CustomerThink: Seeing the value in customer education

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Read the full article here.

A well-educated customer is valuable in a myriad of ways to a brand. They tend to adopt products and services more quickly and easily, draw less on customer support services, and they remain customers longer. This makes an informed customer valuable to both the top-and-bottom line performance of a company.

Brands are taking notice to this trend as well. Recent research from LearnUpon shows that 93% of companies increased spending on customer education in 2024 and planned to increase this year as well.

Despite increased investments, a maturity gap remains

While the research saw spending on customer education increasing, the customer education programs and their capabilities vary widely, creating a maturity gap with only one in six companies considering their program “mature”.

While marketing leaders have embraced education as a revenue lever, many teams are still cobbling together programs from dated webinars, FAQ PDFs, and other disjointed content sources instead of thinking comprehensively about the content that would be most valuable from the customer’s perspective.

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Successful companies treat their learning academies like they would any other growth platform. This includes creating clear roadmaps with owners, defined metrics, ownership, and responsibilities. This also supports the funding and other resourcing needed to make customer education more than a side project.

Thus, leaders should build a formal customer education maturity plan across people, processes,  and platforms, tied to churn, expansion, and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Allocated resources and money alone won’t close the gap, but those combined with a disciplined operating model will.

This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. Read the full article here.