Customer retention is won or lost in little moments throughout the customer journey. The details set the tone for how quarterly and executive business reviews will go, the way customers communicate to your team, and all the other important markers of a happy customer.
One of the most impactful ways to impress your customers, and increase their lifetime value, is how you invest in your customer education program. To be competitive, you must go beyond the standard training offerings and invest in more sophisticated tech built to keep customers engaged and successful.
But to make that happen, the tech must have the right features, including some you might not even know you need.
Beyond the Basics: Personalize CE Content and Meet Your Customers Where They Are
When was the last time you bought something and read through the training manual before you started using it? If we’re honest, our answers are all the same: Never. We’re excited about this new product and we assume we’ll figure out all the important stuff by jumping in.
Your customers have the same instincts. They want to jump in and learn just enough to do their jobs, without wasting time on irrelevant or outdated content. Learning paths do that, but the typical ones often fall short in delivering truly personalized experiences. That’s where adaptive learning comes in.
What Is Adaptive Learning?
Adaptive learning is a smarter way to guide your customers to success with your product. How? By adjusting courses and learning paths dynamically based on your customers’ roles and unique challenges.
Take it one step further by teaming up with the product experience experts on your team to offer short instructional content at the exact moment your customer needs it to expand their use of your product. You can even use the product itself to show users the next best step while they’re in the product. How cool is that? Not into in-app notifications? No worries. You can also map just-in-time learning to key moments in the customer journey, especially during onboarding.
Whatever tactics you use, remember to meet learners where they are in their journey and keep your educational content fresh and up to date. The more personalized the learning experience is for customers, the higher your retention rate and adoption rate will be. It can even prime you for expansion, as customers discover new features and invite more end users to the product.
Incorporate the Community Into the Learning Experience
Sometimes we learn best from the people who speak our language, not necessarily the people who know the most about a topic. It’s the reason communities bring so much value to companies across verticals.
So, instead of keeping learning isolated in courses and certifications, find ways to introduce new customers to your existing community as they move through courses and learning paths. Reward existing customers for their engagement with new users. You can do this through leaderboards, badges, and recognition in community spaces, for example.
You can even offer perks for active participants. Establishing those relationships helps alleviate the volume of support tickets or questions from new customers. More importantly, it brings new customers closer and provides value to customers right away. These are small changes that really add up when it comes time to discuss renewals or expansion.
Map Customer Education Core Customer Success KPIs
Once you’ve established integration between customer communities and customer education, it’s time to establish KPIs in the broader customer success strategy, which you can do by tracking and evaluating the following metrics in your Customer Success Platform:
- Course Enrollments and Learning Progress: These KPIs track the percentage of users who register for and complete training courses or modules. A high course enrollment rate, accompanied by learning progress in and completion of those courses, signifies that the training is engaging and accessible. Alternatively, a low rate in these areas may indicate barriers to participation.
- Certificate Achievements: As you gamify your training programs, users will rack up certificates and achievements. Track these as an indicator of learner engagement and course effectiveness.
- Training Events: If you host one-to-many training events, like webinars, track attendance to indicate interest and engagement.
Bottom line? A strong customer education program is just the start. To really move the needle, you need an LMS that connects with your CSP, so your team has real-time learning data at their fingertips to drive smarter, more strategic customer conversations.
Upgrade Your Customer Education With Gainsight
Going beyond the basic customer education motions is critical to meet users where they are (the product), serve content that is actually digestible in whatever free time your customers have (almost none), and ensure success through tracking the right KPIs (cross-functionally!).
This year, invest in your customers’ engagement, product adoption, and success by stepping up your customer education efforts. Learn how Gainsight Customer Education can help you deliver smarter, more effective training that actually moves the needle.
