The Customer Education Playbook

2Customer Education as a Catalyst for Business Growth

Effective customer education requires us to have a learning strategy and to overlay that strategy across the entire customer journey. As such, it is much more than an activity that's shared across many different teams, but rather, a strategic function for the business that is accountable for achieving specific goals in the same way as other functions, like sales, marketing, and customer success.

The Importance of a Centralized Strategy for Customer Education

When you don't have a centralized holistic function that is thinking about the entire learning journey, you can't help but end up with a disjointed and fragmented experience. If your learning isn't mapped out cohesively, the customer is not nurtured from one stage to the next, and customer education becomes limited to individual projects like creating some help articles for the support team or creating an onboarding workshop with customer success. You'll end up with different teams teaching your customers different things in different ways, and customers will almost certainly experience friction as a result.

In contrast, when customer education is a strategic function, you can focus on the holistic learning journey – by dedicating a team of professionals with expertise around facilitating behavioral change through learning.

What Else Is Customer Education? And What Isn't It?

When you're creating this centralized strategic function, some fundamental principles can ...