rich functionalities, can intimidate prospective customers or, if it’s not dealt with, be a reason for not renewing a subscription.

If you have a complex product, make sure you proactively address first onboarding needs by offering a comprehensive knowledge base with guides and step-by-step video tutorials. Also, provide ongoing support with a well-trained customer support team and regular interactive webinars.

If you release new features often, you need to update existing training material or create new ones as you go while also communicating the news via email, social media, and the product. This will help existing customers discover new features and get the most value out of your product!

If your competitors offer a customer training program and you don’t, you’re definitely at a disadvantage. Essentially, you’re oblivious to your customers’ needs and pain points while competitors are attentive, which doesn’t make you look good.

Having not only scattered training materials but a fully-fledged learning program in place not only puts your brand in a positive light, it also increases brand awareness and perceived authority and can be used as additional leverage by your sales team.

5 Tips for a Successful Customer Education Program

In this section, we share 5 quick tips for a successful customer education program.

Mix on-Demand With Synchronous

Offer a mix of self-service resources in various formats (walkthrough product tutorials, on-demand webinars, eBooks, online courses/certification programs) and personalized customer support, even in person if that’s feasible.

For your asynchronous online courses, use microlearning modules to help customers understand the content better and faster. Include quizzes as “knowledge checkpoints” and case studies to demonstrate examples of your product’s best uses!

Segment Your Audience

Don’t create training courses following a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Segment your audience based on criteria like their plan, use case, skill level, or even location to personalize their experience and develop targeted material for each group. The more functionalities and the larger/diverse your customer base, the more courses and training material you will need to create.

Align With Business Goals

Your customer education team must be aware of your business goals and that they tie those to the training resources. Set specific metrics to measure the success of your program, like “reducing incoming tickets by 2% in twelve months” or “boosting CSAT score by 5% in twelve months.”

Use the SMART methodology to ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound!

Use a Learning Management System (LMS)

Use a flexible, customizable learning platform like LearnWorlds to create a scalable customer education program for different audiences. Our LMS offers rich integrations with tools like Zendesk and Hubspot and enables you to build customizable learning paths in a branded learning environment.

Here are our top features for customer education:

• Content authoring tools
• Website Builder with templates
• Custom User Roles and User groups for easier administration and access control
• Clone & Sync for fast school creation and content repurposing
• Multiple schools to manage multiple academies from one centralized location
• AI tools for course outline, learning objective, assessment, and feedback generation
• Copyrights protection
• CRM & customer service integrations
• Community for better customer engagement
• API, Webhooks & SSO
• Assessment, Survey & Certificate Builders
• Native, white-label mobile app for better user experience

Measure & Reiterate

You know that when it comes to business, you can’t move ahead relying on your intuition but on concrete data. And here’s where you can get this data from:

• LMS reports to evaluate the learning experience, like course completion rates etc.
• Business metrics like Customer Satisfaction Scores, NPS, and CES (Customer Effort Score) – anything you’ve set a “business goal” – to measure the business impact.
• Customer surveys and focus groups to evaluate both the training provided and how it relates to their perception of your business.

Customer Education Can Transform Your Business

Offering a customer education program is one of the best initiatives you could organize for your business, as it has a positive impact on your brand and your bottom line. With a feature-rich and intuitive LMS like LearnWorlds, you are a few steps away from building valuable training content for your customers.

Sign up for your 30-day free trial now!

Androniki Koumadoraki

Androniki is a Content Writer at LearnWorlds sharing Instructional Design and marketing tips. With solid experience in B2B writing and technical translation, she is passionate about learning and spreading knowledge. She is also an aspiring yogi, a book nerd, and a talented transponster.