Customer Education Archives - LearnWorlds

What is Business Budgeting Software?

Business budgeting software (BBS) helps you manage your business planning and financial performance. You can use a budgeting tool to track income and expenses, forecast spending, and monitor your budget.

With the right software, you can even automate key processes like categorizing your expenses or allocating resources to help you stay on track. In short, BBS tools give you a clear overview of how your money is being spent and where you may need to adjust.

Using BBS can help you juggle the multiple costs often involved in customer training – like paying for course creation, customer training software, or your instructors – in an effective and organized way.

Why Choose Budgeting Software for Customer Training?

The right budget management software makes it possible for you to manage your customer education expenses as trackable components. You get real-time insights into your spending and financial statements that you can use to make more informed decisions about your program.

Here’s a closer look at how BBS can help you stay on top of your customer training budget:

→ Track course development costs

BBS can help you understand how much you are investing in each training module, allowing you to adjust as needed.

→ Allocate resources effectively

Using BBS can help you find areas in content, delivery tools, or instructor time that require more or less investment.

→ Monitor module performance

BBS can give you financial data to compare costs to your revenue or course completion rates. This lets you evaluate which courses offer the best return on investment (ROI).

→ Plan for the future

The real-time data-driven financial information you get from using BBS can be used to include space in future budgets for things like scaling, developing new courses, or hiring new instructors.

Using business budgeting software empowers you to manage the financial forecasting and budget aspects of your customer training program. To choose one that best serves your organization, it’s important to understand the key features to look for.

Key Features to Look for in Business Budgeting Software

Modern budgeting software goes beyond a basic spreadsheet, with numerous budgeting features and elements designed to help you manage your finances effectively. While looking for a BBS, we recommend you prioritize these key features:

Expense tracking

When looking at expense tracking, prioritize software that supports efficient budgeting by allowing you to track all of your expenses and categorize them effectively.

See if you can customize your categories for specific programs and if you can integrate the BBS with another platform so that your expenses can be imported automatically. Consider how easily you can track recurring costs, automate entries, and keep your expense tracking organized.

Resource allocation

Resource allocation means assigning different portions of your budget to different areas, like courses, modules, or marketing.

Look for software that has flexible or customizable options for granular resource allocation. See if you can use percentage-based or fixed-amount allocations and if you can alter allocations as your needs change over time.

Forecasting tools

Forecasting lets you look ahead and plan for future expenses using past spending trends. According to Gartner, 36% of CFOs find forecasting to be one of their most difficult tasks. To choose a BBS that makes this easier, we recommend considering what data a BBS tool uses to create its forecasts.

Check if the software analyzes historical spending patterns, gives projections based on upcoming projects or scaling, and lets you customize and adjust variables like new enrollments or development fees.

Reporting

In our opinion, reporting is one of the most important things to look for in business budgeting software. What you see in your reports has a huge influence on how you manage your finances, so you want a BBS that generates detailed and customizable reports.

Check how easily you can generate reports and how easy they are to share with your team or stakeholders. Bonus points go to BBS that lets you customize reports according to categories and create visual reports like charts and graphs.

Integrations

Make sure your BBS can integrate with your other platforms or apps. These could be your:

Anaplan is an enterprise-level financial planning solution with multi-dimensional financial modeling and advanced forecasting capabilities. If your business has complex financial planning needs, Anaplan has great long-range, capital, and revenue planning solutions.

Key Features:

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing: Available after booking a demo.

Whether you are just getting started or are at an enterprise level, there is a BBS out there to suit your needs. And seeing how a BBS can improve customer training may ease your decision-making process.

How Business Budgeting Software Improves Customer Training

Business budgeting software can provide financial clarity and actionable insights for your customer training program. Here are two, real-world examples of companies that benefit from using BBS and how that could improve their customer training initiatives.

Salesforce + Workday

Salesforce’s use of Workday’s financial automation tools demonstrates how financial efficiency can support its broader business goals, including customer training.

By using Workday’s AI and machine learning in its financial back-office operations, Salesforce automates data integration and speeds up financial processes, which frees up time and resources for strategic initiatives.

Salesforce could then reallocate that saved time and resources to customer training programs. By investing more in training, Salesforce could create more high-quality, engaging training content or increase accessibility to their learning platform Trailhead.

Deloitte Germany + Anaplan

Deloitte Germany used the financial planning solution Anaplan to replace its manual financial and capacity planning and reduced its process times by 50%. Deloitte takes advantage of Anaplan’s real-time data integration to react quickly to changing business conditions.

The flexibility of Anaplan could allow Deloitte to track and manage its budget for customer training within the scope of its broader budget, and its scalability and collaborative features could help it grow its customer training across different regions.

By streamlining financial processes, using business budgeting software can enable you to use your funds more effectively and show what you need to allocate to improve your customer training program.

Tips for Choosing the Right Budgeting Software for Your Business

No two training programs are alike, and the same goes for business budgeting software. One of the most important things to consider is how your budgeting software will work with your current LMS’ key features.

Using LearnWorlds as an example LMS, here are some tips for choosing the right budgeting software.

Manage and track unpredictable training costs

Your BBS should help you identify, track, and reduce unpredictable spending. LearnWorlds’ Interactive Videos cut live session expenses by providing scalable, self-paced training. With a BBS monitoring these savings, you can better forecast and manage future training costs.

Track training data accurately

Make sure your BBS considers real training data when tracking expenses. LearnWorld’s Course Insights offers detailed metrics on learning engagement, which can help your BBS forecast refined budget decisions based on actual outcomes rather than estimates.

Allocate your resources strategically

LearnWorlds uses Tags to segment learners based on their progress, helping you identify where you can allocate funds more effectively. Your BBS should consider this customized information and use it strategically.

Scale efficiently

LearnWorlds’ Multiple Schools & Content Sync lets you manage different audiences effectively while maintaining synchronized content across platforms. Your BBS should be able to track this expansion and adjust your budget in real-time to help you manage costs as you grow.

Bonus tips:

Take Control of Your Customer Training Costs with the Right Software

Customer training is a strategic investment that directly impacts customer success and retention, and choosing the right business budgeting software is essential for managing your customer training costs effectively.

Your BBS should not only help you track expenses and allocate resources but also make the most of your LMS’ key features to help you make more informed financial decisions.

Use the tips provided and explore free trial options for the software platforms we listed to determine which is best for you.

Want to take it one step further? Start a free trial with LearnWorlds – your go-to platform for building and managing customer training programs – and explore how its features can enhance your training program and budget.

Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks

FAQs

What should I look for in budgeting software for customer training?

Look for features like expense tracking, forecasting, reporting, and LMS integration. Scalability, ease of use, and customer support are also important for future growth and to make sure you can use the tool smoothly.

Can I integrate budgeting software with my LMS for better tracking?

Absolutely. In fact, you should. LearnWorlds integrates seamlessly with budgeting software, which lets you sync your course costs and revenue and gives you real-time insights into your program’s financial status.

What is the ROI of using budgeting software for training programs?

Budgeting software increases your ROI by simplifying and managing your resource allocation and tracking training expenses. It helps you ensure your budget is optimal for delivering engaging training content that attracts and retains customers.

The post 7 Best Business Budgeting Software for Your Customer Training Needs appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Training and Activity Matrix: Visualize Learners’ Progress at a Glance

Sara Cortellazzi — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 08:27:21 +0000

Who doesn’t love to mix, match, and pivot intricate data to extrapolate a “quick” overview of how enrollments and completions are doing in their online academy?

No one, ever. (If you do, our BI team is hiring!)

Not having a clear, easily accessible, real-time status overview of your academy can prevent you from uncovering issues timely. You may fail to identify important patterns or even miss the opportunity to celebrate important milestones for your learners!

You may need to check if all learners have correctly completed compliance or onboarding training and even answer these kinds of questions within seconds. (Have you ever been phoned by your boss or your clients to get numbers on the spot? Fun, huh?).

Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks

Enter the LearnWorlds Training Matrix.

Mixing, matching, and pivoting enrollment data is in the past.

Say hello to LearnWorlds’ new Training Matrix reporting feature, designed to transform how you track and manage learning progress.

With the LearnWorlds Training Matrix, you can quickly see who has completed which courses and spot those who need more help, ensuring every learner gets the support they need. If someone has trouble with a lesson, you’ll know immediately and jump in with personalized assistance.

Whether running an academy, educating customers and partners, or training employees, this tool has your back.

What is a Training Matrix?

A Training Matrix is a visual chart that displays the training progress status of individuals within an organization or group of learners. It maps out who has completed which training courses, what skills have been acquired, and identifies areas for attention.

It’s like a detailed, always up-to-date checklist that helps you monitor and manage training progress across your entire team or customer base.

What if you want to change the view and, instead of focusing on learners and general progress, see detailed insights on course and individual performance? That’s where the Activity Matrix comes in.

It provides advanced insights into students’ progress, study time, and grades. The in-depth report that would take hours to manually prepare is now easily accessible through the Activity Matrix.

Why Use a Training Matrix?

The LearnWorlds Training Matrix feature is designed to optimize how you monitor and track user progress in your academy. By visualizing the training status, the training matrix brings clarity, transparency, and efficiency to your Learning Management System (LMS) reporting.

Plus, seeing all those checkmarks and progress marks can be motivating to keep up the work you’re doing as a training manager!

But it’s not just for platform administrators. If you collaborate with other instructors, team leaders, or B2B clients, you can also monitor their assigned users’ progress. This means more eyes on the prize and better accountability: you’ll easily track compliance and onboarding requirements, keeping everything running smoothly.

With the LearnWorlds Training Matrix, monitoring your vast training programs becomes a breeze, making the whole learning experience more efficient.

Training & Activity Matrix in Action: Top Use Cases Explored Across Industries and Scenarios

Let’s see a few examples based on the most common use cases for LearnWorlds Academy.

B2B Course Sellers

For businesses that sell courses to other businesses (B2B), the Training Matrix helps manage and monitor the training programs provided to various clients. It allows you to customize training paths for different clients, track their progress, and ensure they gain the necessary skills and knowledge.

On top of that, the Activity Matrix allows you to dive deeper into the performance of your academy and identify which activities need optimization. You can spot any issues with engagement or comprehension in specific sections of your training program.

This personalized approach enhances the value of your training programs and strengthens client relationships. You can also enable your client’s team leads to see the matrix!

B2C Course Sellers

In the B2C space, the Training Matrix can be used to track learners’ progress. You can recommend relevant follow-up training courses, provide timely support when needed, and ensure a high-quality learning journey. This leads to improved training completion rates, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

If you want to investigate the performance of your course activities, the Activity Matrix allows you to view individual learner’s progress and identify where drop-offs occur.

Customer Education Academies

For companies focused on customer education, the Training Matrix is invaluable. It lets you track your customers’ progress through your onboarding and training programs. By visualizing their journey, you can identify common training gaps and proactively offer support.

For more detailed information on progress, grades, and time of completion of each employee, the Activity Matrix will be helpful. It allows you to ensure that users truly understand the material and identify any troublesome activities.

This ensures your customers are well-equipped to utilize your product, leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.

Partners/Resellers/VARs Training Academies

Similarly, when educating partners, resellers, or value-added resellers (VARs), the Training Matrix provides a clear overview of their training status. You can ensure that all partners are up to date with the latest product knowledge and sales techniques.

With Activity Matrix you can dive even deeper and see how well they understand specific topics by e.g. viewing grades of each user.

This transparency helps maintain a consistent level of competency across your partner network, ultimately driving better sales performance and customer satisfaction.

Employee Training & Internal Academies

The Training Matrix is a game-changer for internal employee training. It enables HR and team leaders to monitor each employee’s progress, ensuring they meet their training requirements. Whether it’s to compliance, competency, or career development, the Training Matrix provides a clear roadmap of each employee’s learning path and highlights areas needing attention.

With the advanced tracking provided by the Activity Matrix, you can also examine each course and review employees’ performance on specific subjects.

Tracking Learner Progress

Understanding and using the Training Matrix is straightforward and user-friendly: each row represents a learner—whether an employee, customer, or partner—and each column represents a course you offer.

When a lesson is completed, a checkmark or sticker appears in the corresponding box, while empty boxes indicate incomplete lessons. The matrix uses color coding or symbols to show if a course is completed, in progress, not started, or not enrolled, allowing for quick reference and detailed information by hovering over the boxes.

Tailor Your Data Views: Highlight Key Insights

The Activity Matrix visually represents a learner’s progress and engagement, similar to the Training Matrix. The key difference is that the Activity Matrix takes a course-first perspective, with academy activities shown as columns and learners as rows.

In addition to progress, the matrix displays time spent on each activity and grades from assessments. You can easily switch views, sort users, and view those who are unenrolled. To try it out, select your course and navigate to the Activity Matrix below Course Insights, or open the Training Matrix and click the course header.

Read our support article to find out more.

Effectively Track Your Training Programs

With the Training and Activity Matrix features, LearnWorlds is committed to providing the tools you need to manage training more effectively and ensure all learners achieve their full potential. Whether you’re educating customers, partners, or employees, our training matrices offer a comprehensive solution to track, manage, and enhance the learning experience.

Stay tuned for more updates and start exploring the benefits of the LearnWorlds Training and Activity Matrix today!

Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks

The post Training and Activity Matrix: Visualize Learners’ Progress at a Glance appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Key Benefits of Customer Education: Why It’s Essential for Business Success

Ciera Lamb — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 10:36:05 +0000

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:

Pain Points and Solutions: Customer Education in Practice
Pain Point	Customer Education Benefit/Solution

High Customer Support Costs	Lightens the load on customer service teams, which reduces support costs and empowers customers.
Low Product Adoption/Utilization	Educates customers about use and new product features, which leads to faster and more complete product usage. Bonus: Increases the potential for upselling.
Increasing Customer Churn	Better onboarding and ongoing education for customers help them recognize your product’s value, which makes them less likely to seek solutions elsewhere.
Inconsistent Customer Experience	Having standardized educational materials can make sure customers receive consistent support at every interaction point. This leads to a smoother customer experience.
Long Onboarding Times	Efficient training and educational resources can accelerate time to value by honing the onboarding process.
Lack of Customer Confidence/Satisfaction	Giving customers the knowledge they need to succeed increases their confidence and their perceived value in your product.
Difficulty Scaling Customer Training	Educational materials that can be used across different regions and growing customer bases help you scale efficiently.
Limited Customer Engagement	By offering personalized learning paths, you can increase customer interaction and deepen engagement. Bonus: Loyal customers often become brand advocates.
Inadequate Product Knowledge Transfer	Learning materials put product knowledge into the hands of the user. This knowledge transfer creates empowered customers who use your product with confidence.

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 Academy homepage. Source: 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.”

Monday.com’s academy. Source: monday.com

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 Academy’s Welcome Course, Notion 101. Source: Notion

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.

Ready to start? Get a free trial with LearnWorlds and transform your customer experience today.

Your professional looking Academy in a few clicks

Further reading you might find interesting:

The post Key Benefits of Customer Education: Why It’s Essential for Business Success appeared first on LearnWorlds.

What is Customer Education: A Comprehensive Guide for Businesses

Ciera Lamb — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 10:18:21 +0000

Imagine your customers are so confident in the value of your product that switching to a competitor isn’t even an option. Not only do they have the know-how to use your offering, but they understand exactly how it can solve their unique problems.

This type of confidence is nurtured by customer education. Customer education can help any organization excel, but for those on the digital business landscape – think SaaS, tech, and digital product-based companies – it’s essential.

In this article, I’ll teach you what customer education is and show you how you can use it to ease the customer journey, increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, and help your organization stand above the competition.

Create Your High-Impact Customer Education Program

💁 Product Training for Customers: A Complete Guide

Customer Education: What It is & Why it Matters

Businesses use customer education to teach their customers how they can best use their products and services. It’s highly strategic and helps users internalize the value those products and services can bring to their own business or industry.

Customer education is the process of providing customers with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to effectively use a company’s products or services.

Customer education is not customer training, although there are some overlaps.

Customer training is task-oriented and focuses on features or workflows that help users master how to use their product or service. Its main goal is to improve product proficiency and reduce support inquiries.

While customer education often includes customer training, the customer education lifecycle goes deeper. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate product value and how it can be used to accomplish a user’s broader goals.

Another key difference is that customer education is also a content marketing strategy on its own, where you bring front-up value to your prospective customers with content that evolves around your industry and not necessarily on your product or service, eg., see marketing courses from Hubspot.

The bottom line? It strives to create empowered, loyal customers and set them up for long-term success.

Here’s a simple breakdown to help you visualize the distinction:

Customer training is just one of many elements of successful customer education strategies. Here is what I consider a complete list:

These elements can be available to users through a variety of formats throughout their learning experience, including online courses, webinars, tutorials, or help centers.

I’ll show you some in-depth examples later on, but here’s a glance at how elements of a customer education strategy can manifest through various formats:

To bring the elements of customer education alive, it helps to have a solid customer education team. What that looks like for you might depend on the size or structure of your organization, but could include the following titles/roles:

Regardless of who comprises your team, try to build it around the goals you have for your users and the benefits you seek to gain from your customer education strategy. To do this, it helps to understand why customer education is so important.

Why is Customer Education Important?

Customer education empowers your customers to fully understand and use your product, which results in high customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. In a highly competitive digital marketplace, this is the key to maintaining a thriving business.

Customers want to know more than just how your product or service works; they want to know how it will work specifically for them to solve their problems. When they do, it increases their perceived value of your offering and makes them less likely to drop your product and head to a competitor.

This is why an effective customer education strategy should focus on how it can help you reach your business goals and the benefits it brings your customer base.

In addition to customer enablement, customer education benefits your business by:

💁 See more customer education statistics here.

Roll these benefits into a nice, neat little customer education package and you can see how a good strategy helps you stand out from the competition.

And to truly see the benefits of your customer education strategy, make sure it includes all the major components.

Key Components of a Customer Education Program

I like to look at the components of a solid customer education program as five pillars:

Combined and leveraged effectively, you’ll have a strategy that educates and empowers your users to get the maximum value from your product. Here’s a functional look at each of the five pillars, examples of what they could include, and best practices for each.

Marketing content

Marketing content attracts and informs potential customers. It brings your product or service to their attention and addresses how it can solve their unique pain points.

Examples include: blog articles, social media posts, and webinars.

Your marketing content should cover key features, success stories, and testimonials that illustrate the value and relevance of your product to your target audience.

Best practices for using marketing content in your customer education strategy include:

Thought leadership content

Thought leadership content positions your brand as an authority in your industry, helping you build credibility and trust with current and potential customers.

Examples include: white papers, podcasts, and expert blog articles (written by or featuring industry experts).

Your thought leadership content should inform and empower your customers using expert perspectives to highlight precisely how your brand can solve their challenges. It can foster loyalty and increase your brand’s credibility.

Best practices include:

Educational content

Educational content is a core part of your customer education initiatives. This is where you’ll see some overlap with customer training, as this component focuses on teaching your users how to use your product.

Examples include: how-to guides, interactive tutorials, FAQs, and knowledge-base resources.

Remember, the goal of educational content is to enhance customer skills and remove any barriers to product adoption, so make sure it’s clear and actionable. You want customers to use your product confidently, independently, and as swiftly as possible.

The best practices for this component can be applied to all of your customer education content, so I want to go a little more in-depth here.

Here are the best practices for structuring your customer education content:

💡 Tip: The right customer education platform or learning management system (LMS) is designed to make structuring your education content a breeze, so keep an eye out for one that can help you tick all these boxes.

Engagement tactics

Customer education should be ongoing, so you need to employ the right engagement tactics to keep users learning and active.

Examples include: gamification, in-person Q&A sessions, surveys, and polls.

Good engagement tactics help facilitate active participation from learners. This can result in better customer relationships and increased course completion rates.

Best practices for customer engagement tactics include:

💁 Here’s how you can use online course surveys to gather feedback.

Instructional design principles

Implement instructional design principles when building your courses to add structure and help your customers learn faster and retain information. Instructional design helps you plan and structure a course that guides the learner through the different stages of learning and imparts knowledge.

Examples include: learning paths and clear learning objectives.

Using a good LMS can set you up for success with instructional design. I advise looking for one that offers the formats and features you need (i.e., gamification, video content, webinars, blogs, automation) to develop engaging learning content and structured learning paths.

Other best practices include:

💁 Don’t know the first thing about Instructional Design? LearnWorlds AI assistant can help you build a course using proven ID models.

These components help decrease time-to-value for your users, create empowered and educated customers, and help you stand out from the competition.

If they still feel a bit abstract, take a look at the examples below to help you visualize a successful customer education strategy in action.

Use Cases of Successful Customer Education Programs

A successful customer education program drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduces churn, and equips your users with what they need to know.

For this article, I’ve created some fictitious use cases to help you visualize how customer education can work for you. In these examples, I use LearnWorlds, the world’s most flexible eLearning platform, to demonstrate practical customer education capabilities.

*Note: Aside from LearnWorlds, the names and companies in these examples are fictional. Any resemblance to real companies or organizations is purely coincidental.

TaskFloat – SaaS Project Management Company

Background: A B2B SaaS company that offers project management tools designed for remote teams.

Goal: Improve the customer onboarding process and increase the use of its advanced and new features, particularly with new users. Reduce pressure on its support team and overall support costs.

How TaskFloat uses customer education: TaskFloat matches up with LearnWorlds to create an interactive learning hub. It offers on-demand, interactive videos and guides users through setting up projects, managing workflows, and implementing integrations with tools like Slack or Google Drive.

To assess the learning progress of its users, TaskFloat uses qualification questions and tailored follow-up content based on individual user performance.

TaskFloat uses LearnWorlds’ Course Insights to analyze their engagement metrics and gathers essential user insights by creating customized forms with LearnWorlds’ Form Builder.

Stay Secure Solutions – Cybersecurity Firm

Background: A cybersecurity software company for enterprise businesses that function within highly regulated industries, such as finance or healthcare.

Goal: Streamline compliance training for their clients and demonstrate how Stay Secure Solutions can help them prepare for audits and adhere to regulations.

How Stay Secure Solutions uses customer education: Using LearnWorlds, Stay Secure Solutions builds compliance training content and a certification program. It uses a combination of thought leadership content from industry experts and comprehensive learning modules to guide users.

Through its training program, it offers exams to validate its clients’ understanding and certifications to give lifetime value to their learning accomplishments.

Using SCORM & PPT support, they were able to integrate their existing training materials into LearnWorlds’ comprehensive platform.

While fictional, these examples show how different companies in different industries can use customer education to empower their customers and reach their company goals.

💡If you’d like to see some real-world examples, check out my article where I break down 7 Effective Customer Education Examples and highlight customer education’s positive impact on companies like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Drive Customer Success and Growth with Customer Education

Use customer education to meet customer needs, increase their perceived value in your offers, and boost their loyalty to your brand.

With benefits like reduced churn, higher customer satisfaction scores, and smooth product adoption, now is the perfect time to implement an effective customer education strategy for your organization.

Ready to transform your customer experience? Start your free trial with LearnWorlds today!

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How to Build a Customer Education Program From Start to Finish

Androniki Koumadoraki — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 05:12:14 +0000

When it comes to attracting, engaging, and retaining customers, customer education stands out as one of the most effective and long-term solutions.

By integrating a customer education program into your business strategy, you can differentiate from the competition and build a loyal customer base that keeps growing.

More and more companies are now choosing to invest in customer education because of its many benefits. 90 percent of companies have already seen a positive return on their initiatives, which indicates customer education is a move in the right direction.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

But how can customer education boost your marketing efforts, and why is it so important?

This article will answer these and many more questions.

Find out why having a customer education academy is so beneficial for your company, and learn how you can build educational content and your program from scratch. We’ll also share tips for choosing a customer education platform and some examples of successful academies for inspiration. Let’s begin!

What is Customer Education?

Customer education is any purposeful and organized learning activity designed to impart knowledge or skills to prospective or existing customers.

Educating existing customers helps them discover all your product’s use cases and capabilities (features and workflows) so they can exploit it to its full potential and make it part of their lives. It’s meant to provide support throughout the customer lifecycle and not only during onboarding.

Customer education is particularly beneficial for companies with:

Customer education can also be part of an educational marketing strategy serving sales & marketing purposes, like:

💁 Not sure whether your business would benefit from customer education? Find out more in our blog post 10 Warning Signs You Need a Customer Education Program ASAP.

Why is Customer Education Important?

Customer education is critical as it helps create long-lasting relationships with new and existing customers, with everything that implies for your business (more on that in a bit).

But there’s more to it. Customer education also gives you a chance to change how people perceive your brand and distinguish yourself as the leading educational voice in your industry, answering questions that will help build trust in your brand:

Sharing educational messages dramatically increases the likelihood of people making a purchase. You also reach a broader audience and boost brand awareness, encouraging people to buy your existing or new products.

7 Benefits of Customer Education

Integrating customer education will help strengthen your relationship with your customers throughout their lifecycle. This means that a successful customer education program can support your business goals, including increasing customer satisfaction scores, reducing support costs, improving product adoption, driving lead generation, and growing upgrades.

Let’s dive into each of these benefits.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

The educational activities accompanying customer onboarding enable your customers to engage with your product in the best way possible. Customers are equipped to take full advantage of your product and are, therefore, satisfied with their purchase.

Customer satisfaction brings a wealth of positive results for your business: product complaints, customer churn, and product returns decrease while loyalty and customer lifetime value (CLV) improve.

Higher Customer Retention

Customer satisfaction is directly related to customer retention throughout all stages of the customer journey.

A well-structured onboarding process for new customers ensures a smooth initial user experience, reduces time to value (the first time a new customer completes a task), and prevents early churn.

Beyond that critical first stage, customers enjoy a better customer experience since they have the help they need at hand, enjoy a frictionless user experience without interruptions to contact support, discover new features, and make the most of your product by developing deep product knowledge.

Revenue Boost

Research by Intellum-Forrester confirms that formalized customer education programs have some significant direct benefits for a company. The study showed that with a customer education program in place, bottom-line revenue increased to 6.2 percent.

This comes as no surprise – customer education helps increase customer lifetime value since loyal customers buy more often and more products, renew their subscriptions, and are more likely to pay for advanced features and plans.

You can also choose to monetize your program, especially if you offer a certification, which further contributes to your bottom line.

Reduced Customer Support Costs

The Intellum-Forrester report also showed that the most successful organizations among those implementing a dedicated customer education program saw a 36x greater reduction in support costs than the least successful organizations.

This makes perfect sense. When customers have access to self-service resources, they are less likely to reach out to your customer support team or their customer success manager.

Therefore, you can occupy fewer support agents than you would without customer education resources. Plus, your customer base can keep growing at a higher rate than your support team, which translates into cost savings for you.

Better Customer Support

Self-service resources, like knowledge bases and on-demand video tutorials, enable customers to resolve minor issues on their own.

This frees up significant time for your customer-facing teams, who have to deal with fewer support tickets and questions. As a result, they can offer superior customer service and handle complex issues with undivided attention.

Brand Advocacy

When customers enjoy a great customer experience, customer loyalty and brand advocacy increase. Happy customers not only commit to your brand; they are more likely to recommend your brand to others.

This creates a life cycle of people who engage in word-of-mouth recommendations, positive reviews, and social media mentions, bringing your content and your brand into the eye of prospects. Your NPS and CSAT scores also improve.

Market Leader Positioning

Customer education, whether for customers or prospects, helps you position your company as an expert and market leader. Sharing educational content is an excellent way to attract leads and instill trust to win them over.

What Kind of Content is Educational?

Educational content is any type of content that helps people learn something new, whether it is industry knowledge, tips and best practices, or skills to develop product knowledge and mastery.

Such content needs to be informational, inspiring, entertaining, and engaging. Let’s see some examples of educational content formats you can create depending on your goal.

For educational marketing:

For product-focused training:

Creating an online academy will enable you to provide a smooth, focused learning experience where customers will find the content all in one place content in one place. You can also include quizzes and exams to reward learners for completing a course.

A customer education academy can combine content built for both purposes – strictly product-focused or for marketing purposes.

On top of content, a customer education academy can include a virtual community either built-in or on social media groups.

Feeling inspired to start building your academy? Try LearnWorlds now with a 30-day free trial and see what engaging customer education looks like in action.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Step-By-Step Guide to Building Your Customer Education Program

So, how do you go about building your customer education program? Here’s a quick 6-step process with the key stages:

Identify Business Goals

Customer education is part of your business strategy, and as such, it should be aligned with your business goals. Try to identify pain points and challenges you want to address or opportunities for growth, for example:

Identifying what you want to achieve is fundamental to developing customer education initiatives to achieve these goals; it’s a common mistake not to link business and customer education goals.

Segment Your Audience

Not all your customers are the same. Some know more, others know less about your product. Some will use it for the X reason, others for the Y.

With that in mind, segment your audience into smaller groups and develop training courses per use case, knowledge level, job role, and any other criteria that apply to your business.

Develop a Content Strategy

Now is the time to start building content from scratch or repurposing existing one. We have already shared types of content and where they fit into your strategy – just make sure they’re suitable for imparting the knowledge you want.

For example, nothing can beat video when it comes to demonstrating complex tasks, but a support article might be more suitable to describe a simple process. Similarly, if your goal is to attract leads, you can hold a webinar on an industry-related topic.

Invest in Customer Training Tools

Now that you know what type of content you want to use, choose how you want to deliver it: synchronously, asynchronously, or both. Research the market to find the tool that best meets your requirements.

A customer education platform stands out as the most comprehensive solution enabling you to create, deliver, and manage your academy, streamline it with business workflows through integrations, monetize your program, and evaluate its performance. (More on that in the next section.)

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Promote Your Program

Another essential step is to market your customer education program to attract attention and let customers and prospects know about your educational offering.

You have many options here, like notifications both in-app and on the website, paid ads, email marketing, and social media.

Measure Results

Measuring your program’s performance and business impact is crucial. Start with learning and engagement metrics, such as completion rates, interaction with content, time spent on activity, etc.

Then, monitor lagging metrics that measure business impact, such as CSAT score, customer retention, upsells and renewals, time to value, etc.

For a more detailed analysis of a measurement framework watch our webinar with customer education expert Vicky Kennedy:

Choosing The Right Customer Education Platform

With the plethora of online learning platforms (also known as learning management systems) out there today, it’s easy to build your online academy without having a huge customer education team and a string of subject matter experts.

Using a full-featured, budget-friendly LMS ensures you have all the tools you need to make your academy the must-go learning destination.

When exploring technology platforms to support your customer training program, there are specific requirements to look for:

Scalability & Efficiency

As your business grows and evolves, your training platform needs to support this growth without sacrificing functionality or reliability. Features that support scalability are:

LearnWorlds has all the features listed here and many more to discover. Try our platform now with a 30-day free trial to start exploring!

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Easy Setup & Intuitive Navigation

Learners typically engage with customer education content voluntarily. Depending on how intuitive and user-friendly your LMS is, customers are more likely to complete coursework and come back for more.

The foundation for an effective customer education program lies in ease of use and intuitive navigation.

Similarly, the platform should be easy for you as well. Ask for information about the implementation process and the support offered by your LMS provider, since complex systems may take several weeks to set up.

Built-In Content Authoring (+ AI tools)

A customer education platform should offer built-in content authoring tools, such as a video editor, eBook builder, and quiz builder, that feature interactive elements like buttons and pop-up questions.

Content creation is a lengthy process, though. An AI-powered platform will help you create, repurpose, optimize, and edit training content faster.

For example, LearnWorlds AI assistant, in addition to the features mentioned above, has built-in prompts and can design a course outline with modules and learning materials based on proven Instructional design theories, generate quizzes and feedback, and write marketing emails.

Engagement & Interactivity

How do you get customers to complete a training they don’t have to? You make it interesting!

Here are some features that support engagement and interactivity and shouldn’t be missed from your platform:

e-Commerce Readiness

It’s important that you choose a platform with a set of features that will allow you to sell your customer education program. These features include:

In-Depth Analytics

Robust analytics will help you gauge the appeal of your training materials and demonstrate the value and ROI of your program to stakeholders. Look for a platform that offers – among others – reports on sales, course completion rates, learner behavior and interaction with the content and your community, and individual course performance.

Monitoring these metrics is an essential first step to measuring the overall business impact of customer education and also to improve your offering.

How to Monetize Customer Education

Customer education effectiveness will depend on whether you have achieved your business objectives, measured by key customer education metrics like revenue, customer retention, customer satisfaction, and customer support costs.

A customer education strategy can involve monetization or not. Selling shouldn’t begin immediately, nor should it be the ultimate goal.

First, you need to generate customer engagement and build a rapport with your customers.

This can be achieved by providing high-quality educational content, which will enable you to position yourself as an authority.

Your subscribers have to see how you change their businesses, lives, relationships, or whatever your subject is all about. In this case, you have to invent;

You then gradually build the expectation of something that must change their lives. You create the need for your product without directly presenting it. The selling phase will come after you have provided this upfront value.

Get Inspired by Successful Online Academy Examples

If you are looking for some inspiration, check out some successful online academy examples offering customer elearning:

Hubspot

HubSpot Academy is one of the best examples out there. With many years of experience in the digital marketing scene, HubSpot has created a knowledge base where marketers can enroll in certification programs and take online courses that can help them develop their marketing skills and expertise.

Here, you can find courses ranging from SEO, and content marketing to LinkedIn marketing, email marketing, and more.

Brevo

Brevo is training customers on how to their software (in 4 different languages) and offers certificates in various email marketing topics. One of the top email marketing software & CRM suite, Brevo has built a structured academy to educate customers and train email marketers to improve their skills at no extra cost.

Adalo App Academy

Adalo, a no-code App builder is educating their audience on the ins and outs of making and promoting an app. This goes beyond simple customer education, focusing on all stages of app development. Their courses help app creators at the idea stage, strategy, business, design, building, launching, and more!

Lodgify Academy

Lodgify, a vacation rental management software is educating its users on how to improve their results. Lodgify offers skill-based courses, interactive lessons, and certificates for vacation rental professionals.

AWS training and Certification

AWS’s customer training and certification programs help people learn and develop their cloud skills. Each training course explores learning opportunities with AWS. The academy is either grouped by role or by domain. AWS experts develop the content and keep it regularly updated.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs Academy is an excellent example of an academy that is built both for marketing purposes with courses that offer niche knowledge and for product training. Apart from the certification course, Ahrefs allows their customers to learn how to use the Ahrefs platform and take full advantage of the SEO tools and reports it provides to improve their SEO strategy. The educational content is delivered through a series of short but in-depth videos.

Salesforce

Another excellent example of an online academy you need to check out is Trailhead by Salesforce Academy. Trailhead allows you to begin your learning adventure the way you prefer giving you three options – learning online, learning in class, or learning as part of a community.
All three pathways offer a fun way to learn and through them, Salesforce accommodates all types of learners.

LearnWorlds

Our very own LearnWorlds Academy offers free online courses that aspiring online course creators can enroll in to learn more about online learning.

You will find all you need to know on our site regarding creating, marketing, and selling online courses, creating interactive videos, getting started with email marketing, and using the LearnWorlds platform.

Ready to Educate Your Customers?

One of the most effective ways to attract new customers and retain existing ones is to provide exceptional upfront educational content designed to address specific customer needs.

The more you share your wisdom, the more people will jump on the customer journey with you. Use your knowledge to educate and expand your customer base by choosing a robust LMS that offers the best learning experience.

Your customer education program is just a step away!

Try LearnWorlds for a month for free and take your business to a whole new level with a vibrant online academy.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Further reading you might find interesting:

The post How to Build a Customer Education Program From Start to Finish appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Customer Education: 7 Top KPIs to Measure Success

Androniki Koumadoraki — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 03:06:27 +0000

Most products have a learning curve, especially SaaS products that can be relatively complex and hard to set up. Unless you help your customers discover the full capabilities of your product and incorporate it into their lives, you risk losing them to a competitor who does a better job assisting them.

Enter customer education.

Customer education not only helps you retain customers but also serves another purpose – boosting brand awareness. This happens because, unlike customer enablement and customer training, which are product-focused, customer education also means sharing knowledge about topics relevant to your niche or industry.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Therefore, it’s addressed to prospective customers as well as existing ones, and it’s a smart marketing strategy to attract leads while showcasing your expertise and building trust.

How do you know if your customer education program has brought value to your business? We have singled out the top 7 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that hold the answer to this question.

Let’s see these KPIs, why they are important for business growth, and how customer education plays a role in shaping them.

7 KPIs That Measure Customer Education Effectiveness

The following 7 KPIs demonstrate the impact of customer education on your business goals. Monitoring them regularly will help you improve your training offerings and stay on track with your goals.

1. Course Completion Rates

Completion Rate (%) = (Number of Students Who Completed the Course / Total Number of Students Enrolled) * 100

The course completion rate is a metric that indicates a positive learning experience and customer engagement with your program. Although not a business metric, it’s an excellent first indicator of success – it means that your program has successfully attracted prospective customers, leaving a positive impression, and has managed to hold the attention of existing and new ones.

This and other learning and engagement metrics (time spent on activity, certifications issued, quiz scores, etc) can be accessed via your Learning Management System (LMS).

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like LearnWorlds offer even more in-depth data, including course performance and course sales. In addition, our platform offers a Survey builder that enables you to capture new lead information and create surveys – including NPS – to gauge learner satisfaction with your online courses.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC = Total Marketing and Sales Expenses / Number of New Customers Acquired

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the amount of money a company spends to gain a new customer.

To calculate CAC, you add sales and marketing expenses (e.g., advertising, marketing campaigns, sales team salaries) and divide their total by the number of new customers you gained during a specific period of time.

How customer education reduces Customer Acquisition Cost: As we mentioned, customer education can be part of your marketing strategy.

By proactively offering valuable resources, you generate leads, establish yourself as an authority, and start building trust even with people who are not yet part of your customer base.

Not to mention that customer enablement creates happy customers who turn into brand advocates and leave positive reviews for your products or promote them through word-of-mouth advertising, both of which are essentially “free” advertising.

Moving past the initial investment, customer education strengthens your brand and decreases the money you spend on marketing – which is undeniably the most costly factor in the customer acquisition equation.

3. Customer Churn

Churn Rate (%) = (Number of Customers Lost During a Period / Total Number of Customers at the Start of the Period) * 100

Customer churn is one of the most “burning” KPIs for a company – and you want to see it go down. The simplest way to calculate the customer churn rate is to divide the number of clients you lost during a certain period by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that period. Multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

You need to decrease churn and increase customer retention for two reasons:

How customer education prevents customer churn: Customer education is an effective way to boost customer retention rates because it ticks several boxes in one go.

For starters, an onboarding process minimizes time to value and helps new customers set up your product and start using it shortly after they purchase it, which decreases early churn.

Further down their journey, they will discover more use cases and functionalities and maximize the value they get from it – so why risk switching to a new product that might fail to meet their needs?

Last but not least, educated customers have a better user experience. They encounter fewer technical roadblocks, and they need to seek support less often – and when they do, it’s available 24/7 in the form of a knowledge base.

Do you want to learn how you can yield a positive ROI from customer education? Watch our on-demand webinar with customer education expert Vicky Kennedy for practical tips and strategies.

4. Sales Growth

Sales Growth (%) = (Sales in Current Period – Sales in Previous Period / Sales in Previus Period) * 100

Sales growth signals success loud and clear – for many businesses, this is the ultimate goal and key to survival.

The only downside of this customer education metric is that sales growth can result from multiple concurrent business initiatives, so it’s hard to pinpoint the exact contribution of customer education.

How customer education drives sales growth: Customer education drives sales growth in multiple ways. For one, it boosts brand awareness, perceived authority, and positive word of mouth, which makes it more likely that people will choose your product over a competitor’s who might be lesser known.

Your sales team can also use it as a testament to the level and quality of customer service you offer. Most customers appreciate having access to self-service tech-touch onboarding and prefer it over contacting support agents to resolve minor issues.

5. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)

CSAT (%) = (Number of Satisfied Customers / Total Number of Survey Responses) * 100

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is another critical metric. It’s usually measured by asking customers to rate their satisfaction with your product using a linear scale. Satisfied Customers are those who give a positive response (typically selecting the highest satisfaction scores, such as 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale).

NPS = ( (Promoters / Total Respondents) * 100) – ( (Detractors / Total Respondents) * 100)

Similarly, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is measured by asking “How likely you are to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” Ideally, you want to get “extremely likely” responses.

Customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score reflect a positive customer experience and indicators of future growth.

They usually go hand in hand with positive online reviews that build social proof for your brand. Therefore, you want to have happy customers who give your product the “thumbs up.”

How customer education improves Customer Satisfaction and NPS: Customer education offers customers the tools to learn your product and use it with confidence, getting the most out of it. So eventually, they’re happy with their purchase; as simple as that.

6. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV = ( (Average Purchase Value * Average Purchase Frequency) / Customer Churn Rate) * Profit Margin

In this formula,

Eventually, Customer Lifetime Value is the average revenue generated from a customer for as long as they remain your customer.

Businesses often compare Customer Lifetime Value against Customer Acquisition Cost to predict profitability and make the necessary adjustments to increase CLV, especially via marketing and product development.

Naturally, you want this number to be as high as possible, as it’s directly related to your bottom line and, in the long run, your business’s survival.

How customer education increases Customer Lifetime Value: As we mentioned before, a customer education program encourages product adoption and boosts customer loyalty – which is how it makes the most difference in increasing CLV through upsells and renewals.

Repeat customers sign up for higher plans, renew their subscriptions, and buy several products from your brand.

7. Customer Support Tickets

The first way to measure the impact of customer education on incoming tickets is to compare the number of support tickets before and after the training.

This method will give you an indication of the impact, as a decrease (hopefully) might also be attributed to other factors, like an update of the product’s user interface that made it more intuitive and easy to navigate.

The second method is to compare the number of support tickets that come from trained vs not trained customers. This method can demonstrate more clearly the exact impact of customer education, even if from a slightly different perspective.

In any case, a decrease in customer support tickets means less workload for your team, better quality of customer service, and fewer customer support costs as your customer base grows.

How customer education reduces customer support tickets: When customers have access to a knowledge base with on-demand training content (webinars, articles, guides), they are less likely to reach out to your support team and your CSMs (customer success managers).

Ready To Maximize Your Business Performance?

Customer education can complement other business growth strategies and safeguard your place in a competitive market. Aligning your customer education program with your business goals and monitoring its results using relevant metrics will increase your chances of success.

LearnWorlds offers all the tools to build a vibrant customer education academy – from website builder and content authoring with AI to in-depth reporting on everything that matters, CRM and customer service integrations, and advanced eCommerce features.

Explore these and more features with a 30-day free trial.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

How to Measure Customer Training ROI: 15 KPIs to Keep an Eye on

Androniki Koumadoraki — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 08:22:15 +0000

Return on investment (ROI) is a major concern for any business, especially when they invest significant resources. When it comes to customer training programs, the investment can be small or large, but the potential wins are always big.

Customer education programs enhance the onboarding experience and improve overall customer experience, positively impacting business growth. That said, measuring the ROI of customer training is challenging, mainly because it can be difficult to pinpoint its exact impact.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

In some cases, the effects are apparent. For example, you build a course or create a video tutorial to help customers use a specific feature. If feature adoption increases a few months after the launch, you can safely attribute this to the recently introduced training resource.

But what happens when renewal rates or upsells go up? In this case, It’s hard to link success to customer education (or measure the extent of its impact). Sales growth can be achieved by multiple factors, like an exciting new feature release, an offer, or some capable additions to your sales team.

In this blog post, we’ll shed light on the puzzle of customer education ROI by examining 15 key KPIs that indicate success and explaining how to track them in a way that links them back to customer training.

But first…

Why Should I Measure Customer Training ROI?

A customer education program is a business initiative and a significant investment. As such, it shouldn’t be left to fate. Measuring the ROI of customer education helps you understand where your efforts stand and make data-driven decisions regarding its future and even the future of your business.

15 Essential KPIs to Measure Customer Training ROI

Let’s clarify that there are no wrong or right KPIs to measure. The following ROI metrics are indicative, and not everyone will be relevant for your business (although all of these matter to stakeholders). Since customer education is linked to your business strategy and goals, the must-track metrics are unique for every business.

In any case, implementing a measurement framework is essential so you know whether your initiatives not only meet customer needs but also help you achieve business growth.

💡 Want to learn more on how to maximize your business impact with customer education? LearnWorlds held an insightful webinar with customer education expert Vicky Kennedy, who shared her tried-and-tested measurement framework. Click the link below to watch for free!

First, we’ll start with metrics that demonstrate how customers respond to your program and how effective it is in terms of learning and engagement.

Note that the most efficient way to gain access to these essential metrics with no fuss is to create and deliver your training program using a customer training platform or learning management system (LMS).

1. Course Completion Rates

This metric tracks the number of customers who finish the courses they start, reflecting content engagement and perceived value. High completion rates indicate that customers find the content engaging and valuable.

How to measure: Track the percentage of customers who finish the courses they start.

2. Learner Engagement Metrics

Learner engagement is linked to interaction with training content and is expressed through analytics like time spent on each activity and module, click rates, number of logins, and interaction with different types of training content (videos, articles, quizzes) or even your community. These metrics monitor learner behavior and can help you determine which content, activities, and courses are the most engaging.

How to measure: Use analytics to track user activity, monitor click rates, time spent on pages, and interaction with multimedia elements.

See an example from our platform:

3. Certifications Issued

Awarding a certification enhances perceived product value and enables you to monetize your customer training course. A high number of certifications issued points to an effective and engaging training course, provided that the certification is issued upon the successful completion of an exam. It also shows customer commitment to mastering your product, which is a positive indication for product adoption and retention.

How to measure: Count the number of customers earning certifications and compare it against participation rates.

4. Attendance and Participation

Attendance rates at live training sessions, webinars, and workshops clearly reflect the program’s appeal and success. High participation rates indicate that customers find value in the training sessions offered and are actively engaged.

How to measure: Track attendance at webinars, workshops, or live training sessions.

💡 The following metrics focus on the business impact of customer education. These are the most important metrics when determining customer training ROI as they demonstrate tangible results and are, therefore, directly linked to your business goals.

5. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)

These metrics gauge customers’ satisfaction with your product and whether they would recommend your offerings to others. You want CSAT and NPS to be as high as possible; the opposite is a strong predictor of customer churn and negative word-of-mouth.

How to measure: Conduct product-focused surveys at key touchpoints, such as after product usage, purchases, or during regular customer check-ins with CSMs and support, to gather specific feedback on their satisfaction levels.

6. Customer Retention Rate

The most crucial metric, customer retention can be significantly improved through education, which ensures users understand and derive value from your products. The impact of customer education on retention is even more evident for complex products where lack of understanding leads to cancellations.

How to measure: Compare churn rates among educated vs. uneducated customers.

7. Time to Value (TTV)

Another essential metric to track during customer onboarding, time to value measures the time from initial engagement with educational content to achieving the first success milestone, eg., performing a task. Reducing the time it takes for new customers to understand and effectively use your product can boost satisfaction and adoption rates and prevent early churn.

How to measure: Measure the time from the customer’s first interaction with educational content to when they achieve their first success milestone.

8. Product Adoption and Feature Utilization

Product and feature adoption are among the must-have KPIs on your list. These metrics calculate feature usage among educated customers, showing how education drives product understanding, which directly impacts adoption rates.

How to measure: Track which features are used more frequently by customers who have participated in education programs.

9. Support Ticket Reduction

Assesses the reduction in support tickets after customers engage with educational content, indicating improved self-sufficiency. Effective education should reduce the number of support tickets as customers become more self-sufficient.

This, in turn, can also reduce customer support costs because your customer base can continue to expand while your support team stays the same.

How to measure: Monitor the volume of support tickets before and after customers engage with educational content.

10. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Educated customers tend to spend more, stay longer, and are more likely to purchase additional products or services. This is why we always say, “educated customers are your best customers” – not only is acquiring new customers expensive but also repeat customers are those who contribute the most to your bottom line.

How to measure: Analyze the CLV of customers who participate in education programs compared to those who do not.

11. Sales Growth and Upsell/Cross-sells

The definition of “let’s talk numbers” and some of the most burning KPIs: sales growth. Customer education often leads to increased sales through better product understanding and awareness of additional offerings.

Not only that; through social media engagement and regular communication, customer training increases existing customers’ loyalty to your brand and brings repeat business.

How to measure: Track the revenue generated from upselling or cross-selling to educated customers.

12. Self-Service Success Rate

This metric tracks how frequently customers resolve issues independently, reflecting the effective use of self-service resources. When customers can solve problems independently using available resources, you can rest assured you’re doing a good job offering targeted training.

How to measure: Track how often customers resolve issues without contacting support, utilizing resources like knowledge bases or forums.

13. Community Engagement

Customer activity in forums, user groups, and social media indicate a strong connection with your brand and deep product knowledge. Engaged customers not only help others but also transmit their enthusiasm for your brand and help boost engagement. Overall, this metric clearly indicates loyalty and advocacy, and it should be closely monitored.

How to measure: Monitor activity levels in online communities, forums, and social media groups.

14. Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it is for customers to interact with a company, typically during support interactions, purchases, or using a product or service. It is a great indicator of customer satisfaction and a predictor of churn. This metric is also helpful for identifying deficiencies in your customer enablement strategy.

How to measure: Customer Effort Score (CES) can be measured by asking customers to rate how easy it was to interact with your business or complete a task on a scale (e.g., 1-7). This is usually done through a survey right after the customer interaction with a question like “On a scale of 1 to 7, how easy was it to resolve your issue today?”

15. Customer Reviews

Customer opinions and ratings on products or services provide insights into customer satisfaction, features they love or hate, and areas that need improvement. Reviews highlight strengths and weaknesses in your offerings and can heavily influence potential customers.

How to measure: Monitor and analyze reviews across platforms like your website, third-party review sites, and social media to gauge overall sentiment. Engage with customers as much as possible.

Final Thoughts

ROI calculation is tricky but necessary. By tracking these KPIs, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your customer training programs and their impact on your business goals and bottom line.

Investing in customer training is an investment in your customers’ success, which ultimately drives your business forward. Start measuring your customer training ROI today to ensure that your educational initiatives are not just meeting customer needs but also contributing to long-term success.

Looking for the best customer training LMS? LearnWorlds is your go-to solution. Our platform offers features that facilitate streamlining and administration, content creation, and in-depth monitoring with reports on learner progress and engagement, academy performance, and sales.

Take advantage of our 30-day free trial and try LearnWorlds now, commitment-free.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

AI-Powered Tactics for Customer Education (Webinar Insights)

Androniki Koumadoraki — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:33:01 +0000

Recently, we held an insightful webinar on using AI for customer education with an emphasis on content creation – and not only. LearnWorlds CPO and co-founder George Palegeorgiou, along with Eliza, our Learning Designer Expert, and Brett, our Customer Success Expert, shared invaluable tips with real prompt examples to demonstrate how easy it is to build your customer education program with the help of AI tools.

Watch the webinar on-demand to see the multiple use cases and impressive capabilities of AI in customer education, using ChatGPT and LearnWorlds AI assistant.

Or, keep reading to get to the gist of what we covered:

Why Every Business Can and Should Offer Customer Education

Until a few years ago, we believed that customer education was only for large enterprises, but that’s not the case. The truth is that every business can offer product training for customers using a budget-friendly LMS platform that allows you to deploy customer education without breaking the bank.

In fact, you should offer customer education. Customer education can be integrated throughout the customer journey, bringing enormous benefits regardless of the size of your business:

By aligning customer education with your business strategy, you can achieve key business goals like reduction of customer support tickets, reduction of customer support costs, shortened time to value, increase in customer satisfaction, and more.

Overall, customer education can drive sustainable growth for your business… because trained customers are your best customers!

Six Applications of AI in Customer Education

So, where does AI fit in the picture we’ve described? AI can help you create an engaging and impactful customer education, every step of the way. Let’s see how!

👉 Before we dive in, let us introduce you to LearnWorlds’ advanced AI assistant. With more than 200 pre-built prompts, LearnWorlds’ built-in AI tool takes you through all the steps of course creation efficiently and reliably. (Apart from our AI assistant, we give you the option of connecting your own OpenAI provider.)

Our AI assistant performs tasks, like course outlines based on Instructional Design theories, eBook authoring, assessment and feedback generation, email creation, and content editing & transformation. Try LearnWorlds now with a 30-day free trial to see the magic for yourself!

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

1. Strategy & Planning

Using AI tools, you can build tailored, personalized learning experiences that meet your customers’ needs and have actual impact.

While you’re in the planning phase of your customer education strategy, AI can help you:

2. Content Creation

AI can help you create your customer training course in two key ways:

Build a course plan

Build your course like an Instructional Designer pro even if you’re not one. AI can create a course plan based on Instructional Design principles (like the ADDIE model, Bloom’s taxonomy, Experiential learning, etc.) to enhance learning. Needless to say, effective learning is key to achieving the goals of the course eg., improving feature usage.

The best part is that you can experiment with different ID theories to see what your course would look like with each one and then you can select the one you like the most, either as it is or certain elements from it.

Design high-quality learning activities

…at lightning speed! Speed is critical in customer education because the faster your customers learn, the quicker they’ll adopt a product. Otherwise, they might abandon the product or leave a negative review. So, each time you have a new feature or product release, you want to get out that content really fast – and you now do so!

Flashcards, slides, quizzes, exams, images, stories, and case studies are some activities you can create with AI. Provide AI with as many details and requirements as possible to get the result you want faster.

When it comes to content creation, AI can address one of our biggest “fears” – being boring! AI can “think out of the box” for you and create engaging content by using creative thinking techniques, humor, role-playing, or critical thinking. For example, you can ask it to explain what market segmentation is with an analogy from cooking.

3. Content Optimization & Repurposing

Often, you may have content from existing courses or other resources that you can reuse. In such cases, AI can you polish your content to perfection or transform it! Let’s take a glimpse into how AI can optimize your content:

Content editing: Simplify, polish, rewrite, rephrase, shorten, expand, enrich, keep writing, or remove redundancies.

Content optimization: Summarize, extract key takeaways, pros/cons listing, translation, converting into another format/activity.

👉And these are just a few of its capabilities! If you want to find out more about using AI for content creation, download our free eBook AI and the Art of Instructional Design: Exploring the 5 Layers of Expertise.

Download eBook

4. Assessments & Certifications

Offering a certification is very motivating for customers who will receive tangible proof of their learning after the program. Similarly, assessments will help them stay on track, refresh and self-evaluate their knowledge while giving you a reliable source to evaluate your program.

Generating (the right) questions to ensure your customers truly absorb the content is time-consuming – unless it’s done with AI.

AI can help you create quizzes and exams (knowledge checks) for your certification programs and self-assessments (quizzes without scores) to help customers evaluate their knowledge level.

For example, you can ask AI to create a quiz based on a resource of your choice, like an eBook, and set specific requirements, like 10 questions with 4 possible answers each. If you want, AI can even autogenerate feedback for you!

5. Marketing Material

Marketing material is a powerful tool to nurture leads, stay in touch with customers, and, of course, promote your program. The thing is, you might not be a gifted wordsmith or have the time to create everything from scratch, which is why you might need some help from AI.

A typical example and very effective type of marketing material is emails. Set parameters like the goal of the email, keywords, and tone of voice to craft emails that sound like you… but better!

6. Data Analysis

AI can analyze performance scores, engagement rates, and more to help you understand how customers are interacting with your program and identify areas for improvement. You can do this manually or you can do this with AI – fast and accurately!

AI can display the results in the way you want (eg. a pie chart) and it can even suggest recommendations to improve your course.

Final Thoughts

AI is here to accelerate your work – and that’s great! But don’t forget that you have the last say; you’re the owner of the content and in charge of ensuring its quality. It’s important that you closely review the output for accuracy and to ensure it’s what you want.

Want to know more? Watch the entire webinar to learn more about AI for customer education and see prompt examples using ChatGPT and LearnWorlds AI Assistant.

And, of course, take advantage of our 30-day free trial to see how LearnWorlds advanced AI assistant prompts can transform the way you develop customer education content.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Maximize The Business Impact of Customer Education (Webinar Insights)

Androniki Koumadoraki — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:30:48 +0000

In a recent webinar, we had the pleasure of hosting Vicky Kennedy, CEO of Echtus and an expert in customer education, alongside Panos Siozos, CEO of LearnWorlds. They shared proven strategies for successfully implementing a customer education program. Vicky also introduced her measurement framework, designed to demonstrate the tangible impact of such programs.

The webinar was a big success, and we’re glad we were able to answer so many of your questions and help you dive a bit deeper into the topic.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to transform your customer education efforts. Watch the webinar on demand and gain insights that will help you drive real results!

In the meantime, here’s a quick recap of what we covered:

You may have heard it as customer enablement, customer training, product education, or product training – they all refer to the same thing. Customer education was born a couple of decades ago and grew from the concept of training your customers on how to use your tools to what it is today.

The term “customer education” has two meanings:

Whatever the case, customer education has multiple benefits and can drive a wide range of results that elevate a business.

Product-Centric Education vs. Other Learning Initiatives

Naturally, customer education is not the only type of education a business offers. Education in a business can show up in different forms:

✅For compliance: linked to auditing and legal training and involves departments like IT and HR.
💡As a service: product training that is sold to the customer, aka revenue generating, like a paid webinar.
🎯As a strategy: when you’re using education and its outcomes to achieve other goals in your company, like increasing customer retention/performance or reducing cost.

When using education as a strategy, you expect an ROI from these outcomes. It’s a more nuanced initiative and it’s complicated to measure the results.

Misalignment between business strategy and customer education is one of the most common mistakes.

When using customer education as a business strategy, you need to be aware of and understand the current strategies across your company. That is why it’s important for people leading customer education initiatives to be embedded with department heads across the organization.

For example, your business is looking to expand into a new market – how can education drive that? Understanding the business goals and the strategy behind those goals is key and mandatory to maximize the business impact of customer education.

👉Very often, we see companies focusing on content creation and creating multiple courses to cover every possible topic and feature. While there’s nothing wrong with creating content, content alone will not drive the desired business results.

It’s important to have a customer education program to make sure the right people will get educated about the right things for the right reasons; it’s also key to measuring success.

Education program examples:

The Six Dimensions of a Customer Education Strategy

According to Vicky, a well-orchestrated customer education strategy has the following six dimensions:

Program

All education initiatives must be aligned with your business strategy. Take inventory of all the opportunities or problems that you need to solve at your organization (eg. early customer churn); if you want to measure the business impact you have to know what you want to impact!

Prioritize the most impactful initiatives, and take stock of what content you already have.

Audience

Even within your customers, you’ll have different audiences/segments. Ensure you understand their motivations, prior knowledge, challenges, and why they would want to learn from you for a more targeted and effective program.

Content

Having understood the two first dimensions of your strategy, you can move on to content creation. Although you can use content you already have, your content strategy should be developed with your business strategy and audience in mind.

Delivery

Program delivery is not only about the tech tools, like customer training software you’ll use to deliver your program but also the modality, e.g., ILT (instructor-led) or self-paced.

A common mistake for many organizations is to skip the first steps and pick the tech tools without having a foundation of what exactly they want to do.

Marketing

You need to focus on education marketing and connect the learner audience to the learning using their goals and motivations. The goal of marketing is to drive engagement and traffic to your learning program. Without marketing, you won’t get the results that you’re expecting.

Measurement

Measuring the business impact of customer education is absolutely necessary. It helps to have a proactive approach to measuring business impact, for example by using a measurement framework like the one Vicky has built.

A measurement strategy connects leading metrics (learning and behavior) to relevant business metrics (lagging metrics, like NRR) to demonstrate a compelling ROI story.

Leading metrics demostrate engagement with learning. When measuring learning, organization will often lean on these easier-to-get and understand metrics around engagement, like completion rates, attendance.

👉But if you only measure engagement metrics, although they’re extremely important, it’s hard to demonstrate business impact.

The following framework takes a programmatic approach and consists of both leading and lagging metrics:

So, based on the framework above, let’s say you have an “Enterprise Product adoption” program. The program is linked to a business opportunity to retain business from B2B customers by promoting product adoption and stickiness.

How will you measure the success of the education program at a business level?
In this case, your high-level business metric is NRR (Net Revenue Retention) – this is what you’re going to showcase to management to prove the value of your program.

You also need to break down your target audience, B2B, to specific segments – in this case, Enterprise and SMBs.

And how will you know that learning is actually happening?
You can measure learning using engagement metrics, like attendance rates or quiz scores, or even gamification. You can then connect these to the behavior metric (because ultimately learning is about changing behavior!).

In this case, if you’re trying to drive utilization (=product adoption and stickiness), you can link the quiz scores to utilization. And utilization, in turn, impacts your NRR.

Metrics that can translate into revenue are easier for executive leadership to understand. It will also be easier for you to showcase the impact of your program and even ask for more resources.

Even if you are sitting earlier in the funnel, you still need to measure something to demonstrate the impact of your program, eg., feature usage.

Closing our webinar, we mentioned the most important pillars you need to focus on when building your program. With these pillars in mind, you can also select a suitable customer education platform:

👥Engagement and community to facilitate interaction collaboration, and peer learning
🤖AI assistance for a more efficient experience
🎯User management for segmenting learners and providing a more personalized learning experience
🎨Branding and customization to bring forward your brand identity and offer a consistent user experience
📱Mobile app to improve accessibility on the go to boost engagement and participation
💰Monetization options as, at some point, you might want to generate revenue from your customer education or sell certification programs.

LearnWorlds is a top choice for customer education, offering features like advanced AI assistant, and built-in content authoring tools for fast course creation (including assessment and certificate builders), white-label website builder and mobile apps, interactive learning activities & built-in community.

Our platform also makes user management easy with access controls, user groups, tagging, bulk and automated actions, and more options. As for monetization, you will find every tool you need to promote and sell your program, either built-in or as an integration.

9000+ brands trust LearnWorlds to train their people, partners & customers.

Moving Forward

Customer education is a powerful tool that can transform your business. It goes beyond simply providing content; it strategically aligns with your business goals to drive measurable outcomes such as increased retention, enhanced product adoption, and higher customer satisfaction.

By leveraging a well-crafted education program and implementing a strong measurement framework, like the one shared by Vicky Kennedy, you can prove the tangible impact of your efforts. Start building or refining your customer education strategy today, and unlock its full potential!

Further reading you might find interesting:

The post Maximize The Business Impact of Customer Education (Webinar Insights) appeared first on LearnWorlds.

Key Customer Education Statistics You Need to Know

Alexandra Cote — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:00:46 +0000

As a business owner and marketer, I can’t thrive without putting customer education first.

Customer education is the process of equipping potential buyers with the necessary knowledge and information to make informed decisions about our products or services.

With everything moving so fast, consumers need to be educated on how to choose the best product and service options out there, as well as how to use them.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve skimmed through customer support queries only to realize our customers weren’t using the tool correctly or to its full potential.

But it’s not their responsibility to know that. It’s yours.

▶ Maximize Your Business Impact With Customer Education ◀

By prioritizing customer education, you can demonstrate your commitment to their needs and well-being, earning their trust and loyalty.

In 2023 alone, successful customer education programs have shown a significant business impact. Companies with structured customer education strategies experienced an average revenue increase of 7.6%, a 2024 Forrester study finds. This growth is primarily due to enhanced product adoption rates, increased customer lifetime value, and customer satisfaction.

💡 Customer satisfaction scores (Csat), upsells, cross-sells, and completion rates in customer education programs are only some of the most crucial KPIs you need to monitor.

💁🏻 Here is a list of 12 customer training KPIs to measure success.

Before I explore some of the fundamental customer education statistics and trends, let’s see why this matters in the first place.

Why Customer Education Matters

Educating customers on how to effectively use your products or services significantly boosts adoption rates and usage. Informed customers are more likely to take full advantage of your offerings’ features and capabilities, getting more value from what they receive.

Companies like Adobe have shown that 79% of businesses with customer education programs have increased product adoption.

This boost is linked to customer education efforts that make it easier for users to explore the software’s functionality fully rather than relying solely on basic or self-taught features. Through comprehensive training, tutorials, and ongoing support, companies like Adobe can ensure their customers are well-equipped to maximize investments, leading to higher retention and growth opportunities.

Adding customer training to your marketing strategy is also an excellent way to build strong relationships with your target audience. You can empower your customer base to become more knowledgeable about your products or services through various educational initiatives, such as informative blog posts, tutorials, webinars, or personalized support.

💁🏻 Customer Training Best Practices: 7 Practical Tips for Optimal Results

This, in turn, fosters customer loyalty and encourages word-of-mouth marketing.

Businesses employing customer education report a significant reduction in customer attrition rates by 63%, indicating enhanced loyalty.

Furthermore, I’ve noticed that solid customer education has helped brands differentiate themselves from competitors. By effectively communicating the value and advantages of an offer, you can position your brands (and teams) as industry experts and trusted advisors.

Hence, companies are increasingly adopting digital educational platforms, making learning more accessible and flexible. The global eLearning market is expected to hit $400 billion by 2026, highlighting the growing demand for online education and training solutions.

Key Customer Education Statistics

Next are some of the up-and-coming trends and benefits of customer education that will shed light on how well-implemented learning management systems (LMSs) can significantly impact customer satisfaction and reduce churn rates.

Influence on Retention and Engagement

Organizations that are highly focused on customers experience 51% better customer retention than those that are less customer-centric. According to Salesforce, nearly 90% of buyers say that a company’s experience is just as important as its products or services.

Part of that experience? Customer education. Every step of the way.

Engaged customers bring a 23% higher share of wallet growth than the average buyer.

According to the Technology & Services Industry Association, 68% of respondents say they use products more frequently after training, and 56% use more product features than without training. Improvements in customer experience strategies resulted in 84% of companies seeing a rise in revenue and 79% achieving cost savings.

And there are diverse factors contributing to these results:

Impact of Customer Education on Business Growth

Help resources significantly reduce support tickets by enabling customers to solve issues independently, saving costs, and improving productivity.

Lokalise’s launch of its online academy on LearnWorlds underscores this impact. Initially facing a gap in localization education resources, Lokalise created 32 courses and attracted over 2,000 active learners.

The platform’s user-friendly features and strong community-building capabilities helped establish Lokalise as a leader in the localization field. This investment in educational resources boosted the company’s visibility and positioned it as a go-to expert, advancing its market presence and business growth.

Expanding reach and enhancing market authority is another key effect you can expect.

Codefresh’s GitOps certification program exemplifies this. Initially aiming for 1,000 learners, Codefresh quickly exceeded expectations, enrolling over 20,000 students. The platform’s ease of use and robust analytics capabilities allowed Codefresh to create 9 courses and integrate seamlessly with existing tools efficiently.

This enrollment growth established Codefresh as a leading authority in GitOps and converted learners into potential customers for their enterprise products, significantly boosting their market presence and sales opportunities.

Customer Education Strategies & Results

Now that you have a better grasp of what you can achieve through improved customer education efforts, let me walk you through three simple strategies you can implement straight away:

Build Online courses

Two-thirds of businesses use a learning management system to provide customer training. Develop comprehensive online courses to create structured learning paths that cover all aspects of your product or service.

Use platforms like LearnWorlds to design interactive, engaging content that captures learners’ interest. Offering certification programs can further validate customers’ skills and knowledge, enhancing their commitment and fostering advocacy for your brand.

Ensure your courses are mobile-friendly and accessible to accommodate diverse learning styles and schedules. Emphasize ongoing education by incorporating interactive elements like gamification—such as quizzes, badges, and leaderboards—to make learning more engaging and rewarding.

This approach helps maintain learners’ motivation and keeps them updated with the latest information.

Example:
Rajvir Singh, Founder of Code and Compile, shares highly interactive courses with resources and assessments. Using LearnWorlds’ robust features, Rajvir has achieved a monthly revenue of $2,000. With over 8,000 learners enrolled in Code and Compile courses, he is on a promising trajectory for success.

Specialized courses on the Code and Compile website

Conduct webinars and live events

Host live webinars to facilitate real-time interactions and address questions, creating an opportunity for dynamic discussions and immediate feedback. This format fosters engagement and allows for spontaneous exchanges that enhance the learning experience.

Record and archive these webinars to make them available on-demand, broadening their reach and serving as a valuable resource for those who couldn’t attend the live sessions.

Additionally, featuring industry experts or product specialists can provide valuable insights and bolster the credibility of your training content.

Example:
Unblinded Mastery achieved a 150% YoY growth with the help of live events and online courses. Of 1,800 people who registered for a live event, 1,500 attended and immediately enrolled in the mastery program.

Within just seven days, Unblinded Mastery developed its course content, filmed all the videos, and launched its core training program using LearnWorlds. Remarkably, the team attracted major clients and achieved high growth without advertising.

Create customer support content

Build a comprehensive knowledge base that includes detailed articles, FAQs, and how-to guides, allowing customers to access self-service support whenever needed. This resource provides a centralized place for users to find answers and resolve issues independently, enhancing their overall experience.

85% of consumers are more confident in their purchasing decisions after watching a video, which enhances their decision-making and boosts satisfaction. I always recommend producing video tutorials visually demonstrating features, troubleshooting steps, and best practices.

Such videos make complex information easier to understand and follow. To further support users, build community forums where they can ask questions, share experiences, and assist one another, promoting peer-to-peer learning and reducing the overall support workload.

Example:
Here are a couple of videos we produced during my time at Paymo, a project management SaaS:

Support video examples tackling diverse product use cases

It’s important to remember these were never stand-alone videos since we wanted to use them at different stages of the customer lifecycle. They were part of our help center articles and we promoted them on your social media channels as well as through in-app pop-ups targeting new customers.

All three strategies are effective and can easily be integrated into your business goals should you choose to invest in customer education. That said, it’s essential to stay up-to-date with current trends and industry demands at every step of the way.

Customer Education Research Findings

The 2022 Customer Education Council Report that CustomerEducation.org led presented several interesting insights into customer education.

Over 200 customer education professionals participated in the study, which revealed valuable data on many fronts, including organizational structure, CEd partner teams, CEd program audiences, program objectives, budgets, and challenges.

Here is the valuable information in a nutshell:

This report highlights the growing importance of customer education across organizations. While many teams face challenges like securing resources and proving ROI, they remain focused on driving key objectives such as product onboarding, reducing churn, and improving business outcomes.

💁🏻 Product Training for Customers: A Complete Guide

With considerable investment in these programs and a mix of monetization approaches, the findings suggest that customer education will continue to play a pivotal role in enhancing the overall customer experience in the long term.

Next Steps: Ready to Invest in Customer Education?

Understanding these educating customers statistics will help you drive business success. By equipping customers with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions and fully utilize your products or services, you boost adoption rates, enhance loyalty, and reduce customer support costs.

Investing in comprehensive educational initiatives—such as online courses, webinars, and detailed customer support content—can lead to significant long-term benefits, including increased revenue and market authority enablement.

Companies like Lokalise and Codefresh have already demonstrated the impact of well-executed education strategies on business growth and customer engagement. To harness even greater benefits for your business, LearnWorlds offers powerful tools for course creation, analytics, and interactive learning that help customer education teams build and scale customer training programs.

Ready to speed up your customer education game? Start your free trial with LearnWorlds and see how it can help you engage and retain customers.

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