Read about why companies educate their customers.
While companies create great products, it is not always easy to bring the product value and potential to the customers. This is where customer education and training steps forward. Tools and products become more and more sophisticated and creating a pool of experts out of customers is of high importance.

So what is customer education and training? Basically, it includes learning activities, aimed at delivering the understanding of the product value to the users. This will of course require from a company to create an educational content, think of the content delivery way and, what is often underestimated, to measure the impact of training.

Customer education can serve well during pre-sales, where it teaches potential users on the product and its application, during customer onboarding and later on, when customers learn deeper about the product use and how to get the most out of it.

While it might seem that educating the prospects at the pre-sales stage is a waste of time, it is the opposite. Although a  vendor is giving away free content, it is so much more he gets in return. 

First of all it is about trust the company is creating with its potential customers. It gives the users the chance to know the company better, while not yet making a purchase decision. And when they enjoy the experience they have, it is more likely they will sign up for a payable solution. 

Moreover, prospects who have tried and enjoyed the product, are more eager to share their experience with others, thus becoming the products’ advocates and promoting the product on the company's behalf. 

Getting a new customer is great, but it is highly important to make the customer’s onboarding process as smooth as possible. With a functioning customer education system the company creates an automatic onboarding routine for its customers, where each new user gets information needed and is smoothly included into the activation process.

Educating new customers reduces the workload from the support team, thus saving company resources. 

Keeping customers satisfied and providing extra value to them create customer loyalty and contribute to customer retention in the long run. When the customers understand the product’s functionality and potential fully, they are more likely to stay longer, since they know exactly which of their needs the product serves. 

With a customer education process one can expect to lower the amount of incoming support queries and can act as a reference point to the support team.

How and where then one can start customer education? The simplest way to start doing is asking the customer success team what their pains are. This will uncover where to fill the gaps and where the customer needs support the most. Secondly, a company should explore how customer education is done now: how they are trained, who is involved in it and what tools are used. Those are the starting points that can give lots of information and idea on what can be done better.