#32: Scaling Customer Education To Drive Engagement and Retention

Educating customers is a non-negotiable in SaaS. 

To put it simply: Customers that don't know how to use your product can't get value and won't keep paying you. 

But the journey of scaling customer education is brutal.

✅ Webinars nobody shows up to

✅ Emails that never get opened

✅ Knowledge-base articles that go unread while support tickets pile up 

✅ Silent and empty communities 

The frustrating thing is that the tools above are recognised as industry best practices. They seem to work for every successful SaaS business, so...

Why are these tried and tested methods not working for you? 

In today's issue, I'm going to share with you three lessons I've learned through my own journey of building and scaling customer education programs. 

I hope these insights help you make sense of the generic advice that's out there and get you thinking about what is getting in the way of your team's success!

#1 Digital is not a strategy, it's a reaction.

The number one issue I see with Scaling Customer Education is that most businesses don't have a digital strategy. They are trying to plug capacity holes with half-baked ideas and are allocating zero resources behind them. 

They don't have a vision for the future of their customer journey.

They don't have a roadmap to get to that vision.

They don't have the right resources to deliver scale programmes. 

So is it really a surprise that they are failing?

Solution: You need to create a vision for the customer experience. Once you have the vision, you can create a CS roadmap and prioritise what initiatives get piloted and rolled out each quarter based on your resource capacity. 

It's better to move slowly in the right direction than to move fast and accomplish nothing.  

Resource to help you: Journey Maps Newsletter

#2 Losing humanity in favour of efficiency.

Early in a company's lifecycle, education is white-glove and engagement is 1:1. Then suddenly,  you're asking them to find their own answers or engage with soulless marketing emails. 

Customers feel like they are losing their one and only resource, their trusted advisor. 

Nobody is going to respond well to this.

You need a middle ground. A slow and steady journey that feels like you are adding to the experience, not removing from it.

Solution: Don't lose the human. Make sure that even when your communication is automated, it feels like it's sent by their CSM (ie. no fancy marketing templates, use real people's email inboxes etc). Then start scaling by using the touchpoints where customers favour speed over connection. That's usually the 'how-to' questions and product updates, not the complex processes. 

Scale doesn't mean faceless.

Resource to help you: 8 Guiding Principles For Creating Content That Drives Customer Outcomes

#3 Wrong measures of success

Leadership is impatient with success. They want to be hitting the industry benchmarks from day one. The problem is that industry benchmarks work best for mature programs. 

If you are starting your community and only 3 customers sign up for your User Group session, that doesn't mean your community is a failure. The goal at the start isn't volume, is value. 

You are there to learn:

• What's valuable for them?
• What attracted them to the session?
• What pain points they are struggling with?
• Did they take the desirable action after the interaction?

And to co-create these scale solutions with your customers. 

Solution: Find suitable pilot metrics for your scale programs. My favourites are the ones that look at interest (ie. open rates), engagement (ie. sign-ups), feedback (ie. what people think of the session) and action (ie. product usage). 

Success is the product of iteration, not first-time hits.

Resource to help you: How to start with digital CS

TL'DR:

Well, there you have it. My 3 pieces of advice for avoiding the mistakes people make when scaling customer education.

1. Create a Customer Experience Strategy and work towards it using a CS Roadmap; 
2. Retain the humanity in your communication by making it feel like it's coming from real humans in your team, not from marketing;
3. Start scaling by documenting 'how-to' questions and product updates;
4. Measure pilot initiatives using appropriate metrics, not industry benchmarks.

And remember, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon!

See you next Friday :D