The possibilities for customer learning don’t end with customers. Companies with mature customer education programs, the ones who have made customer education a true growth engine for the business, use their learning content to reach employees, partners, prospective customers, and even LLMs.
Once you can accurately measure learning’s effect on key performance indicators (KPIs) like product adoption, time to value, and overall retention, securing additional investment for program expansion becomes a much easier conversation. But it takes considerable organizational savvy to navigate the often-siloed departments and business units who would benefit from your team’s expertise.
This post will guide you through the silo setback that prevents customer education leaders from delivering additional value to their organization. When you educate internal audiences, bring in additional revenue, and make it easier for your company to acquire new customers, you can take customer learning to a whole new level.
Educate Internal Audiences
Why duplicate effort when your existing content is already effective? Use your customer learning modules to onboard and enable internal teams. By creating learning paths for your own employees, you free up capacity across the organization. Sales and support teams get up to speed faster, and you immediately demonstrate the value of your learning content–and your team–to new internal stakeholders. A salesperson extolling the virtues of your product training to a prospect is a win for your team, your new customer, and your company.
Capture Revenue with Premium Offerings
You deliver considerable value to your users, and so why not capture some of that value for your business? Consider packaging learning into premium, subscription-based offerings and advanced certifications that you can monetize.
Tailored learning experiences deliver additional value to enterprise clients who prize customization, while superusers may be willing to pay to showcase their mastery. Partners also value ongoing access to curated learning content in a partner enablement program designed to help them sell. Creating subscriptions and certification pathways offers a scalable, automated revenue stream for your company when you monetize training.
Pinpoint What Works Using KPIs
What gets measured gets managed, so make sure you monitor the effectiveness of learning. Use data and analytics to assess the true business impact of learning on your core KPIs, such as product adoption, time to value, and customer retention.
When you pinpoint exactly what content is most effective at driving these metrics, you can use those insights to help colleagues across the organization improve the entire customer experience. Share your findings with your account management team, identifying churn risks and expansion opportunities. Talk to your product team about where customers get stuck or confused. Partner with marketing on activation or upsell campaigns. Once you identify the learning that influences customer behavior, work cross-functionally to apply those insights.
Attract Future Advocates
One of the biggest costs businesses face is acquiring new customers. As a result, it might be time to rethink gating all your customer education content behind a login.
Consider making select learning accessible to the public to educate the market, including prospective customers, about your products. By doing so, you can define and measure education-qualified leads (EQLs) to demonstrate the full influence of your content on the revenue pipeline. Showing how a free training module led to a closed-won deal is the ultimate proof of your program’s ROI.
Structure your Content for Discovery and AEO
The way customers search for information is fundamentally changing. You can’t depend on them going to your customer academy whenever they have a product question–not when they’re using ChatGPT to answer all manner of questions throughout the day.
Make it easy for large language models (LLMs) to crawl your learning content. (This is called answer engine optimization, or AEO.) When your educational materials are properly structured and accessible, existing customers can get immediate answers even when they aren’t in your academy. Simultaneously, prospective customers can easily learn about your product through AI-driven search, turning your training materials into a powerful discovery tool.
Expanding the Reach of Customer Education
Breaking down organizational silos is not the work of a single day, but it is well worth the effort. When you use learning to empower your internal teams and educate potential customers, you transform customer education from an isolated function into a core driver of business growth.
Make a list of the topics you hear from your executive team. Do you have new employees starting who will need onboarding and enablement? Does your go-to-market strategy involve going “upstream” to win more enterprise clients? Are you losing deals to competitors because your product isn’t appearing in AI search results? By aligning your learning strategy to the needs of your organization, you make customer education integral to business success.
