A well-educated customer is a delight to work with, and customers love brands whose expertise they trust enough to learn from. Consider the top brands across the world and your own willingness to learn from them. It’s all based on the power of each unique customer education strategy.
These customer education strategy implementations are useful and increase the reputation, trustworthiness, and long-term customer retention for every brand that uses the same tactic. So, let’s talk about strategy.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of April 16th, 2024.
What is customer education?
Customer education is when a brand provides learning materials and resources for its customer base. Your customer education strategy will determine how customers interact with your brand, from their first piece of inbound content to long-term relationships based on trust and loyalty.
The benefits of building a customer education strategy
Customer education is a win-win strategy for brands and their customers. Brands have a great deal to gain from becoming a trusted source and showing off their expertise through a number of channels. Simultaneously, customers gain useful information, skills, and even credentials through their favorite brands.
Self-service customer satisfaction
The simplest benefit of customer education is the satisfaction of self-service. Modern customers are independent and like to find their own answers. So, having those answers available improves the customer experience.
Becoming trusted subject matter experts
Brands that provide reliable and extensive customer education resources also become trusted sources and pillars of the industry. Consider how Moz rose to the top through regular and insightful study reports. Your reputation as an established source of expert knowledge will skyrocket.
Motivated customer onboarding
A great customer education strategy is the perfect way to onboard new customers and usher them through the customer journey. A good education experience can turn the onboarding process from a manual your customers skim into an engaging lesson that creates a well-informed and invested customer base ready for product adoption.
Improve customer retention
Customers who learn from a brand are more likely to come back for more. The usual customer churn of customer engagement and disengagement disappears when your brand becomes a favorite source of information in addition to products or services. Customers who seek education increase their overall lifetime value because they remain engaged.
Reduce the need for customer support
Lastly, customer education significantly reduces customers’ needs when it comes to support and associated support costs. Looping back to the satisfaction of self-service, your support team will field far fewer support tickets when customers can seek out answers for themselves.
What kind of customer education can you offer?
You can provide many types of effective customer education, depending on your brand style and business goals. Consider the many formats that learning can take when you build your educational material.
You might offer simple yet informative blog posts, a searchable information center, or formal courses where you certify professionals as growing experts in your field. This can increase your overall customer lifecycle by providing an all new type of value.
The three types of customer education strategy
In general terms, there are three categories of customer education that you can provide: passive, interactive, and formal.
- Passive education resources: Customers can search for and absorb useful information through static resources like blogs, FAQs, videos, and guides.
- Interactive customer education: Customers can interact with educational material, seeing the information in action through resources like calculators, simulations, games, and microlearning.
- Formal customer education program: Customers can seek formal accreditation through online courses, webinars, certification programs, and other methods that reflect formal training through an LMS.
Passive customer education resources
Let’s start by diving into passive customer education materials. These are often at the heart of inbound content marketing strategies. In fact, some brands don’t even realize they’ve developed a customer education strategy in the process of writing engaging blogs that address pain points and provide useful tutorials.
This type of educational content provides self-directed customer training that customers can absorb without further engagement. But they often come back to learn even more.
Publishing useful FAQs
FAQs are the first type of self-service enablement. Each FAQ realistically represents a pain point—a question customers often ask and which brands want to answer without delays or support tickets in the way. For decades since the dawn of business websites, FAQs have been written to help users.
Today, a company’s original FAQ is often used as the inspiration for its informative blog or knowledge center.
Helpfully written blogs
The most common form of passive customer education is a company blog that seeks to provide useful information. A good blog written by an expert who cares can quickly become a trusted guide and achieve many of the goals of customer education, with or without an intentional strategy.
Building a knowledge base
A knowledge base is a formal, searchable source of educational materials provided by a brand. Brands with highly technical products like appliances and equipment often build a knowledge base as their first customer education program because they are often asked for digital copies of manuals and tutorials.
Others intentionally build a glossary and a useful set of guides, reviews, diagrams, templates, and walkthroughs because they realize how useful these resources are to their customers… and their inbound marketing strategy.
A good knowledge base is also a useful place to both market products and head off questions about new features.
Interactive customer education resources
Interactive customer education involves tools that customers can play with and learn from. Many people learn better when they can get involved in what they are learning. This is also a great way to engage potential customers who are looking for a tool and are delighted to find it on your brand’s website.
When building an interactive customer education program, look for different ways you can engage customers and get them clicking. Consider everything from one-time quizzes to tools they will come back for again and again.
Quizzes
Everyone loves a good quiz. They are a fun way to test yourself, assess a problem, or prime yourself for learning. Quizzes can be an entertaining avenue to engage new customers and get them interested in learning about what you have to teach.
Interactive tools and calculators
Online tools and calculators are some of the most frequently bookmarked customer learning materials. Some people are looking for a good tool they can use regularly. Others will be intrigued by a tool they use only once. Either way, these widgets are a useful way to show off your applicable knowledge. You’ll pave the way to get engaged customers coming back for more.
Microlearning courses
Microlearning is when you offer tiny lessons that apply to exactly one slice of information. For example, consider the value of a short video on how to pump bicycle tires the right way or a diagram to help find the valve nut.
Customers seek out microlearning when they need a tiny slice of information. But they often wind up immersed in more interesting slices along the same vein, following their curiosity and growing need to know more as they go along.
Microlearning is also highly repeatable, both for newbies and experts who want a quick reference without combing through a larger body of educational material.
Educational games
For some brands, the right answer is one or more educational games or gamification of your learning system. Duolingo, for example, rose to the top of language learning online software due to its rewarding game-like interface. The right game feature integrations can make a big difference in certain educational initiatives, especially for younger customer personas.
Formal customer education programs
If you’re ready to enter the big leagues as a trusted source, you can offer formal customer education programs. We mentioned HubSpot and AWS because they are heavy hitters when it comes to being trusted in the industry. When these brands certify a professional through online learning, that certification is trusted in real hiring scenarios.
Your brand could become that important if you offer customer training, educational content, and certifications that come to hold weight on resumes.
As a formal program provider, you take responsibility for your learners and their learning experience, as well as the successful absorption of the stated learning objective. You will use metrics to provide grades and stand behind the education you provide.
Webinars
Webinars are a great starting point for any brand offering formal educational material. A webinar is a recorded video where the teacher – or panel – presents a recorded lesson that can be attended live or replayed at a later date.
Webinars can be recorded by current company experts using their existing knowledge and presentation skills. With a bit of work, you can provide a digital classroom experience similar to modern colleges.
Online courses
Online courses go above and beyond a single webinar. They are typically longer training programs made up of multiple lessons. These lessons may be broken up into learning objectives and modules that guide learners toward a comprehensive educational goal.
Certification programs
Certification programs are the most prestigious of the formal customer education strategies. You are positioning your brand as a certifying authority. Customers who advertise the certs you grant will each become brand ambassadors. Their skills will reflect back on the credibility of your program.
This means that if you release highly skilled and trustworthy professionals into the world, you could soon see your place in the industry on the rise. Measure that value alongside the strong relationship built with your certified student customers.
Put your LMS to work toward customer success
Customer success is rooted in accessible and high-quality customer education. From the onboarding process to quick reference materials to formal learning experiences, your brand has the power to create an informed, empowered, and dedicated customer base.
All you need is a comprehensive LMS and a top-notch customer education team to ensure successful customer education. Through these strategies we have outlined today, you can secure long-term customer loyalty. You’ll likely gain professionals who will forever praise your brand as the source of their success.
If you are ready to integrate your learning management system into the ultimate customer education strategy with Docebo, contact us today.