The Customer Education Playbook

15Your Roadmap to High-Performance Customer Education

As part of our research into the state of customer education, and our charter of “educating the market,” we spoke to dozens of organizations about their goals, their challenges, and the initiatives that helped them advance the performance of their programs. We identified the qualities of great customer education leaders, and we asked several of these leaders to share their journey, their insight, and their advice.

These stories highlighted the natural contours for how customer education programs evolve and thrive, and surfaced the unique obstacles faced by professionals in the field. Ultimately, we identified a five-stage roadmap from the earliest, least-mature programs all the way to those that are at the most innovative and future-focused stage of the game. You can see this maturity model in Figure 15.1. Now that we've reached the end of the Playbook, we want to share it with you as a reference and a guide for achieving growth in your own customer education programs.

Figure 15.1 Customer Education Maturity Model

The Five-Stage Maturity Model for Customer Education

How can you use this maturity model? First, recognize that all companies will go through these stages, but not all at the same pace. Everyone starts at stage one, but some will quickly go from two to three – if, for example, they have comparatively more ...