The ultimate guide to customer education and training for 2024

The ultimate guide to customer education and training for 2024

Did you know that 30% of current customer education programs require improvement?

If you’re wondering ‘what is customer education and training?’, it refers to the process of equipping new and existing customers with the necessary tools and knowledge to learn how to use your product. For example, a customer onboarding program can help new clients get to know your product. Especially useful in complex sectors like SaaS and enterprise software, a robust client training framework significantly enhances user familiarity and perceived value. 

In 2024, customer education is no longer an option but a necessity. We’re here to discuss the question ‘why is customer education important?’, delving into how a customer education program streamlines the client journey and boosts loyalty and satisfaction. As we explore the benefits and steps to launch a successful customer education program, remember that informed customers are loyal advocates. Keep reading to learn how to educate customers with a training program that yields high ROI by increasing customer retention and reducing support costs.

Understanding the need for customer education in 2024

There are many benefits of customer training programs. Over 70% of such programs have reported an increase of more than 10% in customer adoption growth. This rise in adoption translates to more satisfied clients who are likely to continue their journey with your business. 

Another reason why customer education is important is because trust forms the bedrock of brand loyalty and helps retain customers. 95% of customers assert that their loyalty comes from trusting a brand, which is significantly enhanced through well-structured customer education programs. 

But the impact doesn’t stop there. A tailored customer education strategy can accelerate onboarding, leading to quicker product adoption and reducing the time and burden on your customer support team. This strategic approach speeds up customer onboarding and reduces the time to value.

Creating training content that educates users about your product is critical. It empowers users to explore and understand the product at their own pace, aligning with the finding that 81% of customers prefer to troubleshoot issues themselves before contacting a support team. This self-service model fosters improved engagement and significantly boosts product adoption. 

Higher customer satisfaction leads to increased retention rates, reducing churn. Furthermore, as customers derive more value from your product or service, they’re more likely to upgrade their subscriptions, increasing expansion revenue. 

Customer training in 2024 isn’t just about informing. It's about creating a sustainable and profitable relationship through knowledge and trust. 

Foundations of effective customer education

Next, let’s learn the foundations of client education to get the most out of your customer enablement and education strategy. Effective customer training is essential for business and user growth and mirrors key principles found in product management. 

Here are our fundamental principles for crafting a successful customer training program:

1. Start with the why: Clarify why well-trained customers are crucial for your solution and what your business goals are. This involves understanding the unique benefits of your product or service and how training enhances these advantages.
2. Understand the problem: Identify barriers preventing full adoption of your solution, like unfamiliarity with features or the lack of instructional material. 
3. Focus: Prioritise areas in your educational content that align with your strategic business objectives and address customer needs. 
4. Empower the customer success team: Create training materials that are informative and engaging, keeping the customer's experience central. 
5. Embrace uncertainty: Stay adaptable to technological changes, customer preferences, and market trends, ensuring your training remains relevant. 
6. Balance inputs, outputs, business outcomes, and learning: Utilise data to measure the effectiveness of your training and its impact on customer behaviour and product usage. 
7. Iterate: Continually update your training program based on feedback and evolving product features.

And remember, balancing in-depth knowledge with accessibility is critical to cater to a diverse customer base. Training materials should be comprehensive yet simple to understand and accessible, catering to existing and new customers with various levels of expertise. This balance ensures your customer education program is a valuable, inclusive resource. Using an inclusive eLearning platform like Lingio to create customer training can help.

‘ We aim to foster digital inclusion and transform learning into a more accessible and fun experience that yields 12 times better results powered by gamification principles, modern pedagogy, and multi-language support,’ says Yashar Moradbakhti, CEO of Lingio.

Designing your customer education program

Once you’ve learned the foundations of effective customer education, it’s time to start designing. Here are the first steps to consider when creating a comprehensive and effective customer training strategy that aligns with your business goals.

1. Identifying customer learning objectives

When designing your education program, start by pinpointing your customers' learning objectives and who your target audience is. Ask yourself: what skills or knowledge should they gain? Understanding their goals helps tailor your educational content to be truly impactful, ensuring each course or resource directly contributes to their journey of mastering your product or service with a smile.

2. Understanding your customer base: A diverse audience

When designing a customer education program, you need to ensure everyone feels welcome and understood. Consider easy navigation and universal availability, including options like closed captioning and multilingual content. To hit the mark, you could get to know your audience with a user persona survey. This helps you understand your customers' varied needs and preferences, ensuring your educational content resonates with your audience. This way, your program becomes a rich, inclusive learning experience that addresses the real challenges your customers face. 

3. Choosing the right tools and platforms for customer education

Online learning tools and platforms, like Lingio, allow customer success managers and other staff to create, manage, and organise training material with ease. These platforms can help you save time creating programs from scratch and avoid spending hours training users. If you go down this route, opt for a customer training platform that’s powerful, scalable, and easy to use for a cohesive and efficient online learning experience for your customers. With the right technology, your customer journey becomes a smooth, enjoyable ride. 

At Lingio, we take pride in our comprehensive eLearning platform. This learning platform includes our innovative AI Course Creator, a dedicated coaching portal for customer success managers, and an extensive library of premium courses ready for immediate use.

Developing impactful customer training content   

Now, it’s time to curate and create effective training content. Here are some best practices for creating engaging and informative content for customers.

1. Strategies for content creation and curation

Creating impactful customer training content involves ensuring relevance for all skill levels. This approach encourages learners to continually engage with your program, eager to level up, whether they’re novices or experts. Keep content fresh and current, particularly in fast-evolving sectors like SaaS. Utilise mixed-media and short courses for easier updates, and establish a systematic process for integrating new information as your subject matter evolves, maintaining a vibrant and up-to-date online learning environment.

2. Incorporating interactive and engaging elements

Spice up your customer education content by incorporating interactive and engaging elements. For example, implement gamification elements, such as rewarding learners with badges for completing tutorials, engaging in training, or achieving product milestones. 

Why not add a point or reward system too? Offer tangible incentives like discounts on renewals or a free trial of a premium plan. This approach keeps users motivated and excited, turning every step of their customer journey into a rewarding and fun experience.

‘As our understanding of human psychology deepens, gamification techniques will likely become more sophisticated, targeting individual motivation and learning styles for improved efficacy. I expect to see further development of generative AI tools to make the implementation of gamification in learning and other activities easier than ever for organisations.’  - Yashar Moradbakhti, CEO of Lingio

3. Adapting to different learning styles and preferences

Recognising that everyone learns differently is key to impactful customer education training. As well as creating training courses, you can incorporate interactive product walkthroughs and in-app guidance, educating customers to connect new knowledge. This approach caters to diverse learning styles, ensuring your training resonates with each customer and guiding them seamlessly through their learning journey.

4. Promoting cross-team collaboration

The heartbeat of your sales education initiatives lies in the hands of your diverse customer success team members. Embrace cross-team collaboration for a holistic approach to customer success. Gather insights from various departments like customer success, sales, customer support, and UX design to pinpoint customer pain points across the entire sales journey. This inclusive feedback helps identify critical areas for improvement, like the customer onboarding process. By addressing these issues collaboratively, your customer education program becomes a powerful tool, enhancing both customer success and support and promoting a unified, sales team-driven approach to customer education. 

Delivering the training: Methods and channels

Once you have some strong customer education examples for developing content, it’s time to think about delivery. Here are some customer training best practices for delivering content via different methods and channels.

1. Leveraging eLearning platforms for customer training

Take advantage of the power of a learning platform for your training program, especially when your customer education software demands a deep understanding of various concepts, capabilities, or security protocols.  A learning management system (LMS) like Lingio can craft custom, engaging, information-rich online courses and certification programs. These business systems enable you to design visually captivating online courses with interactive quizzes, games, and storylines, for strong customer retention and comprehension. 

2. Utilising video and multimedia for engaging learning experiences

Elevate your customer training program beyond text with the power of video and other multimedia. Video tutorials offer a quick, engaging, and fun way to communicate information, transforming the learning experience into an entertaining customer journey. Video tutorials are particularly effective for step-by-step instructions, allowing users to follow along seamlessly. This multimedia approach captivates and simplifies the learning process, making it easier for users to grasp and apply new features. 

3. Interactive workshops and webinars for real-time learning

Interactive workshops and webinars are great options for real-time learning in customer education. These live sessions offer a platform for immediate customer engagement and interaction, enabling new and existing customers to learn, ask questions, and clarify doubts on the spot. They create a vibrant learning atmosphere, promoting a sense of community and deeper understanding among participants.

4. Knowledge bases

Knowledge bases are invaluable in your customer training program, acting as a comprehensive, self-service library of information. The key to a great knowledge base lies in its organisation, currency, and searchability. It should offer an intuitive experience, allowing customers to swiftly find useful content whenever they like. Regular updates and integration with in-app tutorials and customer help centres further enhance its effectiveness, ensuring it remains a go-to resource for ongoing learning and support. 

Measuring the impact of customer education programs

There’s no use developing and delivering product training for customers if you don’t track and assess the impact. Here are some recommended techniques and tools for analysing the effectiveness of customer training in your education program.

1. Gathering and analysing customer feedback

Gathering and analysing feedback is vital for assessing the effectiveness of your customer education programs. For example, surveys are a direct line to understanding how your resources are received and utilised. This feedback allows you to refine existing materials and identify areas needing new content. 

Remember, the value of your education efforts is only as good as its impact on customers. Including quick surveys or satisfaction scales in your knowledge base articles or walkthroughs provides real-time data, enabling swift action and continuous improvement.
 

2. Key metrics to measure training success

Measuring the success of your customer education program hinges on tracking key metrics, each offering specific insights into its effectiveness. 

• Website views: Track the total number of website visits and views your training content receives. This metric helps in understanding the overall interest in your program and identifying the most popular sections or topics.
• Website visit duration: Monitor the average time visitors spend on your training webpage or specific training modules. Longer durations may suggest higher engagement and interest in the content, while shorter durations could signal a need for content improvement.
• Training registration and attendance: Monitor registrations and attendance for training sessions. This metric, particularly when compared with training completions or viewing durations, reveals learner engagement and interest levels. 
• Engagement: User engagement can be measured through various means – from click-through rates in promotional emails to questions asked during courses and even resource downloads pre-, during, or post-training. 
• Ratings: Collect feedback through surveys, numerical ratings, or suggestion boxes. This feedback is essential for continuously refining and evolving your program. 
• Product adoption and effectiveness: A less direct but powerful metric is assessing product adoption. Compare the training consumption of learners from a single customer against indicators like feature usage or escalation rates. This can reveal how effectively your training influences product use and problem-solving. 

3. Continuous improvement and adaptation of training programs

Continuous improvement and adaptation are crucial for the success of your customer education programs. Don’t hesitate to evolve your approach if the current strategy isn’t hitting the mark. Remember, your customers are busy people with varying levels of motivation, time, and energy. It’s natural for engagement tactics to fluctuate in effectiveness. Blend your understanding of your customers with analytical insights to inform your strategy so you can create training content that’s both relevant and beneficial for your audience. Such responsiveness aligns with your customers' needs and positively impacts your success metrics.

Addressing challenges in customer education

Of course, it’s natural for things to go wrong, even after putting time, effort, and energy into your customer education program. Here are some common obstacles in customer training and strategies and how to overcome them.

1. Overcoming technological and accessibility barriers

Be sure to embrace a universal design approach, ensuring your education program is accessible to all, regardless of their tech-savviness or physical abilities. This means optimising content for various devices, including mobile phones and tablets, offering closed captions, and providing alternative text for visuals. Make sure to test your platforms regularly for user-friendliness and accessibility compliance. Additionally, provide support for users facing tech challenges. By breaking down these barriers, you create an inclusive online learning environment that empowers every customer to engage fully with your educational content.

2. Ensuring relevance and up-to-date training material

Keeping your customer education content relevant and up-to-date is pivotal. In a fast-evolving world, training materials must reflect the latest product features, industry trends, and customer needs. Regularly review and refresh your content, ensuring it aligns with current best practices and technological advancements. Engage in continuous learning about your industry to guide these updates. This proactive approach maintains the relevance of your material and also demonstrates your commitment to providing valuable, current information and keeping your customers informed, engaged, and proficient in using your products or services. 

3. Catering to a global and diverse customer base

To cater to a global and diverse customer base, embrace cultural sensitivity and inclusivity in your content, ensuring it resonates across different backgrounds. Offer multilingual support and consider varying time zones for live sessions. Acknowledge diverse learning styles and provide various formats like videos, text, and interactive quizzes. Regular feedback from international customers can also guide content adaptation to their specific needs. This inclusive and adaptable strategy fosters a welcoming learning environment, making your program relevant and accessible to customers worldwide.

Future trends in customer education and training

The best customer training programs are created and developed by those who actively keep up with the latest news and innovations in the EdTech industry. To effectively maintain the customer lifecycle, it's best to be aware of future customer education and training trends.

1. The role of emerging technologies in customer education

In the growth of customer education, virtual and augmented reality will offer immersive learning experiences, making complex concepts easier to grasp. Artificial intelligence (AI) will customise learning paths based on user behaviour, enhancing engagement and retention. 

Embracing technologies like AI, VR, and AR will enhance the learning experience and ensure customer education programs remain cutting-edge, interactive, and deeply impactful.

2. Personalisation and AI in future training programs

The future of customer education will continue to be profoundly shaped by customisation and AI. Artificial intelligence will enable hyper-personalised learning experiences, tailoring content to specific needs, learning styles, and progress. AI-driven analytics will predict and address customer learning gaps, offering targeted resources for optimal understanding. This technology will also facilitate adaptive learning paths, adjusting to user interactions for maximum engagement. As AI becomes more sophisticated, we can expect training programs to become increasingly intuitive, responsive, and effective, revolutionising how clients interact and benefit from an effective customer education program.

Lingio’s AI Course Creator effortlessly converts training materials into captivating, tailor-made courses in just a few seconds, streamlining the process of employee onboarding and training. All you need to do is upload your onboarding or training content into the AI Course Creator, and within a few clicks, you'll have an interactive online course designed and ready to be shared.

3. Evolving customer expectations and educational strategies

As we look towards the future, evolving customer requirements are set to reshape educational strategies in customer training. Customers will increasingly seek instant, on-demand learning solutions that fit their busy lifestyles. They'll expect more interactive, engaging content that goes beyond traditional formats, favouring immersive experiences like gamified learning and simulations. Personalisation will be key, with customers desiring content tailored to their specific needs and skill levels. Educational strategies will need to be agile, adapting quickly to these changing preferences, ensuring that learning isn’t just informative but also highly relevant and captivating. 

Real-world examples: Successful customer training programs

Here are some successful real-world examples of effective strategies to give you some inspiration before or during planning your customer training program.

LinkedIn's unified customer education strategy 

LinkedIn's customer education program stands out for its unified and sustainable platform across its talent, sales, and marketing domains. Using customer training platform Skilljar, LinkedIn has crafted a seamless customer learning experience, which includes hosting numerous live events and offering self-service training in 11 languages. The program features three distinct learning domains operating under a single LMS for inter-divisional collaboration and learning. Additionally, LinkedIn has introduced objective-based learning paths, catering to specific hiring and learning needs, further enhancing user experience and accessibility.

Myntra's MyFashionGPT AI customer education program

Myntra, an e-commerce platform owned by Walmart, is a company using AI for customer education and usability. Myntra introduced ‘MyFashionGPT,’ a feature powered by ChatGPT that significantly enhances customer product discovery and learning. This AI-driven feature allows customers to make natural language-based queries, providing various options across related categories.

MyFashionGPT interprets and responds to sophisticated fashion queries, offering a high level of personalisation and suggesting various products based on global trends. This initiative by Myntra exemplifies how AI can be used in customer education to improve the shopping experience by providing personalised, relevant, and timely product recommendations​.

Work with Lingio to improve your customer lifecycle process

As we finish our journey through the essentials of customer education and training in 2024, it's clear that the path to success is multifaceted. Effective client training hinges on understanding customer needs, embracing diverse learning styles, and choosing the right tools and platforms. 

The integration of AI course creators and eLearning platforms like Lingio has revolutionised the customer education landscape, offering a seamless and efficient way to transform training materials into engaging, custom-tailored online courses. AI-driven platforms significantly streamline the process of onboarding and ongoing training, ensuring that content is accessible, personalised, and engaging. 

Today, staying ahead of the competition means continuously adapting your training strategies. With the support of AI technology, such as Lingio's eLearning platform, organisations can easily adapt to changing needs and preferences, ensuring that their customer training program grows and is current and cutting-edge. Request a demo to try our eLearning platform today and discover how you can transform your customer education and training strategy.

FAQs

What is customer or client education?

Customer or client education refers to the process where organisations provide their customers with relevant knowledge and skills related to their products or services. If you’re wondering ‘why is client education important?’, it plays a crucial role in building trust, cultivating long-term customer relationships, and ensuring client satisfaction. By handing customers the right information and skills, companies can reduce support costs, increase product adoption, and encourage customer loyalty. 

How often should I update my training material?

Updating your customer training materials should be an ongoing process, ideally aligned with the pace of changes in your industry, service, or product. A good rule of thumb is to review and potentially update your content at least quarterly. However, consider more regular updates if your product features, industry regulations, or technology trends change more frequently. Regular feedback from users and tracking engagement metrics can also signal when updates are necessary. This proactive approach ensures that your training material remains relevant, accurate, and valuable, increasing customer satisfaction scores.

How can customer feedback be effectively incorporated into training programs?

Effectively incorporating feedback into training programs involves a continuous, responsive process. Regularly collect feedback through surveys, direct communication, or digital analytics to gauge customer experiences and challenges. Analyse this data to identify common themes or specific areas needing improvement. Then, use these insights to update and refine training content, ensuring it remains relevant and addresses customer needs. Encourage open dialogue by creating channels for ongoing feedback and show clients that their input leads to tangible changes that contribute to effective customer training.

What role does storytelling play in customer education?

Storytelling and gamification play a crucial role in customer education by transforming abstract concepts into relatable and engaging narratives. They help illustrate complex ideas through real-life scenarios, making them more understandable and memorable for the audience. By including gamification, customer success stories, and challenges in the training material, learners can better grasp the practical applications of a service or product. Storytelling also encourages emotional connections, making the learning experience more impactful. This approach aids in retaining information and motivating customers to apply what they've learned, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the education program. 

Sources:

1. (2021), 2021 State of Customer Education, Thought Industries
2. Dixon, M., Ponomareff, L., Turner, S., & DeLisi, R. (2017). Kick-Ass Customer Service. Harvard Business Review, January–February 2017. 
3. Salesforce Research. (2018). State of the Connected Customer (2nd ed.). Salesforce.
4. (2023), Myntra, in an industry-first, leverages the power of ChatGPT to launch MyFashionGPT ahead of its EORS-18, Myntra
5. (2023), Lingio and IAAP pioneer first accessible AI workforce training platform, Yahoo Finance