How To Ensure Complete Customer Success With Customer Education

To deliver winning customer outcomes at scale, you need to improve product adoption, reduce customer churn, and drive account expansions with best-in-class predictive insights and prescriptive guidance. This blog is for you if you believe in providing value and think that customer success is more of a calling than just a job.

In this article, we explain how to provide trusted, top-rated customer success with a detailed customer education program that can help clients besides creating a fulfilling and positive experience for all customer-facing teams.

What constitutes customer success?

Customer success professionals aim to ensure the successful resolution of customer issues through independent and efficient product or service usage. A successful demonstration of product usage and thorough education of the customer on how to use the product positively influences the customer’s life cycle. So, let us dive deep to understand what constitutes the perfect customer education program and how it can help deliver customer success.

Customer education requires foresight and clear communication

Successful customer education requires collaboration with marketing, product, sales, and support teams and good communication with customers and process teams. Good communication involves repetition—keep this in mind while assisting your customers throughout their life cycles.

One way to think of marketing customer success today is as a healthy mixture of expertise and education. For that, you need to:

• Talk to customers
• Find ways to help them
• Foresee bottlenecks or obstacles in the customer lifecycle
• Be helpful, engaging, and entertaining
• Create a two-way conversation

A successful customer education program needs three inputs:

Good customer data and intelligence inputs: Customer golden record, customer health score, and data regarding customer segments.

Inputs from your product and customer success teams: These can be statistics and data regarding product usage, user behavior, and team performance.

A healthy dose of predictive intelligence: These can be data regarding churn risk, expansion opportunities, and revenue forecast.

A good customer program can be delivered through customer case studies, articles and blogs, videos and recorded screen captures, and webinars, depending on your business goals, demographics, geographics, buyer behavior, purchase history, and more. The outcomes should be focused on enhancing your customers’ knowledge about your product or service to help them achieve value faster and better scale user growth.

10 steps to create a successful customer education program

A well-designed customer education program is a powerful tool for building loyalty and driving product adoption. Here are ten actionable steps to help you create a program that truly makes an impact.

1. Thoroughly analyze your customer portfolio

2. Create an ideal customer profile

3. Create a learning curve with customized learning plans

4. Create a flexible learning program that has everything you need to quickly set up, launch, and scale your customer education programs and courses

5. Set accurate customer expectations

6. Build a customer success map

7. Deliver solutions that immediately resolve the customer’s lingering problems

8. Create a robust knowledge base—it helps your customers and employees

9. Close the loop by collecting customer feedback and working on it

10. Identify any potential learning gaps and close them with follow-up consultation

Building your value-driven program for ultimate customer success

Let us look at the below steps a little more closely to create a valuable customer education program.

1. Creating a customer profile

Thoroughly analyze your customer portfolio and build your customer intelligence data through a unified 360-degree perspective. Determine customer profitability and growth potential. Segment customers. Determine the outcomes customers realized. Identify the causes of churn and segment your churned customers. Identify the reasons for churn and where in the customer journey it is caused. Analyze commonalities within various customer groups and focus on driving a shared value or reaching a common goal.

2. Creating a customer journey map

Discovering your customers’ goals and determining their starting points is the only way to create effective customer education programs. Next, define all the intermediate goals, the tasks to complete/problems to solve, and the inputs required for your customers’ transformation.

3. Create a learning curve with customized learning plans

Take stock of your customer’s objectives and see if your brand can fulfill them. If yes, you should align your business, departmental, and team goals to your customer’s goals to achieve customer success.

4. Deliver your promise to customers

To take your customers to the top, you need a mix of education, training, and consulting services, besides a top-quality product and excellent service delivery systems.

8 tips to ensure flawless service delivery

Delivering a flawless experience is the ultimate goal for any service-oriented business. Following these key tips can help you exceed customer expectations and ensure every interaction is a success.

• Invest in employee training; empower employees with the right tools
• Multichannel support communicates with clients—have a solid strategy for social media
• Leverage conversation bots to keep your business online 24/7
• Automate your business processes
• Use thoughtful responses to reach out to customers
• Use content templates for faster messaging
• Leverage AI to reduce workload and improve efficiency
• Offer self-service support

Create a robust knowledge base

The knowledge base embedded in the helpdesk software is one of the most critical resources for improving support and delivering a better customer experience.

The knowledge base helps establish your authority as an expert on any topic or information related to products/services. In addition, it serves as an information management system that assists in the onboarding of new customers as well as helps in their decision-making process.

A consolidated knowledge hub within your helpdesk reduces your agents’ turnaround time (TAT) and boosts team efficiency. In addition, the customer satisfaction scores soar as your agents give accurate suggestions quickly.

Optimize content creation; compile, create, and distribute resources

The best customer education strategies bring sales, marketing, and services teams together. Break down silos and encourage clear communication and information sharing. This should help you optimize the content creation process. Gather knowledge from multiple sources, vet them, and offer value in your final content. Your content should support and help achieve desired outcomes.

Here is a breakdown of the educational content you should offer your customers during various stages of their journey cycle.

1. The Awareness Stage is when customers become aware of their pain/problem. At this stage, you want to offer prescriptive guidance to your customer, akin to hand-holding them and prepping them at the beginning of the journey lifecycle. Suitable content for awareness stage could be playbooks, demonstrations, successful task completion, performance data of various business processes, data from touchpoints, and customer experience optimization efforts.
2. The Consideration Stage is when the customer becomes aware of a solution to their problem. Again, the answer could be in various forms—the customer has to choose what is right. Then, you must nudge the customer in the right direction to make the right decision. Suitable content for the consideration stage could be playbooks, brand campaigns or customer education drives, customer surveys, or customized alerts at various points of the journey lifecycle. This is where the customer sometimes signs up for the trial offers.
3. The Decision Stage is when the customer becomes aware of all the solution providers to his existing problem. The customer is aware of their desired outcome and is trying to decide who the best solution provider is. This is the stage where the customer’s trial period has ended, and now they have to choose a brand’s subscription that gives them value. This is also the crucial period when customer churn happens. The effort for customer success teams at this stage should be customer retention and account expansion. Freebies, bonus content, free training, product utilization, and customer success camps could be suitable content for the decision stage.

Engagement is key to successful customer education

Whatever your customer education strategy, you must ensure you give your customers all the information they may require before they sign in and become users. No customers are users from the start. You need to engage them meaningfully, promise them value, and convert them into users of your product. It would help if you kept your customer education strategy fresh and engaging without hampering their schedule. Give your customers all the information they need and watch them fall in love with your brand.

Establish two-way interaction

Interacting in today’s increasingly connected work environment is easier than ever, but achieving productive, value-creating collaboration is not. Interactions between your customer and internal teams can be for various reasons, like complex decision-making, dealing with uncertain situations, and innovative solution meetings where you identify areas to innovate your product or service for your customers—question and answer sessions. The purpose of these interactions is to share information, coordinate actions, crowdsource ideas, and help in the complex decision-making for customers, besides creating awareness of any new information and concerns and questions addressed.

Make customer success your top priority; switch to ThinkOwl today. When you use ThinkOwl, our Owlsome team accompanies you from the beginning to give you a perfect start. You and your team will receive product and sales-specific support, both comprehensive and professional. Leverage your business’s potential with ThinkOwl! Sign up today for a 30-day free trial.