How to Design a Successful Customer Education Platform

Let’s quickly review why having a customer education platform as part of your overall retention strategy is critical. With a customer education platform, you can do two core things. First, you empower your customers to have a dedicated area for all the resources they need to maximize their ROI on the product or service they’ve purchased or subscribed to. 

The second core element is a reduction in the need for customer service officers and customer success managers because customers are able to quickly find the answers and educate themselves when needed. With these empowered customers who need minimal hand-holding, they start to become experts in your product. Eventually, this can lead them to become advocates for other potential customers in the future. 

Being able to design a customer education platform that is useful and successful requires having a few key areas handled beyond simply choosing the right learning management system or dumping all the information and guides in a centralized location.

Understand Your Market

The market for a SaaS CRM versus a financial ERP system will be different, just as the functionality is. That means you need to be aware of who your target audience is with the product before laying down the foundation of your customer education platform. From there, you’ll start to know what is the most relevant content to create that gets users to become super users. 

You then want to develop the roadmap of what are the most important parts of the customer education platform to build out first, and as soon as each key component is completed, to launch it out to the user base. This helps keep your product or service fresh in the mind of the consumer while at the same time providing them with the information they need.

Don’t Create Dry Content

Never head down this road. Any content you create for your customers should be engaging and easy to use. You don’t want to bog down your customers with an information overload that is boring to digest, as it will deter them from understanding the necessary features to succeed with the product. This means producing content in different mediums, not just text, such as instructional videos, informative podcasts, and easy-to-absorb infographics and flow charts that show the intended use of the product or service. 

Keep the right mix as well, as this is meant to be in an engaging educational format, not in the format of entertainment, with overloaded amounts of video content. 

Always Work Towards Improvement

Just as your product or service is improved or expanded upon, so should your customer education platform. That means first, you want to review the existing data of how your customers engage with the product. Where are they most engaged, and where does there seem to be a pinpoint? 

In addition, you want to head towards the data you get from the customer education platform as well, on how your customers engage with the content created and what seems of interest. 

From this, you want to work towards a continuous improvement model. Keep the content fresh and engaging as trends shift, and always ensure the information is as up-to-date as possible. Find a way to make unused content refreshed and engaging, as they may be missing out on the core features of your product. 

Ensure Ease of Use

You want your customer education platform to be user-friendly and have users from a wide variety of people. Whether they know your platform intimately or barely use your type of product or technology. You also want to make sure that it’s possible to be used by all, including those that may have disabilities or issues with accessibility to your online customer education platform, and that you design alternative methods with that in mind. 

Your customer education platform will ensure that customers are confident in using your product or service. In addition, it will lead to stronger customer relationships, which have their own set of long-term benefits as well. Otherwise, your customers may end up frustrated and not see the value or the path on how your products can help them reach their goals consistently.