Customer education is essential for the success of your product. If your customers don’t understand your product, they will not use it. However, not all companies have roles dedicated to customer education, and when customer education does become a priority, it can feel overwhelming to build a customer education program from scratch.
It doesn’t have to be. Setting up a customer education program isn’t simple, but it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing initiative. It can be gradual, and at any step of the way, it makes a big difference in your customer’s learning journey.
1: Identifying your current and future educational content.
I’ll admit: the title of this article is slightly misleading. It’s rare that anybody builds a customer education truly from scratch in the sense of having zero content to work with.
Content for your educational program already exists in support articles, internal training documents and even recordings of customer calls. You can repurpose it, use it as is, or treat it as inspiration for designing your customer education program.
To start your content design process, gather as much content as you can, and try to organize it in a way that makes sense to you. You might group it by stages of the onboarding and adoption process, or by product features or product edition. It depends on your product and your goals.
Once you have things organized, build a curriculum plan and use the existing content as your guide for further content development, identifying gaps and opportunities to expand on it.
2: Creating and housing your educational content.
To decide which content tools to research, evaluate and purchase, you will need to define your priorities. As well as your internal goals, think carefully about the education needs of your customers, and advocate for the tools that you and your team need to achieve those. It may seem obvious that customer needs should inspire your content design and creation process, but it’s easy to get sidetracked by company needs and lose sight of what customers want.
Where are you going to house your content?
To create a dedicated learning space, look into learning management systems (LMS). If you already have one, investigate which features and tools are already at your disposal and educate yourself on how to manage the system.
If you don’t have one and you are planning to create a robust learning program, it’s a good time to research different tools that would fit within your budget.
Related: Learn how to seamlessly integrate customer education, including LMS tools, into your workflows in this webinar with ChurnZero and Absorb Software.
How will you create your content?
If you are planning to rely heavily on videos, explore video/audio editing tools like Camtasia. If you’re going to use a lot of graphic design elements, consider tools like Adobe Creative Cloud or Canva. If you plan to create lessons, courses, and interactive experiences, consider an authoring tool like Articulate 360.
These are a few examples of tools that I use, but there is a whole world of instructional design tools out there. Before you lose yourself in research, identify what is essential to you, and explore that first. You can always scale your educational offerings later with new tools.
3: Collecting customer feedback to optimize your education program.
Customer feedback can be an emotional rollercoaster. It can make you excited, insecure, confused, worried, and entertained at the same time. However, it is always valuable.
Your customers will have opinions on your educational offerings, so use it to guide your content development process. Take their feedback seriously, but always with a grain of salt. Remember to approach their feedback with empathy, because each learner approaches your education program within a context that you don’t always have.
For example, let’s say a learner tells you that your training program is too long and complicated, and doesn’t make sense. This can seem unfair, but…
What if that learner was given a tight deadline from their supervisor to complete that training, is swamped by work, and is trying to get through it as fast as they can?
What if that learner was given the training without the context that their team would be using your product starting next week, and they are frustrated they were not given notice?
What if that learner finds it hard to learn and retain the information in the format you predominantly use, whether text, video or another format?
It’s important to take this feedback seriously and consider how to to make your training program shorter and easier to digest, while also remembering that there are things you can’t control—such as the environment your learners are approaching your content in. Other tips:
Remember that conflicting feedback is to be expected.
One learner might say that you use the right amount of videos in your content, while another says you don’t use enough. Some might say it is too long; others too concise. This is common!
Don’t waste time counting your positive comments versus your negatives. Instead, look for repeating themes. If you see multiple comments about your quizzes being too easy, it’s time to look at your quiz questions. If you see multiple comments about a specific topic not being covered, consider prioritizing it in your content roadmap.
Ask better questions to get better feedback.
Learners rarely spend much time typing up their feedback. If your feedback consists of comments like “It was great!” or “I didn’t like it”, there are ways to get better information for evaluating your content.
You can design a more detailed evaluation survey, where you guide your learner to give you more specific feedback. Instead of asking how the experience was, for example, ask learners what they would add to the course. Remember, though, that the more questions you ask, the lower the chances of a response, so don’t overdo it.
You can also use focus groups or user testing engagements. Product teams and UX designers regularly use them to obtain important, in-person feedback, and they’re helpful in customer education design too.
4: Measuring your content’s effectiveness.
It’s important to determine early how you’ll measure the success of your content, in order to advocate for your program as well as any additional tools you’d like to add to your customer education tech stack down the line.
To show correlation between education and customer success, track education metrics like course enrollments, course completions, and education program satisfaction, using tools such as your LMS analytics and surveys.
Now, look for correlation between your education metrics and broader customer success metrics including contract renewals, usage trends, and product adoption.
You will often find that those are strongly correlated, but not necessarily talked about much. Highlighting these numbers will be key in showing your support and CS teams how education plays a huge role in customer satisfaction and product adoption.
In the next part of this series, we’ll tackle how to scale your customer education program effectively, even when you’re a team of one.
