The formative decisions around scope and strategy that we've discussed in this chapter are essential points to consider, and will be the foundation of your customer education, playing a large role in proving your value overall. Now, with that in mind, let's turn to the 12 steps of the Customer Education Playbook itself and see how you can develop a clear and structured approach that leads to impactful, engaging, and measurable programs. Let's dive in!
Note
1 1 Maria Manning-Chapman, “Fee and Free, Strategies and Considerations for Monetizing Customer Training,” Webinar, August 2021, https://www.tsia.com/webinars/free-and-fee-strategies-and-considerations-for-monetizing-customer-training.
3 Step 1: Maximize Impact by Aligning Customer Education to Business Goals
Customer education is a challenge, and the stakes are high. Without identifying your goals from the outset, you risk executing aimlessly, and you'll struggle to help others understand the impact of your work.
So, consider this: What do you want to get out of your customer education program?
This question is less about your customer education team itself and more about looking to the rest of the organization for guidance. Customer education teams don't work in a silo; they interact with many different functions of the business to help solve a wide range of challenges. To achieve success, the goals of customer education need to align with the overarching objectives of the company. In fact, the success of your customer education program hinges on executive support and buy-in, which can only happen if you make sure that you share a vision. If your goals aren't aligned, you'll end up doing a lot of work that isn't relevant for what the business is doing right now, and you're not going to get the executive support that you need to keep scaling and growing your program.
Five Common Business Goals for Customer Education
In this chapter, we'll cover five common business objectives and how you can align your own customer education goals to them to achieve success. For each example, we'll also identify the metrics you can use to measure your program and tangibly prove to the C-suite that the customer education program has a clear return on investment (ROI) in areas like generating direct revenue, reducing existing costs, or attracting new leads.
Goal 1: Improve Product Adoption
Product adoption challenges can come in many forms. Perhaps your business is releasing new features and customers aren't using them. Or maybe you have an onboarding issue, where customers who are new to your product are feeling overwhelmed or they aren't getting value during those critical first 90 days. It could even be that customers aren't adopting your product at all.
If product adoption is an organizational focus in your business, then your customer education program needs to ask, “How can customer education help to drive product adoption and fix the problem we're facing right now?” For example, if customers aren't adopting the product in the first place, you might want to create a prescriptive learning path for new customers that walks them through getting started. If the issue is that customers aren't trying out new features, you could launch content targeted specifically around those features. At Thought Industries, we create Feature Spotlight videos that focus on a single feature and the value it can provide to the user. As a direct result, I've seen huge growth in the adoption of empty state features, which previously had zero uptake before the content was created and released.
Of course, in some situations, adoption will be mandatory, such as a retail franchise that is onboarding a new point-of-sale product, such as a cash register. In this example, a product adoption challenge could be that users are making mistakes when they are first onboarded onto the solution – they're just not adopting it in the right way. A similar solution in this case would be to create a walkthrough or a tutorial for the first interaction for each new employee handling the machine to reduce or eliminate error.
Don't Talk about the Product!
It may seem counterintuitive, but an essential part of using customer education to boost product adoption is to remember that your customers and prospects don't care about your product! One of the most famous and often-quoted adages in marketing was coined by Theodore Levitt, who said, “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.1 It's outcomes that matter, not the product that facilitates that outcome.
Let's look at an example using a landing page builder app. If your training focuses on how to use the features of creating a landing page, such as how to enter a heading or add links, it doesn't deal with what users are really looking for. Rather than thinking about what the product does, think about the principles of landing page conversion and optimization. Your users want to generate sales, not just build a landing page. Education that focuses on how to build a page that's optimized for conversion, SEO, or best-practice design will be far more impactful.
Bottom line? Look to create customer education that talks about use cases and puts the value proposition as the star of the show rather than focus entirely on features and functionality. Your customers have hired your product to do a specific job, and what they really want to know is how it's going to help them make their lives easier.
Made to Measure: How to Prove ROI for Product Adoption
If you're a large enterprise, you may have the traffic and infrastructure available to you to distribute various types of content and test out different scenarios. For example, you might randomly distribute your customers into two groups and then run an experiment where one group watches a “Getting Started” video and the other does not. Then, you could track consumption rates and adoption rates over the first 30 days and get meaningful information on a causal relationship between your content and user behavior.
However, in the vast majority of cases, this probably isn't realistic. Instead, here are two other ways you can measure the success of your content on product adoption.
Trained/Not Trained Cohort Analysis In this analysis, you simply compare the behavior of two different groups: one trained, one not. First, you'll need to define trained. To do this, create content that users need to opt into, like video content that you have to register for and watch, a guidebook that needs to be downloaded, or anything else you can actually track. You'll then compare the people who interacted with the content (“trained”) to those who didn't (“not trained”) and measure product adoption rates between the two groups. Although this isn't a causal analysis, it'll still give you a great understanding of the relationship between consuming that content and product adoption rates.
Pre/Post Content Cohort Analysis With this approach, you push the customer education content to all of your customers by, for example, creating a three-minute video that new users watch the first time they sign into your product environment. You then track the data for product adoption after this content has been viewed, measuring the difference between the metrics you had before you launched the video. If you can get the support of your business leaders to push content to all of your users, this can be a great replacement for a true A/B experiment. While the pre/post analysis is also correlative and not causal, it more or less controls for confounding variables.
