Is your customer education program working? It depends on what your customer education metrics have to say about it.
Unfortunately, the hard truth is that you can’t know for sure unless you’re taking the time to track and measure the right data. Some days, it may feel like the customer learning experience you’ve set up is going exceptionally well. But if you don’t know your actual numbers, you may be failing to get a healthy return on investment.
Likewise, there can be a day when you’re overloaded with support tickets and complaints. You may get the sense that your customer training must be inadequate. But trying to capture the complexity of an integrated network based on a single snapshot isn’t helpful.
From day to day, things are going to vary. There will be times when your business is running smoothly, adoption rates are up, and happy customers run to you with compliments. There will be other days when you see a spike in cancellations and feel plummeting customer satisfaction.
If you aren’t accurately and thoroughly measuring your customer education program, you can’t know whether it needs to be refined or completely revamped in order to address a problem.
So, what customer education metrics do you need to measure, and how should they fit into the bigger picture? Let’s take a look!
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of April 15th, 2024.
1. Customer churn
One of the primary reasons you’ve invested in a customer education program is to reduce customer churn. When customers don’t see the value in your product or service, they are less likely to renew a subscription, adopt a new product, or tell their friends and colleagues about your products.
Customer retention relies on more than having a great product. You must be able to demonstrate that product’s value through education resources the customer actually wants to use.
Your churn rate gives you a clear sense of the health of your customer education program. If the number of customers is dwindling, you know that there’s a problem. If the problem is not with the service or product itself, then it’s likely a problem with the way the customer interacts with it.
Your customer education program should work to shorten time-to-value by showcasing product features in a way that makes them accessible and applicable to your customers and their individual needs.
What your churn rate tells you
A high churn rate indicates that your customer education strategy is falling short. It may be time to:
- Create a new onboarding process
- Offer additional webinars
- Build out a whole new customer training program
On the other hand, a low churn rate indicates that customers recognize your product’s value. Customer loyalty and high retention rates are clear indicators of business success that reflect positively on your customer education program.
If you have a successful customer education program, you can look to expand it by implementing upsells and ensuring new product adoption by continuing to build on the foundational trust and engagement you have with your customers.
Many businesses pay more attention to acquisition than churn. Why? Because it’s easier to measure.
As Krish Subramanian explains, “Retention calls for nuanced decision making around trial offers, time-based or usage-based billing, alternatives to cancellation such as pauses or discounts, improved customer support and ways to anticipate at-risk customers.” That’s harder than simply keeping track of how many customers sign up to begin with. But the extra work is worth it.
2. Customer satisfaction
Ultimately, the success of your customer education program depends on the satisfaction of your learners. If the participants taking the online courses you’ve set up, watching the webinars, and going through the onboarding process leave the interactions feeling bored, confused, or frustrated, then your program is not meeting your business goals.
It can be challenging to get accurate snapshots of the customer experience if you haven’t thoughtfully built in ways to measure this metric.
Building in Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) checkpoints can give you invaluable data at a variety of points in the customer education journey. These quick surveys allow customers to rate their satisfaction with individual components of the learning materials as they complete them.
It’s especially important to gather and track CSAT scores for different types of users and delivery formats. If, for instance, brand new users tend to rate satisfaction high while experienced users rate it low, you’ll know that it’s time to include more advanced initiatives in your training materials.
Likewise, if live webinars with time for Q&A score well but self-paced materials score low, then it may be an indicator that you need to invest in higher-quality recordings with more engagement.
This is especially important since customer satisfaction is at higher risk as your business gets bigger. As Harvard Business Review explains, “While high and improving satisfaction in smaller companies drives market-share growth, maintaining high satisfaction once the market share is larger becomes more difficult.”
Use CSAT scores to set benchmarks for your customer training program that can keep it relevant and meaningful as your business grows.
3. Customer engagement
A customer education program that no one uses is a poor use of your resources. You need your customers to actually participate, and that means demonstrating value at every turn.
Happy customers are those who feel like they’re getting something out of the education resources beyond troubleshooting. They want to leave feeling informed and empowered to use the product they’ve purchased. Remember, they’re trying to get their return on investment, too.
The best way to measure customer engagement is often through completion rates. Be sure that you measure how many participants start the customer onboarding process and how many continue.
Creating tiers to your customer education program can give you clear benchmarks for completion metrics. Provide entry-level onboarding information that’s delivered in an especially efficient and accessible way. This will help bring completion rates up and provide a sense of engagement and success for your customers.
Many users may find onboarding sufficient and stop there. But you can also provide advanced learning materials available for more ambitious users. You’ll get a broader customer base and have more renewals as customers find additional uses and value.
As researchers on the impact of word of mouth (WOM) have found, education is key to a brand’s reputation and spread: “Customer education makes customers more satisfied with a brand while increasing their perceived expertise for a product, which in turn enhances their positive WOM intention for the brand.” The more engaged a customer is with the education program, the more connected they’re going to feel with the brand and its strengths.
Make sure that you have engagement-focused customer education metrics built into your customer education program so you can see where the attention is going and make informed decisions about when and how to expand training materials to meet customer needs.
4. Support ticket volume and content
Your customer support team provides key insights into the success (or failure) of your customer education program.
If support ticket volume is high and increasing, it’s a clear sign that there are gaps in your customer knowledge base and the product experience is lacking. When launching a new product or integration leads to a huge boost in support tickets, then you likely need more education around this topic. If new customers frequently send in support requests, you know that your onboarding process could be clearer.
It’s not just the volume that you need to measure, however. Pay attention to the content of these requests. When you see repeated requests for the same information and multiple reports of the same problems, take note. It’s a clear sign that your customer training program is not doing its job.
Adjust your learning materials in response to your support tickets. This will reduce the flow of requests to your customer support team. This approach doesn’t just leave your customers more satisfied and empowered to use your product without delays and obstacles. It also frees your support team up to handle more complex problems faster, leading to happier customers all around.
Measure the right customer education metrics for meaningful customer satisfaction
You are not the target audience for your customer education program. You know your product inside and out, and you understand its value innately.
Without putting the right customer education metrics in place and being willing to read the data to make decisions with purpose, you can end up investing a lot of money, time, and staffing into running a customer education program that doesn’t meet your business goals.
Customer success depends on customers understanding how to use your product efficiently and how they can adapt it to their individual needs. They also need a thorough understanding of product features.
By measuring customer churn, customer engagement, completion rates, and support ticket volumes, you can get a clear sense of whether your customer education program is meeting these needs.
Choose a learning management system built for customer education metrics
The ease or difficulty of tracking these customer education metrics across your customer training program will likely lie with the functionality of your chosen learning management system (LMS).
Look for an LMS that provides easy opportunities for integrating CSATs, clearly written engagement reports, and accurate completion rates.
📚 Related: 10 Best Customer Training Platforms & LMSs [Detailed Overview]
When your LMS has these features built in, evaluating your preferred customer education metrics becomes second nature. You’ll be able to see the success of your program (and any changes it needs) at a glance. Visibility makes it easier to make decisions about where to invest more time and resources and where to scale back.
Don’t leave your customer education program up to chance. It’s too important to your business’s overall health and customer satisfaction to not know how well it’s working. Whether you are starting a brand new customer training program or revamping your current program, make sure that you’ve got the tools in place to get the data you need to succeed.
Schedule a demo with Docebo today to ensure you analyze proper customer education metrics.