Education is a key component of Customer Success. Without training, customers don’t utilize products or find value in solutions, which jeopardizes the opportunity for renewal and expansion. I bet you’re not surprised. In fact, I would venture to guess you’ve seen statistics like, “92% product renewal average for trained customers” and “135% increase in product usage for customers who consume training.”
What is surprising is the number of Customer Success (CS) and Education Services (ES) organizations that are living in silos, working separately from one another on essentially one shared goal: helping customers experience the very best their product has to offer.
As Michael Harnum, CEO of ESG, recently wrote in Knowing is Growing: Integrating Education Services for More Powerful Customer Success, “Education goes beyond how a product works to the more profound concepts of benefit and value. Demonstrate the intrinsic benefits of your product, and engagement and adoption will Teach your customers how your product helps to solve their most severe pain points and go a long way toward overcoming your retention/renewal challenges. Uncover and optimize the full value of a product for a customer, and the stage is set to upsell them to further enhance their experience and ultimately their results.”
If this is true, why aren’t CS and ES teams clamoring to collaborate? The truth is, many don’t know where to start. The concept of Customer Success is still relatively new, so there are few guidelines dictating CS planning and execution. Effective Customer Success strategies positively impact all stages of the customer lifecycle. And when Education resources are focused on key intersection points within that lifecycle, adoption and retention rates rise exponentially. However, there’s no agreed upon instruction manual explaining where education should be inserted for maximum impact and few teams have extra resources to devote to bridging the gap between CS and ES.
While the struggle is real – it’s not impossible to overcome. If you’re looking for suggestions on how and where to combine Education and Customer Success, or if you’re wondering how other organizations are overcoming resource gaps to bridge ES and CS, check out the white paper, Knowing is Growing: Integrating Education Services for More Powerful Customer Success. In it, Michael Harnum shares his experience working with clients who are searching for the same answers.