The Customer Education Playbook

4Step 2: Motivate Customers by Curating Their Path to Awesome

Now that you've considered what your program is looking to achieve, it's important to differentiate between your organization's goals and the goals of your customers. When you think about what success means from the customer's point of view, it's not always going to naturally align with how your business defines success. If your company has a goal to increase revenue this year, you'll have trouble finding volunteers who have made it a priority to give you their money. If your organizational objective is to increase product adoption, you'll need to give customers a reason to adopt it.

Instead of purely focusing on your company's goals, you need to motivate your customers to behave in a certain way by meeting their needs. The customer may not have a direct need to adopt your product, but they do have a need that adopting your product will solve.

This is why it's so important to define your customer's goals independently of your product. You might instinctively think that the role of customer education is to train users on how to use your product, but in reality, that's not where you should focus—at least, not entirely.

Instead, customer education must put the value proposition front and center. First, look to understand how the customer defines success, and next, how you can design learning that allows your product to fit in as a tool to help achieve that success.

How Do I Work Out What “Success” Looks Like?

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