Optimizing Customer Success with Education Strategy for Customers Education Strategy
Reduction in churn, retention of customers Product adoption, reduced churn, and the satisfaction of customers. These are just a few of the top goals of businesses and entrepreneurs alike. The underlying theme for every one of them is
The more complex your product, the greater chances that it's not understood. If customers aren't able to comprehend the product they're unlikely to unlock its value and also get the buy-in of their colleagues.
According to a Eureka study that under-performance in service and product accounts for only 31.5% of customer churn. The factors that cause customer service to be poor, such as overselling onboarding, and poor relationship building make up 68.5 percent. Within the U.S., avoidable customer loss is costing businesses more than $136 billion per year.
Think about that briefly... Three in 10 customers are leaving due to product issues and the majority of reasons that cause churn are entirely within your reach!
What is the best solution?
The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) carried out a study this year about customer training and concluded that education could be an effective competitive differentiation. Training-trained customers are able to renew 92% more often than untrained customers Training increases self-sufficiency, reducing support requests by 87%..
In the end, customer education is the best solution to churn and it plays an important role in satisfaction of customers.
What exactly is customer education?
The process of educating your customers on the products or services you provide beginning prior to the purchase, and continues through the entire journey. This process can take many kinds, like online classes as well as blogs or knowledge bases. Customer education both supports your customers in making the right buying decisions as well as enables them to gain the most value out of the product after they decide to buy.
As a company or service provider, customer education is your opportunity to reinforce the value of your brand as you move leads through into the funnel of sales. As a prospect learns more about your product or service and appreciates its benefits and benefits, the greater chance to become an engaged client.
The reason customer education is vital
Online customer education provides an affordable solution for growing enterprises to expand their efforts for customer service without the need to employ more staff.
Educating your customers will significantly improve your sales and drastically decrease your costs for customer service. If your customers are educated in your company tools and the industry they work in, they will be significantly more likely to use the product, and eventually become powerful users. Their support tickets will decrease while their value over the long term will soar!
If they invest in customer education companies can draw competent leads, increase product adoption, and drive the success of customers. Many companies also see significantly less 1-on-1 support questions using online training courses for training their customers prior to. The 1-to-many model for training allows companies to build informative explainer videos once and use it to train their users at scale -- which helps reduce the frustration of customers, as well as churn as well as the cost of support.
How customer education impacts performance in the customer journey
A successful customer education program starts with the first interaction that continues through the entire customer journey. If that initial touch is a blog post or an online course or a person-to-person interaction, each point of contact determines the relationship your customers have with your brand and product.
By using each interaction as an opportunity to educate your customers about the value of your product, you'll have the ability to meet expectations, boost adoption and cut down on the rate of churn.
These customer interactions can be divided into three phases of customer interaction: 1) presale,) the adoption of the product, and) continual learning. Just like any touchpoint for a customer it is possible to find both chances and issues that arise at every stage that can affect satisfaction of customers. Let's look at every stage with a thorough explanation.
Stage One: Presale
The pre-sales stage is the very first contact the customer will have with your service or product that is mostly driven through marketing strategies. This is where marketing produces content that informs and informs customers about not just the benefits of your product or service but also about your business overall (and what you can do to stand out to your competitors). ).
The problem: Giving unclear information or resources at the start can create an opportunity to attract customers who are not appropriate to your service. It could lead to customers who require extensive customer support, believe they've been oversold, and increase your turnover rate as the client leaves after a few months.
Pro-tip #1: Create a customer journey map! Align your interactions to the journeys of every type of customer. Make sure that at every stage of that experience you are aware of who you are educating, what their role is, and how you can best serve their needs.
Stage Two The Products Adoption
After a sale closes, the product adoption phase of the journey commences.
This stage is usually led by the customer success management team. The goal here is to onboard customers, effectively develop and manage connections, and minimize the rate of churn through meeting the expectations set from the beginning.
The problem is that customers may not have a full understanding of your product or service from the start (due to the lack of education), they need extra support, which means extra tickets for the customer success team. Instead of solving unique problems and speeding up your customers' path to success, they instead devote hours to teaching customers how to utilize every feature of the platform.
1 to 1 onboarding is not sustainable. It's not financially efficient, but it's also bad to provide a great customer experience. this approach to onboarding is high-touch and can result in backlogs on onboarding, implementation delays, slow responses to inquiries as well as, if you're eventually forced to reduce the support offered, you will see there will be a rise in customer churn.
"Education is how we ensure our users succeed, which is the way they grow into loyal Hootsuite customers."
Third Stage: Continuous Education
The last step in the customer journey is ongoing education . This will keep your clients up-to-date with product or industry changes as well as to improve their skills with and usage of the product.
At this point, the customer support staff will be your primary source of protection for customers' inquiries. They can solve issues, answer questions quickly, and explain new functions. Our goal is to offer prompt support for customers as well as keep track of data in order to make your product better or improve support documentation.
The problem:
For customer support, the lack of understanding of the product can lead to responding to the same issues every time. This can make the volume of tickets unsustainable, leading to longer lines of waiting and unhappy customers. If you fail to deal with these issues it is possible to see an increase in sales.
Pro-tip #3: Design active online courses that are based on information from customers that address customer service and training. 80percent of the queries that companies get from customers at this time could be answered by 20 percent of the course they've created. Create your academy as the primary destination for students to go to when they have questions.
For example, Sendable, a social tools for managing media, put the most frequently asked questions from customers to an academy, and have observed a significant reduction in the amount of questions they were receiving via help.
Pro-tip #4 Use customer education to help onboarding new employees. If you've created great customer service material, so why not share it with your internal team and suppliers? Repurpose that customer education whenever possible, to increase the value of your investment.
The Takeaway: 6 Practical Steps to Amplify customer Education and Increase Customer Success
Once you've got an understanding of the value of education for customers and how it affects the customers you serve at each stage on their path, it is time to begin building your own process. These six steps will assist you in establishing and begin implementing your customer education strategy.
- Map out your customer journey
Start by drawing out your customers' journey. What do they discover about your organization? How do they get started interacting with your team? When do they make the purchase decision? - Be attentive to your clients and then record their data
Be aware of the types of questions being asked during the journey. Do not create content that addresses questions no one has asked. - Start with only one course
It's easy to get caught up in the strategy you are using when starting out. Begin with one course addressing your most frequent question, then move on to the next. - Develop courses based on outcomes, not just features
Although your classes are designed to aid your customers in understanding your product, they should be focused on helping your customers achieve success. Think about why they bought your product in the first instance. What were their goals? What can your course do to help you get them closer to them? - Make interesting content
It's obvious that nobody likes dull information. Use a variety of lesson formats that incorporate quizzes and create a social network that captivates your customers and helps achieve mutual success.