When I think about education, I ask myself, “What is the customer’s desired business outcome?”
This approach shifts focus from the traditional “how to,” feature-oriented content of customer education and customer support toward educational content organized around outcomes and value. When you categorize knowledge base or academy content by desired outcome, customers can quickly recognize if they are in the right place, and get what they need out of your product a whole lot faster.
Why does this matter? Because customers who see value faster are your “best” customers. They are more profitable, they can onboard faster during implementation, they can more easily adopt new features, and when they have an issue they can ask the right questions for a smooth resolution. As a result, recognizing these best customers is crucial for setting benchmarks, targeting intervention, and increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Identifying and Alleviating Pain Points to Help the Customer Realize Value
I’ve worked across the whole customer lifecycle, from Sales to Implementation, and now in Education and Support. That gives me a unique vantage point, where I’ve built up an understanding of where customers experience friction and what they need in order to realize value faster. By mapping out the customer lifecycle, and identifying where customers experience value or challenges, we can determine what training content is needed at what stage of their journey. Ask yourself questions such as:
- What do prospects want to learn in the sales process?
- What do customers need to know during implementation?
- What kind of product support do various users need once they’ve been onboarded?
- What do internal teams need to know to help customers realize greater value from what they’ve purchased?
At each stage you can then address any friction in the customer’s journey to value realization. One example we identified at Thought Industries was helping our customers create custom reports. Knowing that people want help where and when they need it, we created a pop up video that customers could open within the software, which walked them through how to create a custom report in the moment.
Targeting Intervention Using Customer Data
To support customers in realizing value, you need insight into who those customers are, how they use the product, and the value they are already gaining from you—or the gap between where they would like to be and where they are. Ideally, this data should be shared across the organization to ensure alignment.
Over the years, we’ve segmented customers and users in a number of different ways. One idea is to look at job roles, and target content towards instructional designers, marketers, or web designers. However, companies often have lean teams, and users wear many different hats. This makes it tough to segment using job titles alone. It can make a lot more sense to focus on the objective, the value that the customer is looking to receive, rather than the role they have in the company.
From a Customer Support perspective, we use ticket metrics to help us understand customer health and target intervention more effectively. We look at ticket deflection and compare the number of tickets for customers who have engaged with office hours and those who haven’t for example, or look at ticket volume for our top customers, which is defined by the Account Management team in terms of their growth potential. We can note those who had extra tickets this month compared with last month, and uncover ways to increase value for those customers based on that data.
What’s really powerful is when we can use that data in line with product adoption metrics. With this data at hand, we can say to a customer, “We can see that you’re having trouble with X feature — you’ve submitted a number of tickets related to this issue. Customers who are utilizing X functionality achieve Y outcome, let me help you to understand how you can see value from it, too.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with the data from ticket categories and product adoption, if you can share it across the organization in a meaningful way. Teams can use information on what their customers are doing to inform the product roadmap with new feature suggestions, offer targeted guidance to customers on value they might be missing out on, or identify additional education needed to help customers realize the full potential of the product they bought.
What Makes a Good or a “Best” Customer?
From a business perspective, I identify a good customer as one who doesn’t submit too many tickets… but also submits more than zero tickets! If a customer isn’t submitting any tickets, it’s rarely because they’ve completely mastered the product — none of us are geniuses! Instead, it could signify they are too scared to ask for support, or they aren’t getting any use out of the product. We flag those customers to Scaled Success who can reach out and check in to make sure they are getting value. I monitor top submitters and bottom submitters equally closely.
A good customer is an educated one: they know what they need, or can describe the problem. That means that when they submit a support ticket, it’s easier for us to resolve their issue. When a support ticket comes through that says “I need help”, but doesn’t provide any additional information,it just takes longer for them to get the outcome they need. A good customer comes armed with the information to help themselves get answers faster.
How Does Customer Education Make Customers More Profitable?
Since your “best” customers are the ones who realize value fastest, this is where education can move the needle. When aligned to a clear strategy, customer education empowers everyone–both internally and externally–to create more of these “best” customers by closing the gap between the outcome customers want and the experience they are being given. By helping customers reach those outcomes faster, customer education fuels product adoption, decreases time to value, reduces reliance on support, and helps to create brand champions and ambassadors.
The most profitable customers have certain things in common, but top of the list is that they are aligned in terms of their expectations for your product or service, and what they are receiving. Once you achieve that alignment, which starts with expectation-setting in the implementation phase, and continues on to value realization with the right education and support, all your customers can become your best customers!
Philip J. Cahill is the Vice President of Customer Experience, overseeing Customer Education, Professional Services, and Technical Support. Phil has over a decade of experience in educational technology, from teaching online to managing teams that drive value through customer relationships.
