Online Customer Education: Mistakes You Should Avoid
One of the reasons is that they don’t see its value as you do. To show your product to its best, you need to teach your customers why it’s so great. If you ever tried it, you know that it’s harder than it seems. Let’s see what mistakes can ruin your customer education efforts and try to avoid them.
A Gap Between Business And Educational Goals
Your customer education can’t be purposeless. It aims to improve your business, so you need to ask yourself how exactly it can be done. You must carefully select which tools you will use at each stage of the customer journey. For instance:
- if you want to reduce customer acquisition costs, you may record a video demo and incorporate a special form into your website. For example," Get a Live Demo" so that your client could ask for it and get the initial idea of your product;
- if you want to make your customer support cost-effective and time-saving, you may educate your customers with a knowledge base and FAQ section at your website.
Lack Of Customer Education Strategy
To make your customer education more focused, you need a long-term strategy to put it into life. Otherwise, it will be a waste of your money and time. To avoid it you need to:
- determine your business and educational goals and align them with each other;
- assess your current state of customer education;
- define which metrics you will use to measure your success;
- create your step-by-step journey to your set up goals.
Neglecting Metrics And KPIs
Without specific metrics and KPIs, you won’t have a clear picture of which parts of your customer education need improvement. So, before initiating any changes, you need to decide how you will measure whether you’ve succeeded or failed. As for metrics, you may measure engagement rate to know how eagerly your learners consume your content.
The main KPIs may be the following:
- customer churn;
- customer life time value;
- Net Promoter Score.
Wrong Choice Of Customer Education Tools
You may deliver your customer education in various ways. What matters here is what type of customers you have, what is their level of expertise in your product, and what stage of customer journey they are at now.
Type Of Customers
Your customers may be divided into various groups. They may be introverts or extroverts according to their nature. Or they may belong to different levels: from primary adopters of your product and to advanced users, curious about some new features which your product may have. So, depending on it, you may offer them different ways to learn about your product. For instance:
- extroverts would appreciate more personal calls, live demos, and various educational chats where they could exchange their experience with other learners and ask advice from mentors;
- introverts would opt for knowledge bases, eBooks, white papers, etc.;
- such systems as Learning Management Systems and Academies may fit both types, as they are intended for self-education and comprise some interactive elements as well.
Level Of Product Expertise
Adapt your content to your customer’s level. Your customer may be either an early or an advanced adopter of your product, so you will need to create different types of content for such different users. As if you tell a primary user of some advanced features of your product first, it may result in customer churn. For instance, you may create the courses with different levels of difficulty, like AcademyOcean did, and thus your customers, depending on their level, may choose the course they need. So depending on their level, they may choose the course they need.
Customer Journey Stage
Proper aligning educational tools for the stages of the customer journey, may boost the efficiency of your clients' education. Think over all the problems which your customer may experience at each of the stages interacting with your product and select proper tools to solve them. For instance:
- at the responsive stage, your customer support informs you what your clients ask most often, and you teach them with knowledge bases and FAQs;
- at the proactive stage, you know your customers better and may offer them educational videos and webinars tailor-made according to their demands;
- at the scaling stage, you structure your content or even make a self-paced educational course as in an LMS or academies created by Hubspot;
- at the optimizing stage, you track the efficiency of your customer education, discover its weak points, and decide how to improve it. One of the best tools here can be academies which offer quiz scores, tracking of stages of completion of the course, and even learner churn.
Conclusion
Customer education, if appropriately organized, may give your company a powerful boost at all levels. A deeper understanding of the benefits of your product results in its faster adoption and more natural brand loyalty formation in the future. As there are no better advocates than grateful customers empowered with knowledge.
