Key Benefits of Customer Education: Why It’s Essential for Business Success
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Customer education has quickly moved from a business bonus to a business essential. In fact, organizations spend approximately 174.3% more annually (about $1.1 million on average in 2024) on customer education than in 2017, and for good reason.
Customer education benefits both the customer and the company in big ways. Customers who engage in customer education are more empowered and satisfied when using a product, and businesses see better customer retention and improved product adoption.
If you’re unsure that investing in customer education is right for your business: stay tuned. In this article, I’ll show you just how effective customer education can be for your customers and your bottom line.
Fewer support tickets? Happier customers? That’s just scratching the surface.
Create Your High-Impact Customer Education Program
Key Benefits of Customer Education
As a refresher, customer education involves providing learning resources like courses, webinars, or other materials to your users to help them gain maximum value from your product or service.
For businesses – especially those in B2B SaaS or tech – customer education can help improve customer onboarding, product adoption, and overall customer satisfaction.
It can also help you attract and onboard new customers, elevate trust in your brand, and increase customer retention., according to Forrester. Additionally, a different 2022 study showed that “educational content makes consumers 131% more likely to buy.”
💁Check more customer education statistics here.
Customer education offers benefits at every stage of the customer lifecycle; here’s a complete look at the key benefits for businesses:
Improved product adoption
When you educate your customers on how to use your product for their specific needs, it leads users to a) adopt your product more quickly and b) engage with it more often. When they understand all the features and benefits, they will use your product more confidently and consistently.
Reduced customer churn
Customers who know how to use your product and understand the benefits are less likely to drop it and seek another solution (i.e., seek out your competition). They are more likely to stick around when they see your product’s direct value for them.
Increased customer satisfaction
Customers who can link how to use your product with the value it brings them are more satisfied overall. Imagine, for example, that a SaaS company receives mixed reviews due to users feeling lost when using their product. Launching an interactive learning center could boost customer satisfaction by giving users the tools they need to confidently use your product.
Cost savings in customer support
With on-demand information available designed to address common user issues, your customer support team will likely receive fewer support tickets. This can reduce pressure on your support team and translate to cost savings for your organization.
Boosted customer retention and lifetime value
The best products offer long-term value and customers who recognize that value are in for the long run. Not only that, they are more likely to seek out additional products or features that support their needs.
Customer education accomplishes these key benefits by directly solving organizational pain points, those little obstacles and frustrations that hinder product usage and sabotage long-term customer loyalty.
Here are some common pain points that your business may face and how customer education can help you solve them:
These benefits of customer education impact the success of real-world SaaS giants like Salesforce and HubSpot. In fact, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a successful business that doesn’t have a customer education strategy.
Real-World Examples of Customer Education’s Impact
Salesforce often comes up when discussing examples of effective customer education, and it’s easy to see why. Their Trailhead platform is touted as being highly successful and boasts results like 50% of its users gaining skills that directly resulted in a promotion or raise.
But I want to give you a broader scope of just how powerful customer education can be. To do that, I’ve created a list of three other companies that successfully use customer education to benefit their bottom line and boost customer enablement.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce company that helps entrepreneurs and retailers sell online and in person. With over 5.4 million e-commerce sites using its services worldwide, chances are when you click that “checkout” button for an online purchase, it’s powered by Shopify.
Shopify uses its Shopify Academy to educate customers on how to use the platform and to encourage users to become partners or developers. Its Academy offers verified badges, micro-learning, and designated learning paths to help users reach their goals smoothly.
When it comes to benefitting from its customer education initiatives, Shopify sees huge results through its partner and developer programs. For instance, Shopify developers pay Shopify 15% of their revenue after reaching the $1 million mark in Shopify app store sales.
By using its Academy to train and encourage more partners and developers, Shopify not only empowers its users to increase their bottom line (increasing customer loyalty), but Shopify increases its overall revenue as well.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a cloud-based platform offering its users a new way of working through its powerful project management system. It’s used by over 180k companies around the world, with some notable customers including Canva, Coca-Cola, and Lions Gate.
Monday.com uses its Academy and Learning Center to support its customer education, offering course-based learning and certifications (Academy) and an extensive knowledge base and guides (Learning Center) to empower its users.
It also offers partnership opportunities, with partners seeing incredible growth results over the last three years: “80% of the partners’ overall revenue is attributed to their monday.com practice.”
But in my opinion, monday.com’s most beneficial form of customer education comes from its customer success stories, where it shares detailed use cases highlighting the benefits customers see from using monday.com.
One only has to scan the headlines – “monday.com Work OS saves us about 1,850 hours of staff time and somewhere in the range of $50,000 a month.” – to see countless examples of satisfied customers who derive value from using monday.com.
These stories serve as powerful word-of-mouth examples that increase brand awareness and trust. They also show potential and current customer exactly how their product can be leveraged to bring value to their company, which can inspire them to follow suit.
Notion
Notion is a productivity platform developed by Notion Labs, Inc. Its customers use it for anything from social media planning to project management at a personal to business-level scale. It’s praised for being highly customizable, but with that flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve for many of its users.
To help manage that learning curve, Notion offers its Notion Academy. Like most customer education academies, it offers learning pathways, tutorials, and webinars to help users adopt their product quickly and effectively. It’s even an early adopter of using AI to take its customer education to the next level.
Notion sends me emails (which I opted into) with suggested resources that seem to be personalized according to how I’ve been using Notion. This helps me solve my problems before they even become problems and demonstrates ways I can use the platform that I hadn’t yet considered.
As a new Notion user, this has been incredibly helpful and empowering. It’s alleviated a lot of potential frustration that comes with learning a complicated platform and allowed me to get to the good stuff (i.e., using Notion to reach my goals) faster.
I’m not the only user who is happy enough with Notion and its customer education to share their experience, “99% of the growth of Notion is Word of Mouth (WoM) driven.”
Word of mouth is an incredible driver of brand trust and credibility and, like monday.com, Notion knows this. They’ve dedicated a section of their site to sharing customer success stories demonstrating the lifetime value customers get out of using Notion.
How to Build a Successful Customer Education Program
We have a whole guide that takes you through how to build a customer education program from start to finish, but here are some of our top tips for not only building it but also making sure it is successful:
To deliver a customer training program that meets customer needs, you’ll need an LMS (learning management system) with the right tools and capabilities.
Let’s look at how LearnWorlds – a platform that is flexible, user-friendly, and designed to help you scale – can help you integrate the tips we listed above into your customer education materials.
📊 Use data to update and improve your offerings
LearnWorlds’ Course Insights allows you to track user engagement metrics and learning patterns. This data helps your customer education team identify areas of improvement and, as a bonus, gives you key figures to share with stakeholders.
🎥 Deliver interactive learning experiences to engage your learners
With LearnWorlds, you can use self-service options like interactive videos to facilitate learner engagement. You can embed quizzes, clickable elements, and additional online learning materials right into the video.
🎨 Personalize your users’ learning experiences
Everyone learns at a different pace, and by using controlled access and qualification questions through LearnWorlds, you can customize each customer journey.
🏅 Provide certifications, badges, or other learning incentives
One of the key features I see when reviewing companies’ customer education programs is some sort of badge or certification program. With LearnWorlds you can offer both: badges to up the gamification factor and certificates to show that users completed specific units or courses.
👥 Conduct live webinars or coaching sessions
Live coaching and webinars help learners feel valued, connected to your brand, and confident that they have the support they need while completing your customer education materials. With LearnWorlds, you can offer group or even 1:1 live sessions through your customer education platform.
💬 Offer your materials in multiple languages to reach a wider target audience
Being able to offer your training content in multiple languages is a great way to help you scale your customer education program. LearnWorlds offers integrations with Weglot to help you do just that.
Following these tips will help you craft a customer education program that delivers valuable content to your users. Functionality is key here, so choose a learning platform that gives you the features, formats, and customization you need to enhance your user experience.
Grow Your Business through Impactful Customer Education
Customer education leads to better product adoption, reduced churn, and more loyal and satisfied customers overall. By investing in a well-crafted customer education program today, you’ll soon see its benefits propel you toward reaching your business goals.
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Ciera Lamb
Ciera is a freelance content writer and editor connecting companies with their ideal audiences through blog articles and other online content. She approaches her writing with curiosity and research and enjoys the ever-present learning that comes with being a content writer. She is also an avid scuba diver, an aspiring Dutch speaker, and lover of all things nature.
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