The Customer Education Playbook

Deliver maximum value to customers and clients with this blueprint to customer success

In The Customer Education Playbook: How Leading Companies Engage, Convert, and Retain Customers, customer learning experts Barry Kelly and Daniel Quick explain how teaching customers to best engage with your products and services is the key to converting them from prospects to loyal advocates of your brand. 

In this book, you’ll examine how to define success for your customer, create a customer education development plan, and pursue customer success and revenue metrics. You’ll also:

• Learn why you should prioritize customer learning and invest in customer training and education
• Discover how to create a detailed customer success and retention plan that emphasizes delivered value
• Determine how to implement a learning strategy that maximizes and scales lifetime customer value

Perfect for founders, executives, managers, and practitioners at companies of all kinds, The Customer Education Playbook is especially practical for SaaS company executives seeking to extract and provide maximum value from their customers over the long haul.

Introduction vii

Chapter 1 How Customer Education Transforms Prospects to Champions 1

Chapter 2 Customer Education as a Catalyst for Business Growth 7

Chapter 3 Step 1: Maximize Impact by Aligning Customer Education to Business Goals 19

Chapter 4 Step 2: Motivate Customers by Curating Their Path to Awesome 39

Chapter 5 Step 3: Personalize Learning by Focusing on What Your Customers Need to Know 51

Chapter 6 Step 4: Execute Your Strategy Flawlessly with a Development Plan 63

Chapter 7 Step 5: Video or Course? Choosing the Right Content Format for the Job 77

Chapter 8 Step 6: Make Content Engaging and Efficient for the Busy Customer 95

Chapter 9 Step 7: Who Trains the Trainers? Transforming Your Team into Experts 111

Chapter 10 Step 8: Design Learning Experiences That Lead to Behavioral Change 127

Chapter 11 Step 9: Make Sure Your Customers Consume Your Content 141

Chapter 12 Step 10: Did It Work? Measuring the Success of Your Content 157

Chapter 13 Step 11: Actionable Strategies to Improve Your Content 171

Chapter 14 Step 12: Demonstrate the ROI of Customer Education 187

Chapter 15 Your Roadmap to High-Performance Customer Education 199

Chapter 16 Looking Ahead: The Future of Customer Education 209

Acknowledgments 217

About the Authors 221

Index 223

Daniel Quick is Vice President of Learning Strategies at Thought Industries. He previously led customer education at Optimizely and Asana.

Barry Kelly is Co-founder and CEO of Thought Industries, a world leading B2B customer training platform and developer of the world’s first cloud Learning Business Platform. His company has worked with hundreds of clients to improve their customer training and increase customer engagement and retention.

Customer education, in which companies train their clients and customers on how to extract value from the services they provide, is becoming increasingly vital as businesses move to recurring revenue models. It’s proving to be one of the keys to maximize and scale lifetime customer value. Despite this, many firms remain unfamiliar with how to successfully educate their customers on how to use their services and products.

In The Customer Education Playbook: How Leading Companies, Engage, Convert, and Retain Customers, customer education experts Daniel Quick and Barry Kelly deliver an intuitive and comprehensive blueprint for effective customer engagement with your products and services. Here, you’ll learn to convert your prospects into loyal advocates of your brand.

This book demonstrates how to define success for your customer, create a customer education development plan, and pursue customer success and revenue metrics. It also makes a compelling case for prioritizing and investing in customer learning and shows you how to design and implement a detailed customer success and retention plan.

Covering all aspects of the customer education process, the authors discuss optimal customer education formats, content distribution channels, and the measurement of program impact. They explore practical and pressing issues, like when to charge for additional training and when to offer it for free, and when to use prerecorded video and when to use live, instructor-led training.

An indispensable resource for founders, managers, and other business leaders at SaaS companies, The Customer Education Playbook belongs in the libraries of professionals at companies of all kinds seeking to extract and provide maximum value from their customers in the long run.

Praise for The Customer Education Playbook

“Customer learning is vital to any organization looking to educate their customers and/or grow their learning business. The Customer Education Playbook connects the dots to make sure your customer education is a success from pre-sale to renewal.”

Mark Roberge, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School; Co-founder, Stage 2 Capital; Former CRO, HubSpot

“The Customer Education Playbook is the most comprehensive and useful explanation of goals, techniques and value of customer education I have read. This playbook is an essential guide for customer success teams, customer education teams, or anyone responsible for exceptional customer education experiences.”

Cushing Anderson, Vice President, IT Education and Certification Research, IDC

“It’s time for customer education to move into the spotlight. SaaS companies dramatically increase customer retention when customers know how to use their products. Customer education is the catalyst for business growth, and The Customer Education Playbook is the spark to drive that growth.

Donna Weber, Author of Onboarding Matters