What is customer education?
You probably got here because you asked yourself what customer education is, or because you were looking for a better definition of the topic.
Customer education is about accelerating your customer's learning so they find more and more value in your product or service. This is done by fostering new knowledge, encouraging specific behaviors or promoting attitude change.
We can't talk about what customer education is without also talking about why it's important to think about it.
From a practical, customer-facing point of view, the customer education area aims to increase your customers' renewal rate, likelihood to recommend and average amount paid. From a broader point of view, a well-implemented customer education program will position you as a market leader and attract new customers.
Beyond content marketing, a customer education team builds on educational concepts. In other words, it cares about making the customer learn something, not just repeat a series of steps for the moment, as many of those blog posts do.
What makes up customer education?
Let's explore each of the three functions of customer education: fostering new knowledge, encouraging specific behaviors or promoting attitude change.
When we talk about promoting attitude change, we're addressing the purest concept of attitude: what a person thinks about a subject.
If you work with customers, you know: often they aren't willing to try new features or experiment. A customer education strategy will promote attitude change by drafting a plan that reinforces the same message.
Encouraging specific behaviors refers to adopting market best practices.
While a blog focused on inbound marketing strategies will report ten disconnected cases about how to use the product, an aligned customer education strategy will think about how to align each of those ten cases with a larger purpose, whether that's reflection or the adoption of certain features or behaviors when using the platform.
Finally, fostering new knowledge means helping the customer understand why something works the way it does.
While an instructional tutorial will teach you how to create an ad on Facebook Ads, with educational content your customer will also master the logic behind it. That way, even if the platform changes, the customer retains the knowledge and can reproduce it alone, and even combine strategies, making your solution part of something bigger.
So, the three pillars of good customer education are PAM: plan an educational program, align the strategy and master the logic.
Expanding on the concept of customer education
- Customer education is not a platform tutorial. But it is also that.
- Customer education is not onboarding. But it is also that.
- Customer education is not an LMS. But it is also that.
- Customer education is not a knowledge base. But it is also that.
Customer education is about reducing the barriers that exist for a customer, whether a specific user or an account as a whole, to find value in your product or service, OR to see more value, so that they don't abandon your product and so that they grow the account, respectively.
That's why it is much more strategic than any one of those things alone.
It's important to stress that, although I've made some comparisons between an inbound marketing strategy and what customer education is, I'm in no way trying to belittle marketing. On the contrary, good marketers end up using instructional design strategies in their content, even without knowing it.
The thing is, because they are focused (even pressured) only on generating leads and keeping time on page, they end up not looking at the big picture and lack formal training in instructional design. That's a very common mistake.
The most common mistake when implementing customer education in your company
With the "rise" of the term customer education, many professionals have been looking for instructional design content, believing that customer education is content marketing with education techniques. Yes, it can be, but there are some catches.
First, what is instructional design? In short, it's a field that focuses on improving the teaching and learning process. It's like the engineering of education. An instructional designer thinks: what is my learner's goal? What is the best way to deliver this content?
A good instructional designer understands the most diverse theories of education and designs (that's why they're a designer) the most appropriate content to foster that learning. Within constraints, of course. Those barriers can be budget, time, platform and so on.
The designer looks at the teacher, the learner, the content and the technologies, connecting them all.
And what's the problem with reading up on instructional design theories?
You will definitely benefit from learning about instructional design on your journey to understanding what customer education is and how to implement it in your company.
The problems I see people falling victim to are:
- Most of the reading is outdated and doesn't incorporate more recent technologies;
- It doesn't focus on customer education but on traditional teaching;
- In the end, you come away knowing a lot of new terms, but in practice your day-to-day changes very little.
What do companies do when they get frustrated? They hire a training instructor or an instructional designer from the market, one with years of experience. It's a way of feeling safe that at least someone knows what they're doing.
What is customer education: think about objectives first
I've already talked about this at my company Poly Studio in how to become an online teacher, but before you go off learning about instructional design, focus on what your goals are as a company and what your customer's pain points are.
If you're in the startup world, this is already a mantra repeated many times. Solve your customer's pain. In this case, swap customer for learner.
What does your company expect to get from customer education and, perhaps even more important, what does your customer need to learn?
The goal of this first post was to start a discussion on the topic and help a wide range of professionals, from instructional designers to HR, enablement and marketing professionals and business owners, understand what customer education is and how to implement it in their companies!
If you want tips on how to become a better teacher, the Poly Studio blog is the way to go!
