customer, but rather, it's about creating and delivering content to many different customers at the right time and at the right place. Customer education is about personalizing content so that it feels uniquely relevant to a customer's learning needs, without having to customize it.
It Is Not … Mandatory. Usually, no one will be forcing your customers to engage with customer education. It's not compliance training or internal employee education. That means you need to engage and persuade your users to keep going – you need their buy-in. For this reason, customer education can't be dry and technical, and it often uses a mix of marketing elements to help the content to sing to the customer and encourage them to want to learn.
Where Should Customer Education Sit in the Business?
If we accept that the customer is always learning, from the moment they start looking for a solution to a problem all the way through to when they love your product and are telling their friends about you, then customer education has to work closely with many different business functions. The most common are marketing, product, professional services, and customer success. For this reason, it's not always easy to know where to place customer education as a business function. It doesn't have a clear and obvious home. A lot of companies house it under customer success, emphasizing the role that customer education plays in finding and maximizing value when customers need help or when you want to quicken their time to value so that they renew their subscriptions or relationship.
Other companies will place it in marketing. This works particularly well if your education plays a pivotal role in converting free tier or trial plan customers into paying customers or in attracting Educated Qualified Leads (EQLs). As customer education teams have a deep understanding and empathy for how customers are using the product, they think deeply about the industry and its needs. They have a strong understanding of both your product and the market itself. This makes customer education professionals an exceptionally good choice for creating thought leadership content to bolster the authority of your brand in your market category.
Occasionally, you'll find that customer education shows up in product teams as a way to deepen product adoption and to formalize a connection between the product and the customer base. Placing customer education here can create a connective tissue between the product itself and the customer. If your product is very complex, this can make a lot of sense. Lastly, more commonly in larger organizations, we've seen customer education crop up as a function under professional services, where training and education play a big role in driving revenue for the business.
That's Where It's Traditionally Placed. But, Where Should It Be?
All of those departments are where you might find customer education. However, while they each have benefits, placing customer education under a different department often limits the scope of what it can achieve in a way that serves the overarching goals of that function. That's why at Thought Industries, we have a Learning Strategies department with a VP who reports directly to the CEO and shares a seat at the table with the leadership team. Our charter is “Educate the market, educate the customer, and educate the team.” We'll talk more about how Learning Strategies works as a department and how it can support the rest of the business in Step 7 (Chapter 9).
No matter where it sits, customer education as a strategic function is a force multiplier. It amplifies your ability to do more with less. It's a catalyst for accelerating growth throughout the customer journey. All the decisions that your customers make, from buying and adopting to renewing or expanding usage, are grounded in education. They are all about what the customer learns, and how these lessons shape their attitude and behavior.
As a scale agent for the company, it doesn't make sense to wait until you're throwing headcount at your support team or your customer onboarding process before you look to hire a customer education team. Start with the customer education function, and your business can grow proactively, ready for economies of scale.
The Customer Education Portfolio
You've got your strategic function in place, and you're ready to support the business, but what areas fall under your responsibility? Here are some of the most common programs that customer education will take ownership of, and the technology stack and expertise you'll need to run them effectively.
Knowledge Base
Also known as a help center, the knowledge base is often the first education program to come online in the lifecycle of the business. It's essentially a collection of articles that helps customers troubleshoot and find answers to their questions. Think of it like a digital instructional manual: great for self-serve and usually easy to search and filter. It is a customer education tool rather than customer education in and of itself.
Your knowledge base is a foundational program for your customer education portfolio, but it's not usually where deep learning takes place. Instead, it's more about information and knowledge transfer, and it's particularly helpful for customers who are just getting started, or who need a little help figuring out how to use a specific feature.
How to Build and Staff Your Knowledge Base You'll likely want to explore implementing a content management system (CMS) to manage your knowledge base. Some people may choose to use a learning management system (LMS), which can help with templates for support articles, but this isn't essential. Some help centers use a GitHub repository to publish content on the website. However, if your product is complex, this can be difficult to update and maintain, and you can end up having issues with version control and management across teams or stakeholders.
In terms of staffing, start with a technical writer – preferably one who has a dash of marketing under their belt. This is because your articles need to be both digestible and concise, but also weave in the value proposition and industry best practices. If you can achieve this, then you're not only deflecting support tickets, you're also starting to explain to your customers and prospects what they can gain from using your product.
One last tip: Don't put your knowledge base behind a sign-in wall for your customers only. I'm often amazed at how often help center content is read by prospects and even people who haven't ever heard of your brand, but who have been channeled to some content during a random Google search. This is a great way to get EQLs and promote brand awareness.
Academy
This is where you'll focus much of your efforts around learning. Customer academies can also be called universities or learning centers. They usually offer courses, videos, and activities that help customers onboard and quickly find value with your products. They do this in a way that's less about knowledge transference and more about deep learning that ultimately leads to behavioral change. Content could be self-paced, eLearning content, or tutorial videos – and sometimes you'll find blended training or virtual instructor-led training (VILT). Often, your academy will start with onboarding content to help your customer find value as quickly as possible. Later, you can supplement onboarding content with deeper or broader learning tracks that help your customers develop mastery with your products. You can even create a certification to demonstrate this proficiency. Eventually, you can expand your content strategy to continuing education, helping customers become experts – not only with your product, but also in their industry. For example, at Thought Industries, it isn't enough that we teach you how to use our platform. We also want to teach you how to create exceptional learning experiences so that the product becomes a canvas for your own customer education strategy.
How to Build and Staff Your Academy You'll definitely want an LMS to create and manage your academy – preferably one that specializes in customer learning. A lot of people make the mistake of only thinking about what they need right now, but you should look for one that scales with your program beyond your first year. It's a huge pain to rip out an LMS and replace it. Look for an LMS with customization