Who is responsible for customer education?
When we think about implementing a customer education strategy in our companies, it's common to ask who is responsible for customer education and where it should sit. And it's a very valid question: customer education can be a strategy with many ways to execute it. After all, customer education can generate new leads with content that can be distributed on the web.
It can drive greater customer adoption of the product's tools, since they'll be taught and customers will see more value. It can also mean better feedback and contact with users, helping the product team. Of course, fewer tickets for the support team, since customers will get their questions answered in a self-service model. Finally, a revenue increase from upgrades to higher plans, since the content can help them see value in other plans.
Thinking about implementing a customer education area will require you to think about your goals and, of course, how your company is organized. That is the answer to the question of who is responsible for customer education: it depends. It depends on your goal. There's no single area that will make your strategy succeed, especially if you don't know what you want to get out of it.
For this article, I'll split it into two parts. The first part will point you to the right questions to ask yourself before deciding. Then I'll talk about how customer education can be organized in different teams.
What is your goal with your customer education strategy?
At first glance, you have to go straight to the answer to the question: what do I want to generate with a customer education strategy?
If it's to build reputation or win new customers, customer education would work very well within marketing. After all, SEO and conversion optimization will be crucial. Also, the content can be used for social media, YouTube, email marketing and more. Well-written educational content designed for this purpose can be unfolded into many uses.
Now, if your goal is actually to educate your customers at scale, so you don't depend on manual onboardings and live sessions, customer education lines up very well with customer success. In fact, here in Brazil, the first customer education roles emerged for this purpose and within this area. That's why I want to open your mind further about who is responsible for customer education.
If it's to generate a new source of revenue, if you see the opportunity to offer more advanced training, I would include customer education as an operations arm. It's not uncommon for companies to offer paid courses or consulting on the side. However, now that this becomes a service to be offered, you'll probably have to build a real team here. This goes by the name of corporate services, in-company or training.
If your main goal is to drive more product adoption, customer education should consequently be the responsibility of Product. By aligning the two, you can steer your users toward adopting more features of your product or service, as well as get shorter feedback cycles. Obviously, there's a tendency toward revenue growth if you charge the user or customer for features used or if you have different plans.
For those outside the field: a feature is a capability of your product. A very common term in software. In an ERP, for example, one feature is payment scheduling. Another feature is invoice issuing, and so on.
Perfect. Now that we've seen some of the main goals, let's get into how to put the customer education strategy into practice in each area.
How to work with customer education in each area
With your goal in mind, you can reason about how to work with customer education in each area. Let's look at how we've seen and implemented each of the solutions. Keep in mind that customer education in Brazil is still quite incipient, meaning many discoveries are still being made.
Customer education within customer success
This is probably one of the first paths, and it's where I've seen it most often. Companies that haven't yet designed a customer education strategy probably already have their Customer Success Managers and reps creating content: tutorials, knowledge base articles and webinars with customers.
Now, when you place a customer education specialist within the area, you gain the benefit of creating an ecosystem that talks to itself, since the efforts are no longer isolated but integrated. This brings a very large efficiency gain, because content tends to be used more fully and updated more often.
Another clear plus is closeness to the customer, a more accurate perception of their needs and a better understanding of how the persona translates into real life. The marketing team, for example, tends to have a generic perception of the persona. CS reps have this sense much sharper.
What you must consider is how internal feedback will work: how CS professionals will report needs in an organized way to your customer education specialist. Having a CS professional playing the customer education role isn't ideal, since either they'll have too many metrics to report or they'll end up doing what they already do.
Customer education within marketing and communications
As I've said, one of the biggest benefits of placing customer education within marketing is the tendency to leverage the new sales process, in addition to education. In this format, the marketing team will mainly answer for revenue growth, whether from new sign-ups or account expansion.
I like to explain to my clients that customer education is an evolution of inbound marketing toward more educational content. As I said in another article, a good content creator applies, even unconsciously, instructional design principles and techniques. But ultimately, a professional with instructional designer qualifications will do it deliberately.
That way, by having customer education within marketing, your company will have a view very driven by leads and sales results, which is great for early-stage companies, because you "combine" two needs of the company: educating your customers and creating web content. So after creating an educational piece, marketers will think: how can I reuse this for the weekly email, how do I distribute it on social networks and use it as sales arguments?
Of course, a partnership can be set up to coordinate customer needs with the support area or customer success so the content reaches the people who need it most directly.
Customer education as a services business
Fair warning: I personally have reservations about this. The only companies I've seen make it work are already large, established companies with a good reputation in producing educational content.
Where does this need come from? The company thinks, "Okay, I'll produce high-quality content. So high that people would pay for it. The online course market is growing. I'll sell courses too and make a little money."
But what they fail to consider is the effort of selling.
Your content may be very good, but maybe you don't have the reputation yet. So an accounting consultancy now sells financial planning courses. Okay, those are related topics. But it will take people a while to recognize you as a school. Also, few companies are willing to build a new sales and marketing machine for this content-selling arm.
Yes, it will be a new line of business. You'll have to dedicate yourself as if it were almost a new company. So I personally haven't seen much success with this in the corporate world. I'm a teacher, and my online courses took 2 years to work, even though I didn't invest even 1 real.
Customer education within product
If your intention is to steer users toward constant adoption of new features, whether to retain them or expand the account, nesting customer education within Product will make a lot of sense.
The product team knows your product like no one else, and that gives a huge advantage for creating more specific, on-target content, as well as a more agile update cadence for educational materials. This is particularly useful for highly technical products, such as software.
Finally, these days educational content production cycles use agile methodologies, which can be easy to integrate into product cycles. The only downside I see is that the skill set is different between a product manager and a customer education professional. Plus, of course, if your Product team works as a silo, which is quite common.
The worst option for implementing customer education
Now I'll cover the only option I'm against when we talk about who is responsible for customer education: creating a separate area right at the start.
I've seen some startups that see the value of customer education and think about creating an Instructional Design area, mainly after learning what instructional design is. They probably believe instructional design professionals can create content and implement it in other areas on their own.
No, this is a joint effort. That's why I focused on helping you implement customer education from the inside out.
Don't hire an instructional designer to have your own team without a conscious, very strong effort to integrate them with another area. What I've seen happen is resistance, because this professional (or this team) tends to be seen by other areas as one more demand, without the real value being perceived. In fact, the value might eventually be seen, but in the end, the professionals will have their own metrics and end up looking at those.
Who is responsible for customer education?
There's no definitive answer. It will depend on your goals, and maybe you can even work in cycles: making an implementation effort in each area little by little, until they're all integrated and in sync enough for you to "detach" it and create an independent area.
For example, a 3-month sprint of customer education within Product, then within Customer Success and finishing in the Marketing team.
To get started, you'll probably have to test and place a bet. I recommend doing it with very clear metrics so you can step back, reflect and implement the next cycle more precisely.
