For customers, the online learning process can be disorienting. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert going deeper, you need tools to guide you.
Customer education is like GPS for the customer journey. It guides users smoothly and painlessly through the initial learning curve and quickly to their aha moment. It removes roadblocks, reduces errors, and builds confidence, turning customers into sticky super users
When users feel at home, they’re empowered to go deeper and be successful faster. They also share those experiences with their social and professional circles. In no time, your power users become brand ambassadors.
Customer education matters more than ever
With 86% of companies seeing positive returns from customer education it’s become a key growth strategy for 2025. Even more compelling is that 96% of companies recoup that investment.
Those gains are a direct result of higher customer satisfaction, retention, and adoption. Customers, partners, and suppliers who’ve learned products well use them more and are more engaged. They also submit fewer support tickets, which reduces overhead costs. Over the long term, these customers are more loyal and more likely to explore advanced features. That means increased adoption and added revenue for your business.
Letting data guide the customer education process
The question is often how to start, but the answer is look to your data. At Absorb, we found that the support tickets related to training spoke volumes. This is where we could prioritize for impact and a quick customer education win.
Our L&D team had been tackling small projects to help our employees educate clients on how to use our Learning Management System. However, our ticket volumes told us we needed to do more. External clients felt unsupported with our self-help resources. Our internal support team struggled to drive efficiency and reduce costs due to our 24/7 help service.
We set ourselves the task of building Absorb Academy, a self-serve learning portal that reduced customer reliance on support services and boosted user satisfaction. Addressing our customers’ most urgent training needs would go miles to supporting our internal needs.
To identify high-impact training targets, we looked to our ticketing system, Zendesk. Support tickets pertaining to training needs signaled problem areas, where self-serve education would empower customers to troubleshoot independently. We analyzed the tickets to identify the top ten recurring issues, then we categorized them further by training question. Getting granular with the data helped us uncover trends.
Engaging internally and externally to maximize educational value
With our top issues identified, we launched two-week sprint cycles to develop targeted and relevant self-serve micro-courses covering relevant topics. To reach a multitude of learning styles, such as read/write and visual learners, we took a blended approach to content creation.
Cross-department collaborations during content production teams filled knowledge gaps and ensured the content addressed real client needs. When the courses were rolled out, we made sure our Customer Support and Client Success teams aligned around the resources so internal and external users were fully aware of the educational resources available.
Our data-driven, collaborative approach significantly moved the dial on key indicators:
- Support ticket volume: 15% reduction
- NPS scores: 14% increase
- Retention rate: 25% increase
A correlation between churn rate and training demonstrates the value of the approach. The more training a customer has on Absorb Academy, the more likely they are to keep using the portal and submit fewer support tickets.
Self-sufficient customers reduce costs
Building customer self-sufficiency reduces reliance on support teams. Something as simple as providing access to Help Desk or Knowledge Base resources directly from your platform makes a considerable difference. When customers have the tools to find answers themselves, they solve their own problems.
Developing customer education content that micro-targets your customer training needs an even stronger business impact. When customers are self-sufficient, your overhead and teams' costs drop alongside your support ticket volumes. With fewer top-level questions to answer, your customer support teams can drive more value by tackling complex customer matters or zoning in on the next strategic training target.
Customer education delivers business impact across segments
Educating customers does more than lower costs. It increases customer satisfaction. When customers have the training they need solve their own problems and delve deeper into areas that interest them, they become more confident and more loyal users. Down the road, that lasting connection to your brand comes through in customer retention, engagement and product adoption metrics.
Reducing support ticket volume is a great place to start, but customer education has arms and legs across your operations, both internal and external. The strategic, self-serve learning approach can be expanded and tailored to similar benefit for every type of customer you serve.
- New customers: Provide basic education to get them started.
- Existing customers: Introduce advanced features and reinforce deeper use.
- High-value and VIP customers: Offer specialized, tailored and exclusive insights.
- Renewal candidates: Encourage users to renew and demonstrate ROI when they do.
- Expansion candidates: Highlight additional features to support your upsell and cross-sell efforts.
Steps to starting a customer education program
With customer education proving so valuable, it makes sense to dig in now to get a jump on 2025. Identify one area that needs improvement, such as support ticket reduction, and move from there.
- Start small and targeted: Choose one key problem to address (e.g. churn, user sentiment, or support volume).
- Keep learning modules short: Use short, accessible, and tailored content that follows a targeted learning path.
- Make customer education a cross-functional effort: Bring your Customer Success, Product, and Support teams together to discuss pain points, develop content, and analyze data insights.
- Set clear and measurable targets: State what you want to improve – such as fewer support tickets – and attach a number to it.
- Quantify your results: Track your achievements to demonstrate success and maintain support.
Don’t worry that you’re starting too small. First steps taken now will have considerable impact down the road. Improvements in one area, such as shorter customer support times, exert a ripple effect on onboarding speed and customer adoption. Across-the-board improvements give a boost to gross retention rates, too, keeping the knock-on pattern in motion.
Set your GPS to customer education
Customer education is a smart business investment that drives real, measurable results. Companies are seeing the benefits of external training and scaling their efforts. The investment in both internal and external training has grown significantly, with companies allocating 39% of their training budgets to external providers and 61% to internal resources in recent years
As 2025 approaches, therefore, empowering external customers with the knowledge to use your product fully is not just beneficial – it’s essential.
Taking action now means being prepared to lead, rather than follow, in the new year. With the capabilities of an extended enterprise LMS, companies can implement and scale customer education seamlessly and provide self-service options to reduce support costs and improve retention.
Get started before the year’s out by launching or expanding a customer education program. To learn more, explore the benefits on an extended enterprise LMS by watching our webinar on Customer education strategies for improved retention.
