A 2022 report from the Customer Education Council found that 40% of customer education teams report to customer success.
This makes sense when you consider that most customer education focuses on the product—helping improve time-to-value, increase product adoption, and reduce customer churn.
Daphne Costa Lopes, a customer success thought leader and host of the This is Growth podcast, recently surveyed more than 600 customer success leaders to understand their priorities and investments for 2024. These insights can be powerful for customer education leaders looking to further align with their customer success team’s goals.
In this blog, we highlight two key takeaways from the CS Trends Report for customer education leaders.
Top Customer Success Priorities Align Closely with Customer Education
The survey found that many customer success leaders are prioritizing scale plays in 2024, including self-service resources (33%), webinars (17%), and in-app guides (17%).
Just shy of ⅓ of respondents also mentioned that customer onboarding is a top program investment area for 2024.
These are all areas where customer education can play a key role. The goal of customer education is to better educate the individual user or customer—and then scale that successful education across the entire customer base to achieve specific business outcomes like improved customer retention, increases in product adoption or utilization, or increases in revenue through cross-selling or upselling.
Customer Success and Customer Education Share Similar Goals
When asked what challenges they were aiming to solve for in 2024, customer success leaders mentioned:
- Scaling customer success (38%)
- Churn rate (35%)
- Usage and adoption (30%)
- Time to value (i.e., onboarding) (27%)
- Customer satisfaction (10%), amongst other key challenges
Customer education is in a position to help solve these problems. A 2019 Forrester study, commissioned by Intellum, found that formalized customer education programs drove a 6.2% increase in revenue, 7.4% increase in customer retention, 11.6% increase in customer satisfaction, and 6.1% decrease in customer support costs.
The 2023 State of Education Initiative Ownership Report found that 56% of education leaders saw an increase in customer retention as a result of their education programs.
Customer Education + Customer Success = Better Together
It’s clear there’s a lot of alignment between the goals and priorities of customer success teams and what customer education teams can do to support those goals.
Take Action: If you haven’t already, connect with your customer success leadership to understand what their priorities are for 2024. It’s likely there’s an opportunity for customer education to support those initiatives—creating a great opportunity for partnership and collaboration.
Continue Learning
Explore the ways customer education can activate customer success strategies and impact your business objectives in this webinar recording, Underscore: Connecting Customer Education and Customer Success.
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