Are you ready to hop out of the fishbowl and make some real changes to your customer education strategy? Famous media critic Marshall McLuhan once said, “we don’t know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn’t a fish.” If your customer education offering needs an overhaul, it can be hard to know the full scope of the project unless you look beyond what’s working in your customers’ current learning environment.
As a CSM, you might:
- Be an expert on your manual customer education processes, but struggle to keep up with competitors.
- Make the most of your legacy LMS, but the system hasn’t kept up with reporting, AI, personalization, and gamification features.
- Want to delight your customers but are unsure if there is an ROI for innovations such as gamification and social learning.
When the technology is new to you, the benefits of implementing new customer education strategies can feel abstract. What can help is to map out the challenges and changing needs of your end user. Modern learners are craving engaging, multimedia, and efficient content that can support their individual journey through using your product. They want to be able to personalize their experience for accessibility, learning styles, career paths, and more to modify their experience at every step of the way.
To start identifying where you can modernize your strategy, identify your customers’ major pain points and what innovations already exist to solve for them.
1. Your customers are lost in a maze of content
Imagine that one of your customers has completed automated onboarding steps and returns to your platform every few months. Each time they log on, they breathe a big sigh in anticipation of seeking out the content they need. They wonder, “will I need to search on Google to get my answer? Is the customer base big enough to find what I need from an online forum like Reddit? What about YouTube?”
If your customer analytics indicate low engagement with your learning content and result in unmanageable support requests, it might be time to build a self-service ecosystem. A strategic learning system can help you to shape these learning paths by using the user's profile, interests, subscription model, and other details to personalize their experience when they revisit your customer education content.
Here are common goals for organizing customer education content and how to meet those goals:
- Relevant onboarding experiences: Lower drop-off rates by addressing your customers needs as soon as they log with an auto-generated and personalized onboarding process based on their profile.
- Offer customizable dashboards: Empower your customer to be self-sufficient with content they want to learn, refer to in the future, or reference regularly.
- Modernize content delivery: Appeal to the modern learner with customer education content for different customer preferences, learning styles, and device types.
- Boost customer retention: Gamification tools such as leaderboards and completion awards can boost motivation, incentivize learners, and foster healthy competition among employees.
- Identify gaps in customer success: Analytics tools now offer expanded options to track and share insights into customer learning patterns, progress, and performance, making data-driven decision-making easier and enabling targeted improvements in course design and content.
Learn the secret sauce to growing your customer base
2. Customer support and education are siloed
Have you noticed that when you interact with a customer chat support bot to get help with a purchase, you’re recommended relevant articles before you’re connected with an agent? Integrating customer education content with an AI chatbot can be game-changing for reducing resolution times by automatically generating suggested content for users. This leaves more time for complex customer tickets and minimizes the touchpoints needed to get the right information quickly.
You can connect customers with relevant content faster, by:
- Analyzing customer feedback: Use analytics tools to instantly analyze customer support feedbackand identify patterns or common issues. These insights help your team to create new content or learning pathways that will support your customer’s needs.
- Suggesting relevant content: Analyze learner behavior, preferences, and performance to create tailored learning paths, ensuring that customers receive the most relevant and appropriate content based on their unique needs and progress.
- Identifying success metrics: Find potential knowledge gaps or areas of confusion within your learning content, adjust course materials accordingly, and provide targeted support to ensure customers fully comprehend the subject matter.
3. Your customer education engagement rate is low
In some cases, a low customer education engagement rate can be a sign that your product experience is exceptional — but it always signals a missed opportunity. An expansive customer education strategy can drastically increase the lifetime value of each customer and save money on support, demand marketing, and more. In fact, attracting a new customer will cost you five times more than trying to keep an existing one. By nurturing existing customers to feel valued and supported in their learning journey. you can increase their likelihood of developing a strong sense of brand loyalty.
Here’s how to boost customer engagement and loyalty with your brand:
- Increase customer lifetime value: Customer preferences and interests, organizations can identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling relevant products or services, driving incremental revenue and growth.
- Embed empathy into alerts and prompts: Although it's important to be informative, customers will appreciate a communication style that acknowledges waiting times, server issues, and other pain points.
- Incentivize engagement: Offer personalized rewards and incentives based on customer performance, preferences, and progress, reinforcing their commitment to and enthusiasm for your brand.
- Measure customer engagement: Customer reports and analytics enable you to identify opportunities to re-engage customers in products and services or introduce them to new offerings.
- Inspire brand advocacy: An engaged customer is an industry peer ready to recommend your product or service. With engagement features, you’ll expand your market reach across diverse industries, increase brand awareness, and establish your organization as an industry thought leader.
Ready to start planning? Download the Fostering customer success: Enhance customer training with an extended enterprise LMS eBook to start the conversation.
4. Your customer service response time is too high
It’s increasingly important for organizations to merge individual arms of customer education into one strategic learning system. To stay competitive and nurture customer satisfaction, reducing the barriers for customers to adopt your platform will be essential. Ideally, customer success expert and VP of Customer Experience at ChurnZero Lukas Alexander stresses the importance of adopting a proactive customer support mindset where you, “continuously build on the positive behaviors that make customers successful.”
There are several ways to reduce your support tickets:
- Multi-channel customer education: If your customer base is growing fast, your frontline customer service team might be overloaded with tickets. By building new and more relevant learning paths you can accommodate an increasing number of customers without compromising their product experience.
- Continuous compliance and innovation: To stay ahead of competitors and maintain a strong market position, make sure your team knows what they need to do to expand your customer education offerings quickly and securely.
- Integrate your LMS with other platforms: A big part of scaling your customer strategy is about revisiting your team’s workflows to become more responsive to changing customer needs. Integrations can improve global collaboration, data accuracy, and lead to better decision-making overall.
Imagine that your Salesforce data was integrated with your LMS. How much time would this save your team?
5. Global customers are feeling left out
As a CSM, you might be looking for new ways to strengthen your customer retention and be ready to scale with the rest of your organization. In the event of a market expansion program, your department could become critical to your organization’s ability to reach new audiences and serve a diverse range of customers.
Try these two ways of reaching more audiences:
- Expand your language support: Consider implementing automatic translation for customers with different language preferences and to be attuned to different cultural contexts.
- Offer language-specific courses: Scale your employee learning program by purchasing pre-built courses that support your customer’s local compliance needs, gives them tips for success, and other topics that will engage them with your brand’s LMS.
Learn about the difference between off-the-shelf, DIY and custom content
6. Your IT team is nervous about introducing new data processes
It’s a burgeoning predicament— your sales and analytics teams want access to every bit of customer data, but your IT team would suffer the consequences if their data were compromised. And if you want to integrate your Salesforce or other CRM tool with an LMS, you’ll need a trusted LMS partner to ensure you maintain compliance standards.
Keep your customers’ data safe and secure with:
- Risk assessment and mitigation: When integrating your platform with a new software and workflow, it’s critical to find an LMS platform partner that is knowledgeable about compliance standards and can support your IT team throughout the process.
- Privacy compliance: Data privacy regulations are constantly evolving, so it’s important to ensure ongoing compliance and customer trust with a trusted LMS partner.
Share 5 key eLearning platform security components with your IT team
7. Customers want to learn from your product's community
Let your customer's passion for your product do the work for you. Modern learners crave interaction with their peers to address their industry’s greatest pain points. They need to adapt quickly, and colleagues and industry peers can reduce the time to get access to relevant information. Although you’ve spent a lot of time creating a robust customer education offering, fostering community around your customer product is critical for informing their safety, career growth, industry best practices, and more.
Here's how you can help your customers connect, commiserate, and celebrate:
- Learner-matching and networking: LMS platforms can match learners based on shared interests, expertise, or learning objectives, fostering meaningful connections, and promoting collaboration on group projects and assignments.
- Content crowdsourcing: Incorporate AI-powered features to facilitate user-generated content and collaboration, allowing customers to share their insights or resources within the community, thereby expanding the available learning materials and enriching the overall learning experience.
8. Your customer education team is unprepared for AI-driven learning
As AI continues to become more prevalent in the way we organize, create, and facilitate customer education, your team must prepare for further disruptions and opportunities within customer education. Embracing the potential of AI-driven innovations can ensure the ongoing success of your customer-focused learning initiatives:
- Continuous technology monitoring: It’s critical to stay informed about emerging AI technologies, trends, and developments, including government guidance such as the AI Bill of Rights, as recommended by AI scientist Dr. Nikki Mirghafori on the Return on Intelligence podcast. This will empower your organization to adapt and integrate new AI features as they become available.
- Invest in AI training: Prioritize training and professional development for your team members, ensuring that they possess up-to-date knowledge about AI technologies and their potential applications in your customer education strategy.
- Collaborate and consult with AI experts: Establish partnerships with AI thought leaders, and researchers to keep your customer education offering on the cutting edge of AI-driven learning.
9. Your customer education isn’t integrated with marketing
Does your customer education strategy include promoting product upgrades, subscription tiers, and add-ons? Integrating your marketing eCommerce team with customer education can transform a customer retention plan into a revenue-generating engine, streamline sales processes across the customer lifecycle, and provide valuable insights that maximize revenue generation: Here's how you can collaborate with marketing:
- Personalized product recommendations: Tailored product recommendations, increasing the likelihood of cross-selling and upselling opportunities. You can send regular reports to marketing on customer preferences and behaviors right from your LMS platform.
- Predictive sales analytics: AI-driven data analysis can provide predictive insights into customer behaviors and product trends, enabling your organization to make data-driven decisions about inventory management, pricing strategies, and marketing campaigns.
- Seamless payment integration: Integrating AI technologies within your LMS can help simplify payment processing, providing customers with seamless and secure payment options, enhancing their overall experience, and engendering trust in your eCommerce platform.
Share more with your eCommerce team
10. Outdated sales and partner training
We recommend that your customer education strategy include a plan to integrate a sales and partner learning portal with relevant training and insights. Equipping your sales and partner teams with timely and thorough customer training is essential to a customer education strategy. Sometimes your sales representatives are the first point of contact for information on product adoption learning curves or product updates. An informed sales team instills confidence in your leads and customers that their teams will be just as informed during at point-of-purchase, during implementation, and beyond.
Update training for sales and partners with:
- Department-specific learning paths: An AI-powered LMS can deliver customized training experiences that cater to the unique needs and expertise levels of sales teams and partner organizations through adaptive learning paths and personalized content recommendations.
- Evaluate the quality of training: Utilize AI-generated reports and analytics to monitor and evaluate the progress and performance of all participants within your sales and partner training programs, facilitating targeted improvements and informed decision-making.
- Inspire collaboration between sales and partners: Encourage team collaboration and problem-solving by integrating AI-driven social learning features within your sales and partner training initiatives, such as group projects, discussion forums, and virtual workshops.
Developing a business case
With 17% of customers willing to spend more money for a good experience, investing in customer education will improve your revenue, customer lifetime value, and overall career satisfaction. Impactful customer education starts with looking at the lifecycle of your customer to identify your strengths, areas for improvement, and then creating the infrastructure to turn loyal customers into your brand’s advocates. Today, this means leveraging tools to nurture each phase of the customer lifecycle. From automated learning paths to content creation and even gamification, appealing to the modern learner is made easier with efficient and inspiring tools to build your customer base.
