Customer success is synonymous with business success, and it’s time we take a more scalable approach to alleviating the pressure and pain points of customer success managers (CSMs). How? Through formalized education. Education is no longer a supplementary service–it’s a strategic power play that supports the bottom line.
Greg Rose, CXO at Intellum, recently joined a conversation with John Ragsdale, Distinguished Researcher and VP of Technology Ecosystems at TSIA, to shed light on how strategic education initiatives can drive customer success.
Education as a Catalyst for Customer Success
There’s a key distinction between selling outcomes and empowering customers to achieve those outcomes. Businesses tend to focus heavily on the former—convincing customers of the value of a product through marketing and sales efforts, but they fall short in making sure customers have the knowledge and resources they need to fully maximize that value during and after implementation. This gap can lead to customer churn, as clients struggle to realize the full potential of the products they purchased. Or, CSMs become responsible for closing this gap by answering the same questions over and over, while still growing their client base.
Greg and John emphasized the importance of scaling education initiatives to systematically guide customers, and customer success teams, toward success. Let’s face it: the goals of customer success and customer education are similar, with customer education being the scalable approach to achieving those goals. We’ll get to the “how” of that in a minute.
Customer Success + Customer Education
Customer success teams often find themselves sharing overlapping responsibilities, sometimes even outpacing support teams in their understanding of customer needs.
If an organization relies on CSMs to serve its customers, then as the customer base grows, so does the need for more headcount. But perhaps that’s not in the budget, and yet cost reduction and increasing customer retention and satisfaction are key business objectives.
The solution lies in strategically leveraging a formalized education program—one that not only scales with your customer base, but also enhances retention, increases satisfaction, and drives deeper product adoption. By aligning education strategies with customer success goals, companies can create a virtuous cycle that benefits both the business and its customers. This approach empowers customers with the knowledge they need to succeed, and reduces the demand on CSMs.
And if customer education activates customer success, then it’s important to collaboratively build a formalized customer education program that is carefully planned, executed, and continuously improved.
Wondering how? Great question…
The Four Steps to Successful Customer Education
1. Define education for your company.
Start by clearly defining what customer education means to your organization. What outcomes are you aiming to achieve? How will education be delivered across different touchpoints in the customer journey to help achieve those outcomes?
Example: If there’s been an increase in support tickets, you may reassess the content of your onboarding initiatives. If not, you have an opportunity to leverage education to address the topics regularly surfacing in support tickets.
2. Document where and when education happens.
Creating a detailed map of where and when education takes place is crucial, recognizing it can happen at any point in the customer journey. This documentation helps build a strong business case for a customer success-led education program.
3. Identify key education initiatives.
You can start with what you already have in motion—onboarding, skills and enablement, or certification. Use these foundational elements as the cornerstone of your education strategy. Keep in mind, only content that teaches and empowers will help you achieve the customer success goals that education can deliver.
4. Build the business case for investment.
Align your education initiatives with broader business goals, because after all, proving the value of your education program requires a focus on the metrics that matter most to the business. If the focus is product adoption, then start creating personalized learning paths to enhance user engagement and streamline the onboarding process.
Empowering Success Through Education
The moral of the story is: there’s true transformative power in customer education. By taking a strategic approach to focusing on initiatives that directly impact business goals, customer success teams can demonstrate that they understand customer needs better than anyone else.
As you consider your own customer success strategies, ask yourself: Are you empowering your customers to succeed through education? Are you leveraging the right tools and data to optimize your efforts? If not, it’s time to rethink your approach. Your customers—and your bottom line—will thank you.
