How Can You Improve Customer Education? 5 Common Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Implementing a customer education program is challenging. And as we’ll discuss, these challenges might appear before the implementation phase. Or, despite your best efforts, things might not go as planned, and your program may not bring the results you expected.

A school of thought says it’s best to prepare for every eventuality rather than be caught off guard – when it comes to business, we definitely agree.

In this post, we won’t explore a dystopian world where everything is doomed. But, we will examine some mistakes you might make and unfavorable scenarios you might encounter when deploying customer training, offering you solutions for each one of them!

Let’s see 5 common issues to fix for an effective customer education strategy.

5 Mistakes to Fix In Your Customer Education Program

We’ve said before that customer education is not for large businesses only – it’s the kind of business you’re in that determines whether you need to offer a customer education program, not the size.

For example, customer training is very common in the SaaS industry. If you’re not sure about whether you need to educate customers or not, read our article on 10 warning signs you need a customer education program.

If you’re planning to offer customer training, or if you already offer, watch out for the following 5 mistakes that might jeopardize the effectiveness of your program!

This is one of the most common mistakes – not using your budget and available resources efficiently. But even if you’re working with limited budget and resources, you can still offer an effective customer education program with real impact on your business.

The solution:

• Offer low-touch onboarding. One solution when trying to control your spending or without a dedicated customer education team is to prioritize must-have training material that customers can access on their own. Examples include a knowledge base with support articles, recorded video tutorials, and emails with tips.
• Get buy-in from stakeholders for an LMS. Despite the initial investment, an LMS will pay off and help you overcome common customer onboarding challenges as it will allow you to streamline, monitor, and update your training easily – plus, it’s a scalable solution that can grow with you.

Tip: Choose an affordable LMS with AI capabilities, like LearnWorlds, to repurpose proprietary customer education content you already have into more digestible formats for your target audience. This will minimize cost and development time.

A customer education program facilitates the customer journey and is closely linked to business goals. Ultimately, improving the customer journey and customer experience aims to foster business growth and financial stability.

So, how can you ensure business and customer education goals are aligned?

The solution:

• Identify your customer training needs. Launch exit surveys and focus groups and use product analytics tools to identify areas for improvement where customer education could help. For example, track user behavior when using your product. Do they quit or go black and forth when using a particular feature? This means they can’t figure out how to use it, so you need to assist.
• Then, use the SMART methodology to keep you focused when setting your goals. Here’s how SMART works:

Specific: Your goals should be narrow and concise. For example, the goal to “improve the customer experience” is way too broad. The goal to “improve feature adoption rate” is specific – and it will become even more specific as you add the rest of the parameters below.

Measurable: You should be able to track your goal against a business KPI and metrics. Using the example above, set a desired rate, eg., “by 5%”.

Attainable: The goal should be within reach. Aiming to double or triple feature adoption sounds like a toll order. Increasing by 5% is reasonable and realistic.

Relevant: The goal should be within the scope/context of the training. For example, you can set a goal to reduce incoming tickets – this is something you can achieve through customer education. However, you can’t set a goal to improve your customer support’s communication skills. For this, you need to deploy soft skills training addressed to your customer support team.

Timebound: Set a timeframe for achieving your goal – this will also serve as a milestone for monitoring its progress. Usually, allowing for a few months to pass is a timeframe that gives the program enough time to bring some initial results. Even if your timeframe is wider, you should monitor training impact on a regular basis to catch problems early on.

Having a product with rich functionalities and use cases means you must update your knowledge base regularly as you release new features.

The solution:

• Use AI to assist with content creation. Although AI can’t substitute a subject matter expert in customer education, it can accelerate content creation, editing & proofreading, repurposing, and even translation.
• Notify customers via email. Keep customers in the loop via email to ensure they do not miss not just the instructions but the new feature itself! Let them know that while you’re working on updating your knowledge base, they can contact your customer support team, and offer them quick tips.

Not measuring the impact of customer training can lead to missed opportunities for improvement, gaps in training, and inability to demonstrate the program’s value to stakeholders. So here you have another “riddle” to solve: how do you measure the effectiveness of your customer training program?

The solution:

• Pre- and post-training assessments: Create quizzes and self-assessments to measure learners’ knowledge before and after the training. If you want to offer a certificate, create a final exam as well.
• Product analytics tools. Use product analytics tools to monitor user behavior and interaction with your product. After the training, they should be able to navigate the product faster.
• LMS reports. One more reason to deploy customer education using a dedicated platform like an LMS (learning management system) – the data you can pull out to see how learners interact with your content. Not only that; LMSs also report on sales, so that will come in handy if you’re selling your courses.
• Customer feedback. Conduct surveys (you can include them at the end of the course or send via email, or even add simple popup questions in the product guide (like, did you find this article useful?)

So, you’ve developed training, you’ve tracked it, and the results are disappointing. Your program has failed to engage customers and has low completion rates.

Low customer engagement indicates a poor user experience. Customers don’t get the full benefit of your enablement program and, therefore, your customer education strategy fails to meet its purpose.

For instance, when customers don’t finish their onboarding, they won’t get to leverage all product features, or they’ll still run to your customer support team with requests.

On a second level, customer satisfaction will not get the boost you expected, and customer support costs will not decrease like you were aiming for. The longer the time to value, the higher the chances of customer churn.

Before anything else, ensure that the problem is not your product – a product with bugs or a deep learning curve.

The solution:

Look for alternative methods for customer training to satisfy different preferences.

• Offer a personalized onboarding process. Some clients expect more than self-paced onboarding. Schedule one-on-one calls for live walkthrough tutorials with customer success managers to ensure customers are fully engaged in the process. If possible, meet them in person as well.
• Offer self-service onboarding. Simplify things! Not everyone is up for signing up for a lengthy course. Have several on-demand resources like webinars, video tutorials, knowledge base with articles and FAQs, chatbots, wizards, etc. This will not only satisfy the differing customers’ needs and learning styles but also reduce support tickets.
• Keep the online course engaging. Microlearning modules are more engaging than long-form content. Also, use several content formats and types of content like quizzes, case studies.
• Offer incentives. A certificate is a great incentive that justifies setting a price on your customer education program. Gamification incentivizes learners by taping on their competitive nature. Even simple gamification techniques like badges can motivate them to keep up!
• Segment customers. If you have a diverse customer base, segment them per industry, use case, company size, job role, etc. Create different onboarding flows based on customer segments to address their specific pain points and needs per use case. For example, offer a simplified process for experienced users and a more detailed guide for beginners.
• Personalize communications. This is key to maintaining engagement and also enhancing customer loyalty. Generic emails are annoying. A common mistake is to send the same emails to every customer. Use the customer’s name and specific details in onboarding emails. Send targeted messages based on their segment and progress. Provide content that is relevant to the customer’s needs and interests, such as industry-specific case studies or guides.

Here’s a valuable article from one of our experts, Artemis Karadimas, Customer Success Manager at LearnWorlds: Customer Engagement Amplified: How to Create a Compelling Customer Education Experience

Your Successful Customer Education Program is Within Reach!

One of the most important initiatives you’ll ever take for your business, customer education is quintessential for a positive customer experience and has a huge impact on customer retention and business growth. It does, however, require dedication and ongoing monitoring and effort.

The right LMS is a core ingredient for an effective customer education program. LearnWorlds is a budget-friendly LMS that can meet your customer training needs, offering a full suite of features that will enable you to scale your training.

Discover LearnWorlds with a 30-day free trial now!

Further reading you might find interesting:

• The 19 Best Learning Management Systems
• SCORM 101: The Definitive Guide to Choose a SCORM Compliant LMS
• 10 Best WordPress LMS Plugins Comparison
• The Essential Guide on How to Create Cohort-Based Courses
• 10 Best WordPress LMS Plugins Comparison
• The Benefits of Mobile Learning: Unveiling Its Power and How It Works

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