A few weeks ago, New York City, Indianapolis, and Oakland updated their plans for reopening public schools in the fall, but soon after, NYC announced reopening at most three days a week. At the same time, higher education is laying out plans on how they will reopen, while Los Angeles and San Diego decided schools will be remote full-time in the fall.
With all the unknowns surrounding reopening K-16 institutions, EdTech solutions are becoming essential tools for learning at home. As a result, EdTech companies are preparing for a fall full of new customers and users and growing usage from existing customers. Now is the time to adapt Customer Success strategies to support your growth and help learners succeed!
Here are three ways EdTech Customer Success teams can adapt their strategy to make sure their product positively impacts learners during this “new normal.”
1. Help your struggling users by engaging them in their workflow.
To help struggling learners, you need clear visibility into how they’re engaging with your product. Without high product usage, your product won’t effectively enable learning outcomes and is likely to be seen as disposable by your customers. Struggling customers and end-users can be expensive to support, and even worse, they indicate the risk of churn.
Providing just-in-time learning, embedded directly in your solution via in-app Engagements and Guides, is one way you can help your users succeed. In-app Engagements and Guides increase the depth of user adoption, give users more product value, and free-up your Customer Success team to focus on strategic tasks. In-app Engagements can be displayed for a specific audience of users (e.g., student, teacher), at a specific time, to generate awareness or to change user behaviors.
Engagements, for example, are perfect for user communications. They can notify users of new releases, underutilized features, and updates from your organization. As a bonus, you can also collect feedback from your users via an in-app survey. This feedback can help Customer Success, Onboarding, Product, and Marketing teams understand the benefits and impact of your solutions, as well as ways to improve usability for your product.
Guides, on the other hand, coach users step-by-step through a workflow, keeping them engaged and on-task, to make learning a new technology easy!
2. Enable your Customer Success team to identify and proactively manage risks
Reopening schools comes with new costs of testing and cleaning, and administrators will monitor their budgets closely throughout the year. Regardless of a district’s reopening plan, your product must be essential for student and school success to warrant ongoing spending. Your Customer Success team can’t prevent churn if it doesn’t know it’s coming. The sooner your team learns why the customer is unhappy or not seeing value, the more time you have to address the issue and prevent churn. Your CSM needs enablement to quickly and easily identify customers at risk of churn, through a Health Score, and take consistent, proven remedial actions using a Playbook.
Gainsight consolidates and aggregates your customer data across multiple sources to assess the health of a customer. Your Health Score may weight breadth and depth of adoption, usage, sentiment, and other variables to monitor how healthy a customer is and how likely they are to renew. Gainsight uses Calls to Action (CTAs) to proactively alert CSMs based on a change in customer health, giving your CS team a better shot at understanding the customer’s pain and addressing it, thus minimizing the risk of churn.
3. Demonstrate the impact of your product
With the to be determined “New Normal” for education, your customers’ goals and objectives may change from the goals and objectives they initially set when purchasing your solution. As schools develop their reopening plans, it is the perfect time for your CSMs to check in with each customer to evaluate, guide, and reset goals and objectives, and develop a plan to meet them this school year.
At the same time, school administrators are extremely busy right now, and it may be challenging to get in touch with your decision-makers. Gainsight’s Success Plans is a collaborative way to enable customers to specify their objectives and allow your CSMs to track and manage these goals. Success Plans also create a clear and straightforward way for CSMs to report out on KPI improvement.
With the unpredictability of K-16 education’s Fall format, tools that enable “remote learning” or learning in “hybrid” environments are in demand. Your Customer Success strategy is critical to enable the right outcomes for learners and educators and that your business succeeds, regardless of how this “new normal” plays out. We’re here to help! Connect with us to learn more about how to enhance your Customer Success strategy and improve your experience for your students, teachers, administrators, parents, and staff!
