The Customer Education Playbook. Daniel Quick

are highly relevant and increasingly in demand. Customers are happy to pay for applicable and significant credentials that bolster their resume. Companies who can leverage this and create certifications that become known as the industry standard are carving out a competitive advantage, alongside a new line of revenue.

Crossing the Chasm: When Is the Right Time to Invest in Customer Education?

One of the first questions that you'll likely ask yourself is: When is the right time for your business to start investing in customer education?

To answer this question, we want to touch on the idea of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle by Geoffrey Moore, as seen in Figure 1.1.²

As your customers move through the lifecycle, they expect an increasing amount from your company. Innovators and early adopters, by nature, are likely to be more enthusiastic and self-motivated to learn and play with your product. On the business side, you have a lot more time on your hands at this stage to offer a white-glove experience when they need support. In contrast, as you cross the chasm into early-majority and late-majority adopters, your customers will start to expect more hand-holding and an established strategy for training them in how to be successful with your product. The profile of these kinds of customers dictates that they are going to be less comfortable or successful going it alone.

Figure 1.1 Crossing the Chasm

      Conventionally, as companies feel this pressure – the need for customer education becomes clear. When you arrive at this point, as you cross the chasm, your business will need to have a sound strategy in place for education if it is going to successfully scale.

      Let's take this even further and highlight the benefits of creating this strategy earlier in your maturity. As already outlined, customer education is beneficial throughout the customer journey, so why not bring it in at the beginning of your business maturity? Don't just view education as a function that will solve the learning needs of late-majority customers when they ask for help. Rather, also leverage education as a scaling function for content marketing and lead generation, as well as to support early adopters who might not traditionally need education as much but for whom low-effort content such as short, engaging videos can really deepen their engagement with the product. In that way, education helps your company to move from early market to mainstream, effectively facilitating the crossing of the chasm rather than merely reacting to it.

      This attitude may sound like we're conflating education with the marketing function of the business – and that's okay! There is a lot of overlap between the two. If the goal of marketing is to drive awareness and to attract and convert new customers, customer education can play a big role in that if you start your education function early. It's never too soon to be thinking about your customer learning strategy and journey, identifying the moments of their customer lifecycle and crafting a content strategy around teaching the right education at each of those moments. Increasingly, customers expect production-quality education, thanks to the likes of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more, so getting education involved in marketing projects can be a great way to boost marketing campaigns, too.

      Ready to get started? In the next chapter, we will discuss how to define the scope and responsibilities of your customer education team, including where to place your team to get the most value and how to choose the portfolio of education programs that will drive behavioral change across the customer lifecycle.

Notes

      1 ¹ US Census Bureau, “Business Formation Statistics,” December 8, 2021, https://www .census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html.

      2 ² Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, 3rd Edition (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2014).

2 Customer Education as a Catalyst for Business Growth

      Effective customer education requires us to have a learning strategy and to overlay that strategy across the entire customer journey. As such, it is much more than an activity that's shared across many different teams, but rather, a strategic function for the business that is accountable for achieving specific goals in the same way as other functions, like sales, marketing, and customer success.

The Importance of a Centralized Strategy for Customer Education

When you don't have a centralized holistic function that is thinking about the entire learning journey, you can't help but end up with a disjointed and fragmented experience. If your learning isn't mapped out cohesively, the customer is not nurtured from one stage to the next, and customer education becomes limited to individual projects like creating some help articles for the support team or creating an onboarding workshop with customer success. You'll end up with different teams teaching your customers different things in different ways, and customers will almost certainly experience friction as a result.

      In contrast, when customer education is a strategic function, you can focus on the holistic learning journey – by dedicating a team of professionals with expertise around facilitating behavioral change through learning.

       What Else Is Customer Education? And What Isn't It?

      When you're creating this centralized strategic function, some fundamental principles can help you stay focused and inform what customer education is and, perhaps even more importantly, what it is not.

      It Is … a Learning Journey That Is Overlaid on Top of the Whole Customer Journey. That means it's not just a slice of that journey, where you end up hyperfocused on one segment like onboarding. However important a single segment is, it is never where learning definitively starts or stops.

      It Is … Programmatic and Active. When you create customer education, you're intentional about facilitating learning in a specific way to get specific outcomes. You have a clear program that you put in place, and the content will be contextual, depending on what stage the learners are at and who they are. It's not a passive experience, where you create a bunch of content and then wait for the customer to engage.

      It Is … Grounded in Data. Customer education is a constantly living and adapting entity. It is not a static artifact that becomes stale and irrelevant, but rather, it involves a continuous cycle of knowing where customers are struggling, understanding your audience, and recognizing what they need at the right time and place. It's not shooting at the hip; it is data-driven and focused to align with the learning needs of the customer.

It Is Not … Just about Using the Product. The vast majority of people don't have a job that's about using your product. They have a job where your product is a tool that they can use to better complete their tasks. As a result, customer education is about helping your customers achieve success in their roles, doing the job that they hired your product to do. We'll talk more about this idea later, but the main thing to understand is that customer education thinks beyond the product. It's not about focusing on where to click but about equipping the customer with skills that allow them to thrive in their roles.

      It Is Not … Customized 1:1 Training. At its core, customer education is a strategy for scale. That means it's not focused on what might be effective