Customer Education: Benefits, Strategy, and How to Choose a Platform

Customers who know how to use your product get value from it faster, need less support, and are far more likely to renew. That's the case for customer education. Yet many companies still stop teaching customers once onboarding ends.

Customer education is how you change that. It gives customers the learning they need at every stage, from their first login to advanced use, through courses, tutorials, certifications, and community. Done well, customer learning becomes a growth lever, not a support cost.

In this guide, we'll cover what customer education is, the main benefits of customer education, how to build a program that scales, and what to look for in a customer education platform.

3 key takeaways

• Customer education is more than onboarding. The most effective programs support customers across their whole lifecycle, from first login to advanced features, product updates, and certifications.
• Customer learning drives measurable business results. Benefits of customer education include faster time to value, higher product adoption, fewer support tickets, and better retention, but only if you track the right metrics from the start.
• The right customer education platform makes it scalable. Look for branding, audience segmentation, fast content creation, and integrations with your CRM and customer success tools, so you can deliver tailored training to every customer without adding headcount.

What is customer education?

Customer education is the process of teaching customers how to use a product or service successfully, so they reach their goals faster and get more value from their investment. It covers every learning moment in the customer journey, from first-time onboarding to advanced features, product updates, and certifications.

Customer education used to mean one-to-one training sessions run by a customer success manager. Today, most companies deliver customer learning at scale through self-paced courses, video tutorials, live webinars, knowledge bases, in-app guidance, and customer communities.

That way, customers can find answers when they need them, without waiting for a call.

Customer education vs. customer training vs. customer onboarding

These terms are often used interchangeably, but there's a useful distinction:

• Customer onboarding is the first stage: getting new customers set up and using the product for the first time.
• Customer training usually refers to structured learning, such as courses, live sessions, and certifications, that teaches specific skills or features.
• Customer education is the umbrella term. It includes onboarding and training, plus ongoing resources like help content, communities, and thought leadership that keep customers learning throughout the relationship.

In short, onboarding is where customer education starts, and training is one of the main ways it's delivered.

6 benefits of customer education

Customer education plays a key role in improving customer satisfaction and retention. Naturally, when customers find it easy to use your product or service to solve their pain points, they are faster to adopt and try newer features, leading to higher engagement and satisfaction. This relationship of trust and dependability forms the bedrock of customer retention and helps you build your brand as one that cares deeply about customer experience.

1. Faster onboarding

Onboarding is an opportunity to make a great first impression—but only if you have a strong customer education program for your product or service. Poor onboarding is responsible for 23% of customer churn on average. And 67% of all churn can be prevented if customer issues are resolved during the first interaction. A helpful onboarding process allows you to lay the foundation for a great relationship and win over your customers. 

A new product can be scary and intimidating, especially if it’s replacing a well-established process or widely used tool. When your training gives customers the ease of use and confidence they are looking for, they quickly become efficient users and gain maximum value from your product or service.

In one report, customer education led to a 14% annual improvement in onboarding over a two-year period. Your educational content builds trust and credibility for your product because customers know they can count on the resources you provide.

2. Higher engagement and better product adoption

Customers want to use products that address their pain points and make their work efficient and productive. After all, they signed up for your product.

But even the most engaged users need ready answers. Customer education, especially a program that lets users customize their learning path, fulfills this demand and gives them clear and reliable information at the time of need. 

When customers are already engaged with your product, they are ready to adopt new features and product releases as the product evolves. Experts suggest that the greatest measurable impact from customer education in product adoption.

Higher product adoption leads to deeper engagement and creates an ongoing long-term learning cycle.

3. Fewer support tickets and lower costs

The modern product user is a self-directed learner. They're used to seeking answers on Google or watching a short video to understand a concept. When learners access information through a customer education database, they don’t need to contact customer support as often.

Even for customers who want high-touch service, you can’t have support staff present for each little query, especially as you scale your business. 

A strong customer education program plays a similar role by preempting customer needs and providing self-service access to content that answers common questions. The result is fewer support tickets and lower operational costs.

Once learners are ready to go deeper, they can find course modules on specific topics in your learning management system. 

4. Higher customer satisfaction and retention

Customer education helps learners become master users of your product, leading to a marked improvement in customer satisfaction scores (CSATs). But a PowerPoint presentation or a slide deck isn’t enough to achieve customer satisfaction. Even live training sessions are often riddled with learner fatigue and cost more. 

High customer satisfaction comes with intentional customer education. By identifying key implementation areas, Mitsubishi Electric achieved 99% customer satisfaction while training over 2,000 people. The company used a mix of blended learning, course authoring, upskilling, and collaborative learning to engage their customers. 

Happy users naturally want to stick with your product and may even become brand champions. That kind of loyalty builds long-term customers and improves your customer retention rate.

Related: How to Create A Customer Education Strategy That Boosts Retention

5. Stronger brand reputation and loyalty

When customers can count on you as market leaders that excel in training and sharing industry-specific knowledge, you expand your brand awareness and create brand champions, increasing word-of-mouth referrals and helping you potentially find affiliates. 

Ultimately, customer education is the gap between what you know and what your customers need to know to succeed with your product. Pass on that knowledge through a systematic and dependable training program, and you’ve won customers for life. 

Plus, you can offer certifications in your product or service, which increases your reach as customers add these certifications to their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Over time, your certification becomes a must-have in your industry for credibility.

6. Engaged customer communities and discussion forums

Customers don’t operate in a vacuum. They are part of online communities and networks that focus on discussing common pain points and industry trends. A customer who has benefited from your education program will often engage in these communities and share tips or solutions from their own experience, often naming your product and knowledge source in the process. This leads to a healthy exchange and a trustworthy third-party review of your customer education program that you didn’t even orchestrate.

Related: How to Choose the Best Customer Training Software for Your Business

How to build a collaborative customer education program

Just like all L&D efforts, an effective customer education program is a continuous and collaborative process. But all too often, it fades into the background after onboarding. When this happens, you lose the opportunity to use your customer education program to create brand champions. 

Given that the cost of acquiring new customers is five times more than retaining current customers, you want to be present for customers throughout their lifecycle. A customer education program built on collaborative learning methods is the best way to attract and retain customers because it’s centered on the customer’s needs.

Know your customer and pinpoint their needs

Success means something different to each customer. Your customer’s pain points and business goals are the keys to providing them with the skills they need to master your product. A collaborative LMS can help you document these success factors in a centralized spot and stay on track with a custom training dashboard that provides an overview of customer education participation and completion rates. 

Once the business goals are identified and documented, you need to educate customers according to their unique needs. Your customer education program needs to be comprehensive enough to serve every persona but also customized for each learner’s use case.

To improve your customer enablement and partner enablement efforts even further, apply collaborative learning best practices for your company's specific industry.

For example, SaaS customer enablement benefits greatly from microlearning and highly accessible customer support.

Your customer education team can’t possibly train all decision-makers, admins, developers, and end users in 1:1 settings, but you can offer customized experiences by segmenting your customers into relevant groups or sub-groups and setting visibility rules for privacy.

Users can share resources and takeaways or ask questions through a discussion forum, motivating peers to finish their training and boosting overall completion rates.

Users can surface additional training needs by requesting a course through the Learning Needs tool. The rest of the team members can upvote topics based on their own needs, and you get a ready lineup of courses that will fill any gaps in your customer education program. Who knows better than your end users what they need to learn to succeed?

Create relevant content with a focus on collaboration

For customers to gain the maximum value in a short amount of time, your content needs to be relevant, useful, and available just in time. Relevant content can't be created in isolation. For an in-depth understanding of your users’ problems, questions, and training needs, you need to involve them.

This bottom-up method of training helps your customer education program stay fresh and updated. For instance, a user who took a basic course in using your product could become a product champion on their team.

When they discover new features that reduce internal barriers to productivity, they can use an authoring tool to create a new course (or co-author it with an expert on your end). Their participation makes customer education immediately relevant to the team’s business outcomes, and their team is more likely to find value in your product. 

Plus, users can help you iterate content and keep it accurate when they leave feedback on courses and react to content. The more users engage and collaborate with trainers in a course, the better they will learn and boost your training ROI. 

Choose the right tools to make customer education flexible and scalable

An amazing customer education program is useless if you can’t make it flexible or scale it for different users. Customers want a seamless learning experience that caters to their unique needs, and you need technology to fulfill this demand. Choose a learning platform that has the features you need for successful integration, customization, and reporting. 

A collaborative LMS presents content in a neat course catalog, where customers can browse through the course offerings and purchase the training they need. 

Customization helps build brand recognition. With an LMS like 360Learning, you can customize your customer’s experience, which means you can use brand elements and custom URLs to make your customer education program familiar to users.

You can even provide a custom URL for each customer within the learning platform. This helps provide a richer user experience because it looks like the training is coming directly from your software and not from a third party.

Gamify your customer education program to make it engaging

Gamification attracts customers by adding game elements like leaderboards, quizzes, levels, and badges to your training. Gamification has been proven to motivate learners to work harder and provide a better quality of learning. Plus, it’s fun for users to test their knowledge and compete with peers through the ranks and levels displayed on a leaderboard. This type of recognition pushes learners to absorb even more information from training and get higher scores.  

How to measure customer education

Customer education only earns ongoing investment if you can show its impact. The most useful approach is to compare customers who engage with your education program against those who don't, across the metrics your business already cares about.

• Time to value (TTV). How long does it take new customers to reach their first meaningful outcome with your product? If educated customers get there faster, onboarding content is doing its job.
• Product adoption. Track feature usage, active users, and depth of use for trained versus untrained accounts. Education should lead customers to use more of the product, not just log in more often.
• Support ticket volume. Monitor whether ticket volume on topics covered by your courses falls after you launch them. Some teams also track ticket deflection, meaning how often customers find an answer in self-serve content instead of contacting support.
• Retention and expansion. Compare renewal rates, churn, and upsell or cross-sell rates for accounts with high and low training engagement. This is the metric leadership cares about most, and the strongest case for investing in customer education.
• Customer satisfaction. Include questions about training in CSAT or NPS surveys, and collect course ratings and feedback to see what customers find useful.
• Learning metrics. Enrollments, completion rates, assessment scores, and certifications earned show whether customers engage with the program. On their own, they don't prove business impact, so connect them to the metrics above wherever possible.

Start with two or three metrics tied to your main goal, whether that's faster onboarding, fewer tickets, or better retention, rather than tracking everything at once.

To connect learning data with product and customer data, your customer education platform needs to integrate with your CRM and customer success tools.

How to choose a customer education platform

A customer education platform is software for creating, delivering, and tracking training for customers and partners. Many are learning management systems (LMSs) built or configured for external audiences.

Customer education has different requirements from employee training, so these are the capabilities to look for.

• Branding and white-labeling. Customers should feel they're learning from you, not from a third-party tool. Look for custom domains, logos, colors, and email templates, so the academy looks like part of your product.
• Audience segmentation and multi-tenancy. You'll likely serve admins, end users, partners, and different customer accounts, each needing different content. The platform should let you create separate groups or portals, with visibility rules that keep each audience's training private.
• Easy access for external learners. Customers won't tolerate a complicated login. Self-registration, single sign-on (SSO), and access from inside your product all reduce friction.
• Content creation that scales. Your product changes constantly, so your training must too. Look for fast authoring tools, AI-assisted course creation, and the ability for product experts, and even customers, to contribute and update content.
• Certifications. Product certifications motivate learners, create credentialed power users, and spread your brand when customers share them on LinkedIn.
• Ecommerce. If you plan to sell training or certifications, check for built-in payment options, course catalogs, and bundles.
• Integrations and analytics. To measure impact, the platform should connect to your CRM, customer success, and support tools, and report on more than completions. The goal is to see how learning activity relates to adoption and retention.
• Engagement features. Gamification, discussion forums, and mobile access help keep customer learning going after onboarding.

360Learning brings these capabilities together in customizable Learning Academies. Each customer audience gets its own branded learning space, with AI-driven authoring that makes it easy for product experts to keep content up to date.

Collaborative features let customers ask questions and request new courses. For a side-by-side look at other options, see our guide to choosing customer training software.

Use microlearning and mobile learning techniques to strengthen your training 

Your customers don’t want to spend a lot of time learning about your product. They want quick fixes that they can apply right away when facing a challenge. Microlearning techniques like short tutorials, videos, or 10-minute quizzes cater to this need and help users learn in the flow of work. 

You can further bolster your customer education program by offering it through a mobile learning solution. Users want to access training at their convenience, and mobile learning offers them the anytime, anywhere option that is crucial to course completion rates.

Want to see our customer education and mobile learning solutions in action? Get your free demo today.