The COVID-19 pandemic is fundamentally changing the delivery of education and training in the United States. Acceleration to the cloud is critical for most businesses, and EdTech companies like yours want to be at the heart of this transformation, because if they’re not, they risk missing out on growth, or worse, going out of business.
Today, online learning is highly accessible. Rosetta Stone, Absorb LMS, and Udemy bring education into our homes and businesses, making remote learning not only possible but enjoyable. And, most importantly, eliminating the risk of exposure to COVID-19 by enabling learning at home.
This period of intense growth in the EdTech industry created customer, user, and business challenges that must be addressed now to enable the continued transformation of the education industry. Here are 3 ways Customer Success and Gainsight can help your business thrive.
1. [Customers] Your customers need (a lot of) your time and attention
Demand for your products and services is likely at an all-time high. Given this urgent demand from your customers, you need to scale the impact and reach of your existing Customer Success team. Leveraging a marketing automation tool that blends digital and human touch can help.
For our customers, the Journey Orchestrator functionality, which automates the sending of highly personalized messages, has given them the ability to check-in with every single customer. If a customer replies back with a need, or if a specific metric (like usage or support tickets) spikes, a Call-to-Action can be created for the Customer Success Manager (CSM) to follow up in a higher-touch way. That way, CSMs have a structured method of finding and addressing customers who are most in need.
Gainsight Journey Orchestrator
2. [Users] A massive inflow of new end-users who need to get up to speed—fast.
A large number of new students, educators, and administrative staff are engaging with your platform for the first time. In the current climate, managing adoption may feel like a luxury for your team, but it is essential in EdTech where strong student and educator usage makes your products ‘sticky’. To achieve adoption at scale, we recommend that you communicate with users in your application and make their just-in-time learning fast, easy, and automated.
Luckily, there is a way to help these users in a scalable way. Many of our customers use in-app engagements via our PX product to guide client administrators, as shown below from our customer Absorb LMS. With in-product hotspots, tooltips, slides, guides, and pop-ups, PX let’s Absorb provide just-in-time training to new administrators so that they can understand key features of the product and start using it quickly.
3. [Business] New logo growth may slow and you will need to re-strategize to make your bottom line
As EdTech companies, you measure success by serving your students, educators, and community. During COVID-19, new logo growth may slow, making customer retention a top priority. For others that offered free services during COVID-19, student and educator adoption presents an opportunity to convert customers from free to paid.
Many of our customers use our Revenue Optimization product to parse through all of their upcoming renewals and identify the ones that are truly at risk based on signals of customer health and experience. By creating higher-touch Calls-to-Action and Playbooks around these, and automating the renewal of ‘non-event’ customers who are less at risk, our customers are able to close more of their renewable book of business and do so on-time. That way, their increased retention rate, and cash flow can make up for any slowdown in top-line growth.
Speaking as a former teacher myself, one thing is clear: Your mission to help all learners succeed has never been more important. During this challenging and unprecedented time, adopting Customer Success principles can help your customers, your users, and your business thrive. Come take a demo with us to see how you can apply these principles using Gainsight.
