the need for customer education becomes clear. When you arrive at this point, as you cross the chasm, your business will need to have a sound strategy in place for education if it is going to successfully scale.
Let's take this even further and highlight the benefits of creating this strategy earlier in your maturity. As already outlined, customer education is beneficial throughout the customer journey, so why not bring it in at the beginning of your business maturity? Don't just view education as a function that will solve the learning needs of late-majority customers when they ask for help. Rather, also leverage education as a scaling function for content marketing and lead generation, as well as to support early adopters who might not traditionally need education as much but for whom low-effort content such as short, engaging videos can really deepen their engagement with the product. In that way, education helps your company to move from early market to mainstream, effectively facilitating the crossing of the chasm rather than merely reacting to it.
This attitude may sound like we're conflating education with the marketing function of the business – and that's okay! There is a lot of overlap between the two. If the goal of marketing is to drive awareness and to attract and convert new customers, customer education can play a big role in that if you start your education function early. It's never too soon to be thinking about your customer learning strategy and journey, identifying the moments of their customer lifecycle and crafting a content strategy around teaching the right education at each of those moments. Increasingly, customers expect production-quality education, thanks to the likes of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more, so getting education involved in marketing projects can be a great way to boost marketing campaigns, too.
Ready to get started? In the next chapter, we will discuss how to define the scope and responsibilities of your customer education team, including where to place your team to get the most value and how to choose the portfolio of education programs that will drive behavioral change across the customer lifecycle.
Notes
1 1 US Census Bureau, “Business Formation Statistics,” December 8, 2021, https://www .census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html.
2 2 Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, 3rd Edition (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2014).
2 Customer Education as a Catalyst for Business Growth
Effective customer education requires us to have a learning strategy and to overlay that strategy across the entire customer journey. As such, it is much more than an activity that's shared across many different teams, but rather, a strategic function for the business that is accountable for achieving specific goals in the same way as other functions, like sales, marketing, and customer success.
The Importance of a Centralized Strategy for Customer Education
When you don't have a centralized holistic function that is thinking about the entire learning journey, you can't help but end up with a disjointed and fragmented experience. If your learning isn't mapped out cohesively, the customer is not nurtured from one stage to the next, and customer education becomes limited to individual projects like creating some help articles for the support team or creating an onboarding workshop with customer success. You'll end up with different teams teaching your customers different things in different ways, and customers will almost certainly experience friction as a result.
In contrast, when customer education is a strategic function, you can focus on the holistic learning journey – by dedicating a team of professionals with expertise around facilitating behavioral change through learning.
What Else Is Customer Education? And What Isn't It?
When you're creating this centralized strategic function, some fundamental principles can help you stay focused and inform what customer education is and, perhaps even more importantly, what it is not.
It Is … a Learning Journey That Is Overlaid on Top of the Whole Customer Journey. That means it's not just a slice of that journey, where you end up hyperfocused on one segment like onboarding. However important a single segment is, it is never where learning definitively starts or stops.
It Is … Programmatic and Active. When you create customer education, you're intentional about facilitating learning in a specific way to get specific outcomes. You have a clear program that you put in place, and the content will be contextual, depending on what stage the learners are at and who they are. It's not a passive experience, where you create a bunch of content and then wait for the customer to engage.
It Is … Grounded in Data. Customer education is a constantly living and adapting entity. It is not a static artifact that becomes stale and irrelevant, but rather, it involves a continuous cycle of knowing where customers are struggling, understanding your audience, and recognizing what they need at the right time and place. It's not shooting at the hip; it is data-driven and focused to align with the learning needs of the customer.
It Is Not … Just about Using the Product. The vast majority of people don't have a job that's about using your product. They have a job where your product is a tool that they can use to better complete their tasks. As a result, customer education is about helping your customers achieve success in their roles, doing the job that they hired your product to do. We'll talk more about this idea later, but the main thing to understand is that customer education thinks beyond the product. It's not about focusing on where to click but about equipping the customer with skills that allow them to thrive in their roles.
It Is Not … Customized 1:1 Training. At its core, customer education is a strategy for scale. That means it's not focused on what might be effective for a single customer, but rather, it's about creating and delivering content to many different customers at the right time and at the right place. Customer education is about personalizing content so that it feels uniquely relevant to a customer's learning needs, without having to customize it.
It Is Not … Mandatory. Usually, no one will be forcing your customers to engage with customer education. It's not compliance training or internal employee education. That means you need to engage and persuade your users to keep going – you need their buy-in. For this reason, customer education can't be dry and technical, and it often uses a mix of marketing elements to help the content to sing to the customer and encourage them to want to learn.
Where Should Customer Education Sit in the Business?
If we accept that the customer is always learning, from the moment they start looking for a solution to a problem all the way through to when they love your product and are telling their friends about you, then customer education has to work closely with many different business functions. The most common are marketing, product, professional services, and customer success. For this reason, it's not always easy to know where to place customer education as a business function. It doesn't have a clear and obvious home. A lot of companies house it under customer success, emphasizing the role that customer education plays in finding and maximizing value when customers need help or when you want to quicken their time to value so that they renew their subscriptions or relationship.
Other companies will place it in marketing. This works particularly well if your education plays a pivotal role in converting
