What is Customer Education: A Comprehensive Guide for Businesses

Imagine your customers are so confident in the value of your product that switching to a competitor isn’t even an option. Not only do they have the know-how to use your offering, but they understand exactly how it can solve their unique problems.

This type of confidence is nurtured by customer education. Customer education can help any organization excel, but for those on the digital business landscape – think SaaS, tech, and digital product-based companies – it’s essential.

In this article, I’ll teach you what customer education is and show you how you can use it to ease the customer journey, increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, and help your organization stand above the competition.

Customer Education: What It is & Why it Matters

Businesses use customer education to teach their customers how they can best use their products and services. It’s highly strategic and helps users internalize the value those products and services can bring to their own business or industry.

Customer education is not customer training, although there are some overlaps.

Customer training is task-oriented and focuses on features or workflows that help users master how to use their product or service. Its main goal is to improve product proficiency and reduce support inquiries.

While customer education often includes customer training, the customer education lifecycle goes deeper. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate product value and how it can be used to accomplish a user’s broader goals.

Another key difference is that customer education is also a content marketing strategy on its own, where you bring front-up value to your prospective customers with content that evolves around your industry and not necessarily on your product or service, eg., see marketing courses from Hubspot.

The bottom line? It strives to create empowered, loyal customers and set them up for long-term success.

Here’s a simple breakdown to help you visualize the distinction:

Customer training is just one of many elements of successful customer education strategies. Here is what I consider a complete list:

• Customer training
• Onboarding programs
• Self-service learning resources
• Use case demonstrations
• Ongoing customer support
• Industry insights (eg., white papers or webinars)
• Certification programs
• Self-paced online courses
• eBooks & templates

These elements can be available to users through a variety of formats throughout their learning experience, including online courses, webinars, tutorials, or help centers.

I’ll show you some in-depth examples later on, but here’s a glance at how elements of a customer education strategy can manifest through various formats:

1. A business offers an onboarding program featuring interactive video courses and quizzes. This allows new customers to learn at their own pace while tracking their progress through the use of helpful self-assessment tools.
2. A cloud service provider holds monthly webinars to showcase product use cases and best practices for their industry. This helps customers see how they can apply those tools to their unique needs.

To bring the elements of customer education alive, it helps to have a solid customer education team. What that looks like for you might depend on the size or structure of your organization, but could include the following titles/roles:

• Customer Success Manager (CSM)
• Content Marketing Manager
• Customer Onboarding Specialist
• CEO
• Learning and Development (L&D) Manager
• Instructional Designer
• Customer Education Manager
• Technical Trainer
• Community Manager
• Customer Support Manager
• Chief Learning Officer (CLO)
• Product Manager
• Stakeholders

Regardless of who comprises your team, try to build it around the goals you have for your users and the benefits you seek to gain from your customer education strategy. To do this, it helps to understand why customer education is so important.

Why is Customer Education Important?

Customer education empowers your customers to fully understand and use your product, which results in high customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. In a highly competitive digital marketplace, this is the key to maintaining a thriving business.

Customers want to know more than just how your product or service works; they want to know how it will work specifically for them to solve their problems. When they do, it increases their perceived value of your offering and makes them less likely to drop your product and head to a competitor.

This is why an effective customer education strategy should focus on how it can help you reach your business goals and the benefits it brings your customer base.

In addition to customer enablement, customer education benefits your business by:

• Reducing churn: A dedicated customer education program can reduce churn by up to 6.2%.
• Increasing customer retention: “Customer-obsessed” organizations see 51% better customer retention than “non-customer-obsessed” organizations.
• Driving revenue: 84% of companies that improve their customer experience strategies see a rise in revenue.
• Enhancing product usage: Customer education can lead to a 38.3% increase in product adoption.

💁 See more customer education statistics here.

Roll these benefits into a nice, neat little customer education package and you can see how a good strategy helps you stand out from the competition.

And to truly see the benefits of your customer education strategy, make sure it includes all the major components.

Key Components of a Customer Education Program

I like to look at the components of a solid customer education program as five pillars:

• marketing content
• thought leadership content
• educational content
• engagement tactics
• instructional design principles

Combined and leveraged effectively, you’ll have a strategy that educates and empowers your users to get the maximum value from your product. Here’s a functional look at each of the five pillars, examples of what they could include, and best practices for each.

Marketing content

Marketing content attracts and informs potential customers. It brings your product or service to their attention and addresses how it can solve their unique pain points.

Examples include: blog articles, social media posts, and webinars.

Your marketing content should cover key features, success stories, and testimonials that illustrate the value and relevance of your product to your target audience.

Best practices for using marketing content in your customer education strategy include:

• Creating compelling case studies that use real examples to showcase how your customers use your product successfully.
• Using engaging infographics that take data and illustrate it in an easy-to-understand way. This simplifies difficult concepts, grabs the attention of your target audience, and gives them important information they can scan and grasp quickly.

Thought leadership content

Thought leadership content positions your brand as an authority in your industry, helping you build credibility and trust with current and potential customers.

Examples include: white papers, podcasts, and expert blog articles (written by or featuring industry experts).

Your thought leadership content should inform and empower your customers using expert perspectives to highlight precisely how your brand can solve their challenges. It can foster loyalty and increase your brand’s credibility.

Best practices include:

• Using industry research in your content. Do this by publishing original research or surveys or using relevant, up-to-date research from industry leaders.
• Speaking with experts either by interviewing them in a podcast or video, asking them to write guest articles, or requesting to use their insight for your content.

Educational content

Educational content is a core part of your customer education initiatives. This is where you’ll see some overlap with customer training, as this component focuses on teaching your users how to use your product.

Examples include: how-to guides, interactive tutorials, FAQs, and knowledge-base resources.

Remember, the goal of educational content is to enhance customer skills and remove any barriers to product adoption, so make sure it’s clear and actionable. You want customers to use your product confidently, independently, and as swiftly as possible.

💁 Product Training for Customers: A Complete Guide

The best practices for this component can be applied to all of your customer education content, so I want to go a little more in-depth here.

Here are the best practices for structuring your customer education content:

• Know your target audience to better understand their needs and goals – this will help you define your content to suit their specific needs. Differentiate content among different customer segments – for example, per job role or use case.
• Get modular. Meaning? Organize your content into logical components that build on one another. These can be microlearning components or large, long-term courses. Think about any complex topic you’ve ever studied – you didn’t jump into the tricky stuff; you covered the basics first and built from there.
• Use interactive elements in your training program to encourage active learning. These could be quizzes, discussion forums, or practical exercises. (I’ll talk about this more next with engagement tactics.)
• Make it accessible by considering your fonts, using alt text for images, making navigation easy, and adding subtitles for different languages through a service like Weglot.
• Keep your content fresh with regular updates. Stay in touch with industry standards and trends and make sure your content reflects that by updating old content and creating new, relevant content.

💡 Tip: The right customer education platform or learning management system (LMS) is designed to make structuring your education content a breeze, so keep an eye out for one that can help you tick all these boxes.

Engagement tactics

Customer education should be ongoing, so you need to employ the right engagement tactics to keep users learning and active.

Examples include: gamification, in-person Q&A sessions, surveys, and polls.

Good engagement tactics help facilitate active participation from learners. This can result in better customer relationships and increased course completion rates.

Best practices for customer engagement tactics include:

• Using gamification such as points, badges, or leaderboards to reward learner achievements.
• Facilitating feedback loops by regularly checking in with users to see what subject matter they like and what can be improved.

💁 Here’s how you can use online course surveys to gather feedback.

Instructional design principles

Implement instructional design principles when building your courses to add structure and help your customers learn faster and retain information. Instructional design helps you plan and structure a course that guides the learner through the different stages of learning and imparts knowledge.

Examples include: learning paths and clear learning objectives.

Using a good LMS can set you up for success with instructional design. I advise looking for one that offers the formats and features you need (i.e., gamification, video content, webinars, blogs, automation) to develop engaging learning content and structured learning paths.

Other best practices include:

• Set clear learning objectives for your users that clearly define what learners will accomplish by the end of each module.
• Use knowledge checks such as quizzes so that learners can gauge their progress, self-evaluate, and learn the content through what is known as “active recall” (as opposed to passively clicking through a course or module).

💁 Don’t know the first thing about Instructional Design? LearnWorlds AI assistant can help you build a course using proven ID models.

These components help decrease time-to-value for your users, create empowered and educated customers, and help you stand out from the competition.

If they still feel a bit abstract, take a look at the examples below to help you visualize a successful customer education strategy in action.

Use Cases of Successful Customer Education Programs

A successful customer education program drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduces churn, and equips your users with what they need to know.

For this article, I’ve created some fictitious use cases to help you visualize how customer education can work for you. In these examples, I use LearnWorlds, the world’s most flexible eLearning platform, to demonstrate practical customer education capabilities.

*Note: Aside from LearnWorlds, the names and companies in these examples are fictional. Any resemblance to real companies or organizations is purely coincidental.

TaskFloat – SaaS Project Management Company

Background: A B2B SaaS company that offers project management tools designed for remote teams.

Goal: Improve the customer onboarding process and increase the use of its advanced and new features, particularly with new users. Reduce pressure on its support team and overall support costs.

How TaskFloat uses customer education: TaskFloat matches up with LearnWorlds to create an interactive learning hub. It offers on-demand, interactive videos and guides users through setting up projects, managing workflows, and implementing integrations with tools like Slack or Google Drive.

To assess the learning progress of its users, TaskFloat uses qualification questions and tailored follow-up content based on individual user performance.

TaskFloat uses LearnWorlds’ Course Insights to analyze their engagement metrics and gathers essential user insights by creating customized forms with LearnWorlds’ Form Builder.

Stay Secure Solutions – Cybersecurity Firm

Background: A cybersecurity software company for enterprise businesses that function within highly regulated industries, such as finance or healthcare.

Goal: Streamline compliance training for their clients and demonstrate how Stay Secure Solutions can help them prepare for audits and adhere to regulations.

How Stay Secure Solutions uses customer education: Using LearnWorlds, Stay Secure Solutions builds compliance training content and a certification program. It uses a combination of thought leadership content from industry experts and comprehensive learning modules to guide users.

Through its training program, it offers exams to validate its clients’ understanding and certifications to give lifetime value to their learning accomplishments.

Using SCORM & PPT support, they were able to integrate their existing training materials into LearnWorlds’ comprehensive platform.

While fictional, these examples show how different companies in different industries can use customer education to empower their customers and reach their company goals.

💡If you’d like to see some real-world examples, check out my article where I break down 7 Effective Customer Education Examples and highlight customer education’s positive impact on companies like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Drive Customer Success and Growth with Customer Education

Use customer education to meet customer needs, increase their perceived value in your offers, and boost their loyalty to your brand.

With benefits like reduced churn, higher customer satisfaction scores, and smooth product adoption, now is the perfect time to implement an effective customer education strategy for your organization.

Ready to transform your customer experience? Start your free trial with LearnWorlds today!

Ciera Lamb

Ciera is a freelance content writer and editor connecting companies with their ideal audiences through blog articles and other online content. She approaches her writing with curiosity and research and enjoys the ever-present learning that comes with being a content writer. She is also an avid scuba diver, an aspiring Dutch speaker, and lover of all things nature.