You want lasting, meaningful relationships with your customer base. Your customers want intuitive integration and clear value from your product. Most of the time, that means your interaction cannot end at the point of sale. Instead, the customer journey for your business needs to continue with ongoing education dedicated to ensuring that customers understand the product and how to get the most out of it. But what does good customer education look like—and what customer education examples can you use to build the best possible system?
Failure to invest in a thorough customer education program can result in excess churn, dwindling customer satisfaction, and a damaged reputation that can turn away new customers.
On the other hand, prioritizing educational content and high-quality delivery can lead to additional product adoption, high customer satisfaction, and engagement that builds a loyal customer base. Investing in customer education can be one of the smartest moves a business can make.
Let’s take a closer look at the ins and outs of customer education programs and how you can make sure your customer training shows up in the metrics that matter most! We’ll explore what customer education is and some effective customer education examples.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of April 12th, 2024.
What is customer education?
Before we examine customer education examples, let’s examine customer education itself. At its core, customer education is simply making sure your product or service is meeting the customers’ needs.
Whether it’s for a physical product or a digital service, customer support is crucial. Making it clear when, how, and why to use the product can increase functionality for the customer and provide greater overall satisfaction.
Education can occur at various points in the customer journey, including:
- Onboarding. When your customers have made an initial purchase, they’re invested in implementing your product into their lives and primed for learning content. Making sure that their experience gets off to a great start is key to the onboarding process.
- Ongoing engagement efforts. Training content continues to be important throughout your customers’ engagement lifecycle. Reaching out with tips, use cases, and in-depth tutorials can provide renewed excitement and additional functionality for existing customers.
- Retention cycles. To remain competitive and relevant to customers, ongoing customer engagement will often require on-demand customer support. You might have a support team and walkthroughs for troubleshooting and more in-depth integration of the product or service.
What does customer education look like?
The implementation of a successful customer education program is going to be unique for every situation. Some products and services require minimal individualization. For these, the customer journey can be managed through modules and tutorials. For more complex services, companies may require on-demand and even in-person training to ensure large-scale implementation and full functionality.
There are many forms that this kind of educational journey can take. That’s why it’s important to explore different customer education examples before building your own. Then you can mix and match the possibilities to create a customer experience that meets your brand’s needs. These experiences can also grow over time as the customer base or product complexity changes.
Some general customer education examples for materials and resources are:
Quizzes
Providing customers with quizzes can help them identify their own educational needs. You’ll also gain important information about where your customer education strategy should focus for the future.
How-to guides
Your customers want to understand and use your product. After all, that’s why they bought it! How-to guides ensure they have a full understanding of your product’s functionality while giving them autonomy and flexibility. (These are key elements of customer satisfaction.)
Webinars
Live or pre-recorded webinars can be an excellent way to deliver customer training aligned with specific business goals that provide a clear sense of value and immediate implementation. Webinars also provide businesses with opportunities to showcase their own expertise, building lasting trust with customers.
Certifications
Offering certificates for training provides incentives for customers to work through materials while also giving the customer education team clear benchmarks for the knowledge base. A robust certificate program can also give your business additional reach beyond your existing customers.
Case studies
Stories resonate with people. Seeing your product or service in action gives customers a clear sense of its relevance and potential. Leave them feeling inspired with case studies designed to showcase customer success.
Video tutorials
If you know the most frequent questions, troubleshooting needs, and points of confusion, then you can create a database of video tutorials that meet customers where they are. These can be especially important when your product or service undergoes changes or offers new features.
What does customer education impact?
Customer education is a far-reaching part of most modern businesses. Competition is at an all-time high, and today’s customers have little patience for confusing or difficult-to-implement products.
It’s important to recognize the full scope of a customer education program and its impact on your business goals. Consider:
Churn
This is the percentage of customers that cancel or fail to renew their relationship with a company, so churn is a key metric. It provides not only a snapshot of current success but also a glimpse into the future and trends for long-term stability. Customer education can help reduce churn.
Engagement
You want customers to use your product. Not only does it help ensure their own satisfaction and likelihood of future purchases, but engagement creates stakeholders who will help your business grow through word-of-mouth and a positive reputation. Customer education programs create authentic, meaningful engagement points in the customer journey.
Satisfaction
Confusion and frustration are often the foundation of dissatisfaction. You may have a fantastic product that will change your customers’ lives. But if they don’t understand how to use it, your business will not succeed. Customer training eliminates confusion and frustration, leading to high satisfaction metrics.
Support
If you’ve seen support tickets pile up while your onboarding and customer success team scramble to provide timely, relevant responses, then it’s time to improve your customer education program. Use your resources wisely and anticipate customers’ needs before they turn to frustration and malfunction.
Marketing
We often think about customer training as a tool to retain existing customers. But it is also a proven strategy for customer acquisition. Training materials help demonstrate competency and can often dovetail with marketing materials to create buzz and interest in your products.
While creating a customer education program can seem like a major investment, it’s important to analyze existing support costs, marketing struggles, and current customer satisfaction initiatives. Because of its multifaceted impacts, a robust and engaging customer education program can address multiple concerns with a single implementation.
📚 Related: 10 Best Customer Training Platforms & LMSs [Detailed Overview]
Real-world customer education examples
To understand the benefits of customer education in practice, it’s helpful to look at how businesses are turning to these tools and resources. In building customer training programs to provide high-quality learning experiences, these customer education examples show businesses working toward customer retention and increased customer success.
Shopify
As a leader in online storefronts, Shopify knows that its customers’ needs include reliable support, clear training content, and accessible delivery of learning materials that make it clear to busy entrepreneurs that the platform’s time to value is short.
Shopify’s customer education program is multi-pronged. It includes:
- A 24/7 customer support team
- Templates that customers can use to speed up their implementation of the platform
- How-to guides
- An online academy full of online courses complete with certification options
Shopify delivers its online learning opportunities in a way that taps into its customers’ needs and positions itself as a stakeholder in the customers’ success with their own businesses.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a leading provider of CRM software that clearly understands its value to customers is directly related to implementation and functionality. As such, they are also a leader in excellent customer education programs, providing a bold and ambitious example.
HubSpot provides plenty of educational materials that are focused on added value through white papers, blog posts, and how-to guides. Most notably, HubSpot has an online academy that offers certification programs in a range of skills directly related to the software’s functionality.
Through their customer education program, HubSpot makes themselves a clear partner in success for their customers, providing a sense of ambition and long-term connection for their learners. This strategy also provides opportunities for customer acquisition as their certifications carry positive associations with the brand into the future.
nCino
The last of our customer education examples is nCino, a financial technology company providing cloud-based banking services around the globe. It needs customer training that is clear and efficient.
nCino designed a training platform that was streamlined to provide learning material to employees, partners, and customers simultaneously. The company uses a certification program that’s based on a thorough curriculum.
They are also able to deliver motivating case studies to their customers to ensure future success and additional customer acquisition. By creating a training plan that onboards new customers, showcases their expertise and trustworthiness for current customers, and highlights success to attract prospective customers, their online training program is an integrated part of their business plan.
📚 Related: nCino trains 40,000 customers, partners and employees with Docebo
Considerations in building a customer education program
A customer education program is key to ensuring customer success. Whether you are starting from scratch or adapting existing customer training materials to a new delivery system, you’ll want to start by choosing a learning management system (LMS) built with flexibility and functionality.
Even if you are not planning to implement every aspect of customer education immediately, having an LMS that allows for seamless integration of webinars, certification programs, and other sophisticated training materials will provide maximum flexibility with minimum disruption.
Take control of the customer journey with training opportunities that will ensure positive customer experiences for years to come.
Schedule a demo with Docebo today to ensure your user and company data is safe and secure.