Have you ever experienced being ghosted by your newly signed-up users because they never really “got” how to win with your product? Yes? Then this article is for you.
There’s a reason “customer education” is popping up in CX conversations right now. It is a catalyst for business success, as it drives growth and helps organizations achieve their strategic goals. It’s also the answer to modern buyers who want zero-friction, who prefer self-service, and loves learning at their own pace. In fact, 52% of B2B prospects today would rather figure things out independently.
As customer expectations continue to evolve, companies must provide tailored educational strategies to meet these new demands. This article covers why customer education programs are having their big moment, the reason your brand might need one, and the step-by-step how-tos to help you launch a program that works.
What is a customer education program, really?
If you’re picturing a customer-facing knowledge base, let us tell you right away that this is different.
That’s part of it, but it’s nowhere near the whole picture. To move beyond the buzzword and into a practical understanding, let’s take a deeper look at the concept of a customer education program.
Definition and purpose
- A customer education program is a structured approach to help your customers learn how to achieve the results they want from your product—and continually improve over time.
- Its goal is to onboard, engage, retain, and empower customers to maximize product adoption and success over the entire customer lifecycle.
- A well-designed customer education program should be aligned with your overall business goals, ensuring that training and knowledge initiatives directly support broader company objectives such as customer retention, revenue growth, and operational efficiency. Here’s a fun stat: 96% of brands didn’t just break even on customer education.
If you’re asking if the program is the same as onboarding, training, and long-term education, it’s a YES and NO.
It’s a YES because a full customer education program includes onboarding, training, and long-term education. You need all three to give customers the complete learning journey:
- Onboarding: The starting block and the first learning experience that gets customers to their first win quickly.
- Training: The skill-deepening stage which helps specific roles or personas master the workflows that matter to them.
- Long-term education: The growth stage keeps customers learning, adopting advanced features, and finding new value over time.
But it’s also a NO because the program is the bigger strategy.It ties them all together with clear goals, sequencing, delivery methods, and measurement.
Why it’s more than just tutorials and help docs
While those resources are certainly components of a good customer education program, they only solve problems reactively.
A true customer education strategy is proactive and holistic, guided by customer education best practices that are essential for long-term success. Following customer education best approaches ensures your program is built on proven methods and continuous improvement.
Effective customer education means:
- You’re accelerating product adoption because customers see wins faster. Trained customers use your product 68% more often and 56% explore more features
- You’re boosting customer success by scaling your best guidance to everyone, not just the accounts your team can touch
- You’re building loyalty because customers who feel confident and competent don’t leave, they advocate.
Why your brand might need a customer education program
Now, you’re probably wondering if a customer education program is actually something your business needs. Fair thought. Here’s how you know:
Your products are getting more complex—and customers are starting to expect more
Most customers want powerful software that feels simple. And the cruel irony? The customers who need your most powerful features are often the ones least likely to invest time in learning the complexities. They want the “aha” moment to happen in minutes.
To achieve this, it’s important to identify and address customer pain points—those specific challenges and frustrations they encounter during onboarding, training, and content development.
You aim to reduce support volume with self-service learning
When customers have to contact support for basic “how-to” answers, it subtly tells you that your product is hard to use.
If your inbox is full of repeat questions or your support team spends most of their day on simple walkthroughs, that’s your cue: you need to provide a way for customers to help themselves.
Providing self-service resources, such as interactive tutorials, webinars, and comprehensive knowledge bases, empowers customers to independently solve their questions and reduces reliance on direct support. Effective self-service learning not only improves customer satisfaction but also helps lower support costs by decreasing the volume of support requests.
You should boost retention and customer lifetime value
The logic is simple—the longer a customer uses your product successfully, the more they spend and the less prone they are to leave. But “successfully” is the keyword here. If customers only ever use the bare minimum of your product, they’re not seeing the full value.
Providing effective customer education can increase customer retention by ensuring users are confident and satisfied with your product.
A customer education program continually introduces customers to new capabilities. This keeps them engaged, growing, and far more likely to renew, upgrade, and become loyal advocates. Ongoing education helps customers gain more value from your product, which encourages deeper engagement and satisfaction.
As a result, you can boost customer lifetime by supporting their long-term success. So their LTV? It rises naturally from continually getting more from what they’ve already purchased.
You want to position your brand as a thought leader
A great product gets attention. A great product plus industry-leading education gets respect. In competitive markets, customers choose the brand they believe will help them win.
A customer education program transforms you into a trusted advisor. Like a brand customers turn to for insight (best practices, frameworks, and strategies in their field) as much as for a product. Looking at customer education examples can provide inspiration for your own approach, while successful customer education programs serve as models to emulate when building your strategy.
How to create a successful customer education program
A well-structured training program is essential for building an effective customer education initiative. To deliver customer training successfully, it’s important to use the right platforms and methods that engage users and support their learning goals.
Let’s map out a step-by-step guide on how to create a successful customer education program:
Step 1: Understand your users’ learning journey
- This isn’t how you think your customers should learn, nor is it how your product team wishes they would learn.
- Put yourself in their shoes. Map out their entire journey (by detailed user personas), from their first interaction with your brand to becoming a long-term power user, and identify the friction points.
- Consider the full customer journey to ensure your educational content addresses each stage effectively.
- Analyze different customer segments within your customer base to tailor your approach, recognizing the diversity of users and their unique needs.
In practice: Interview recent sign-ups. Watch support tickets roll in. Look for “aha” moments and “ugh” moments. Then build your education plan around those real-world touchpoints instead of guessing.
Step 2: Choose the right format (Videos, webinars, docs, courses)
- Should it be videos or written content? Wrong question. The right question is: What format best serves each specific learning objective for each specific audience in each specific context
- Different types of learning require different formats, and different customers have different preferences, constraints, and situations. To accommodate different learning styles and maximize engagement, it’s important to recognize that customers learn best through a variety of learning styles, such as visual, in-person, or self-paced approaches.
- Looking at customer training examples reveals that the most effective programs often combine videos, webinars, and written guides, along with other educational resources and educational materials as key components.
In practice:
- Use quick, searchable help docs for “just tell me where to click” questions.
- Offer bite-sized videos for visual learners.
- Host live webinars for customers who need Q&A.
- Online courses and training content are excellent options for self-paced or in-depth learning. Courses and certifications work best for advanced topics and a more formal learning experience.
Step 3: Align content with product use cases and CX goals
- Your customer education content needs to serve customer learning objectives and business growth objectives. The magic happens when those two things are perfectly aligned—when helping customers achieve their goals naturally drives the business metrics you care about.
- Build your content around specific use cases, not product features, and ensure the education is centered around your core product or service.
- For each use case, identify the actions that lead to your CX goals. Integrating customer education with existing business systems ensures that learning initiatives are operationalized across departments and their impact can be effectively tracked. This approach helps customers derive the most value from your offerings.
In practice: If your CX goal is faster adoption, create a “first 7 days” crash course that gets users to their first win. If your goal is expansion, drip out advanced tips that lead into upsell-worthy features.
Step 4: Measure success (engagement, adoption, retention)
- A program is only successful if you can prove its value. An education program that feels good but doesn’t change behavior is just expensive busywork.
- The only way to know if it’s working? Track what happens after people consume it. Are they logging in more often? Using advanced features? Sticking around longer? If you can’t answer “yes” with data, your content isn’t pulling its weight.
In practice:
- Track course completion rates, feature adoption before/after training, retention rates, and even NPS changes after education campaigns.
- Collect and analyze learning data to measure the impact of your training programs and optimize your approach. Gather customer feedback through surveys and post-interaction evaluations to assess the effectiveness of your educational resources.
- Monitor customer adoption as a key metric to ensure your program is driving real customer wins. Use that intel to refine, cut, or scale the right assets—so every piece is tied to real customer wins.
Step 5: Keep it updated as your product evolves
Imagine a customer opening your “Getting Started” video, only to see menus and features that no longer exist. A bunch of outdated instructions! If your product changes every quarter, your education content should too.
In practice: Tie your content update schedule to your product release cycle. When a new feature drops, ship the education assets at the same time. The customer education team should be responsible for designing, implementing, and managing these updates to ensure all learning content stays current and effective.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Let’s talk about the pitfalls in advance so you can build a more effective and impactful customer education program from the start.
Information overload
More content isn’t always better. Yes, you have a lot of knowledge to share. But dumping it all on customers at once is like handing them a 500-page manual when they just want to know where the “on” button is.
One-size-fits-all training
Your power users don’t need the same content as brand-new signups. And your enterprise clients don’t need the same path as solo freelancers. To effectively drive product adoption and loyalty, it’s important to segment and tailor onboarding flows and content for new and existing customers, addressing their specific needs.
A single generic course is easier to build—and way easier to ignore. Existing customers also benefit from ongoing education and targeted content to ensure they continue to find value and stay engaged.
Not marketing your program enough
If your customers never hear about your education content that lives quietly in a hidden help center, they can’t benefit from it—and you can’t expect adoption, retention, or loyalty to magically improve.
So, is a customer education program right for your brand?
A well-designed customer education program can drive customer growth by increasing engagement and retention. But is it right for you? Take the time to assess this instead of just jumping on the bandwagon.
Questions to ask before you build
- Do you have complex onboarding? Your product’s value isn’t instantly obvious. New users need a guided path to get their first win, or they risk drifting away before they ever experience its full potential.
- Are support tickets frequently tied to a lack of product understanding? When your team is fielding basic “how do I” questions day after day, it’s a sign customers aren’t finding the resources they need to succeed.
- Is your product evolving quickly? Frequent releases are great for innovation, but they also mean customers constantly need to relearn and adapt. Without an education program, those shiny new features go unused.
When it’s time to invest (or outsource)
If you nodded “yes” to more than one of the above, you’re in prime candidate to invest in customer education. That doesn’t mean launching a huge academy. It means starting small with the most high-impact content, testing what resonates, and scaling as you go.
The customer success team should be considered key stakeholders in this process, as they play a crucial role in onboarding, training, and supporting customers throughout their journey.
And if you want to skip the slow trial-and-error phase or if you’re a lean company or don’t have the in-house expertise, you can outsource with a CX team to build and run it for you.
Customer success managers are also instrumental in supporting education initiatives, ensuring personalized onboarding and ongoing customer support as your program grows.
Educate. Empower. Earn loyalty.
A customer education program is one of the fastest ways to produce empowered, confident, and loyal advocates. Its primary purpose is to educate customers so they can achieve their goals and become proficient with your product. It’s far more than a collection of articles and videos—it’s a deliberate strategy to make sure your customers maximize the value of your brand.
Any company can start by addressing a single pain point or even creating a simple getting-started guide. The best customer education program examples aren’t complicated, but intentional. The key is to begin and keep iterating.
If you want to accelerate that process, LTVplus can help you design, support, or scale a customer education strategy. LTVplus is the go-to partner for Technical Support Outsourcing. Book your free consultation.
