Adopting a customer-centric mindset is more important than ever.
Here’s proof:
- 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.
- Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t.
- Customers spend 140% more with companies with great experience than those who had unsatisfactory ones.
- Loyal customers are 5x more likely to make a repeat purchase and 4x more likely to refer a friend.
- 81% of companies see customer experience as a differentiator.
The list goes on. Seriously.
The evidence that points to the positive impact a great customer experience can have on the success of a company is overwhelming.
So, give them one at all costs.
How? An online learning program backed by powerful customer education tools (also known as a learning management system (LMS)).
Customer education is essential for businesses that offer services or products that are a little more complex — such as SaaS businesses. By providing a streamlined and engaging customer education program, SaaS businesses can more effectively improve their customers’ experience as a whole.
Customer education tools allow your business to create an online education program that helps your customers understand your product or service. This not only helps you to retain customers but also can help to dramatically increase your satisfaction while decreasing the amount of time you need to spend “hand-holding.”
Set up Customer Education Tools
Whether your business is a SaaS business or not, it’s vital to educate customers about products and services that they’ve purchased from your business. And this is where a customer education tool can come in handy.
This type of tool can help your business easily create streamlined customer onboarding experiences and help you train your customers across their entire lifecycle. With these training programs, you can significantly reduce customer churn and ensure that your customers understand using your product or service.
SaaS companies, in particular, can significantly benefit from implementing a customer education program since they often have a bit of a learning curve for new customers. However, even if you are not a SaaS business, using a customer education tool like Gainsight Customer Education can help you increase your customers’ satisfaction with their experience and help your business in the long run.
Gainsight is also a great option because it combines the power of a learning management system with a customer relationship management platform (aka HubSpot LMS) to give you all the tools you need to create amazing and effective customer education programs that can set you apart from your competitors.
Benefits of Educating Customers
So, we’ve already answered the question, “why is customer education important?” It’s important to educate customers about products and services to increase their satisfaction with your business and reduce customer churn and the amount of time you need to spend working individually with each customer.
But now you might be wondering, “do I need customer education tools for my program, or can I make my customer education plan without them?”
Well, of course, you could create a customer education program on your own without any of the tools or resources that a tool like Gainsight offers, but the process would be extremely time-consuming and take a lot of effort to complete.
Customer education tools will make it easier for you to create the customer education program you want for your business.
A learning management system (LMS) can help you to enact your customer education strategy in an efficient and timely manner so that you can focus on implementing your customer education and improving your customers’ experience rather than spending all of your time making your training 100% from scratch without any tools.
Some of the LMS features that can be the most beneficial to building your customer education program:
- A customizable design
- Optimization for mobile devices
- Support for multiple types of content (video, audio, text, etc.)
- Email notifications
- Customized quizzes or assignments
- Certifications
- Live Sessions
- Content creation
- Milestones
- Instructor-led training options
- APIs
- Integrations
- Roles and permissions
- Website and app embedding
- Data sharing
- Alerts
- Support for multiple languages
- Cloud hosting
- Support discussion boards, file sharing, etc. to create a sense of community for your learners
- SCORM compliance
- Analytics and custom reports
All of these features (and more) can be found in an LMS like Gainsight Customer Education and make the process of creating, updating and scaling your customer education experience a breeze rather than a tornado.
So while you may be able to create a 100% original customer education program for your business, there are a lot of factors to take into account to create a streamlined and efficient program. In reality, the benefits of using a customer education tool that already includes many of these features can save you tons of valuable time and create a more easily accessible and scalable customer education experience. This can help you to save time and effort in the future as your company continues to grow and your education program needs to be updated and altered.
How To Build A Customer Education Program
Now that we have talked a bit about why a customer education program is so essential and how customer education tools, like Gainsight, can help you create the perfect program for your business, let’s dive into a few things to keep in mind when you’re determining how to educate customers about your product or service.
Many decisions go into creating a customer education system that will be both personalized to your business and its products or services and engaging and educational to your customers. First up is one crucial factor that often gets overlooked during this process: marketing.
Invest in Customer Education Marketing
Our society revolves around marketing. If your customer education program isn’t being marketed alongside your products or services, people aren’t going to know that it even exists. This makes marketing your customer education system even more important — especially since the customer-centric business model continues to rise.
So, even though it may not seem important initially, the right marketing can be the key to ensuring that your perfect customer education program gets the attention it deserves.
Think About Customer Education Team Structure
Building a customer education team, just like any other team, takes a lot of careful planning and consideration to be successful. But who should be involved in this team to make it the most effective?
Many different types of customer education roles will need to be filled to have an effective customer education team. So, without further ado, here are the six key members you’ll want on your team.
Customer Education Team Members
- Customer education manager
- Subject matter expert (SME)
- Instructional designer
- Graphic designer
- Technical lead
- Video editor
In addition to these six essential team members, you’ll also want an executive sponsor and some beta testers to ensure that everything is running smoothly and just how you want it.
Use Customer Education Certifications to Generate Engagement
People love to feel accomplished. This is no secret. Whether it is an award for good grades, a participation trophy in a football game or anything else, people just like to be recognized for the work they put into something. So, why would customer education be any different?
Using interactive elements like LMS quizzes or assignments that offer a certificate of completion at the end is one great way to help keep your learners engaged and motivate them to continue going through your customer education program.
When people get a certificate, they feel like the work they put in amounted to something — even if it is just a little notification saying “congratulations” or an email certificate that will just be put in a folder.
It’s essential to keep all of these things in mind when you create your business’s customer education program so that your program can best help your customers understand your product or service and how to use it effectively.
But after all of these essential details to account for when making your education program, you might be wondering, is all of this even worth it? And that is why we think this is a perfect opportunity to bring in some examples that show some of the many benefits that a successful customer education program can bring.
The Customer Education Journey
So, whether you already have some type of customer education program in place and are looking for an upgrade or still don’t have a customer education LMS up and running, Gainsight can help you through this customer education journey.
There are many different types of customer education and many different ways to approach creating the perfect program for your business, but using the tools and features from an LMS, like Gainsight Customer Education can help you create the perfect customer education system for your business.
Get started today! Learn more about Gainsight Customer Education and schedule a demo here!
