An Ultimate Guide to Product Education [Important for Customer Success]

Watching clueless Mr. Bean try out funny schemes to do everyday tasks is amusing. But a clueless customer is a big NO-NO!

When customers can’t figure out how to use a product, they do not get the product value and cannot leverage its features to solve their issues. As a result, you witness declining user engagement and conversions and sky-high churn rates.

Product education is the key to ensuring that customers discover the product’s value and use it optimally to resolve their issues. And we aren’t even exaggerating!

So, are you ready to understand product education better?

What is Product Education?

Product education is a practice to help users understand the uses and benefits of a product and how the product can help them fulfill their needs. It involves every action a business takes to ensure the audience successfully uses the product to complete their tasks.

According to Daniel Ladra, Co-founder at Playou, “customer education means explaining the essence of the product to the customer so they can understand why. On the other hand, it is also about imparting knowledge of how exactly the product works so that the customer can use it better.”

To get a better understanding of customer education, listen to the full podcast here.

Why does Product Education Matter?

Have you ever bought a new gadget and lost the instruction manual? 😓

If yes, you know the pain of having a product but being clueless about how to use it.

It is the same with customers when they make a purchase. Hence, product education is a must.

Without product education, users won’t be able to understand and leverage the product features fully to achieve their goals.  

An effective product education strategy drives better engagement with the product. As a result, it increases the chances of user adoption, eventually leading to increased customer retention and loyalty.

Here’s how.

Product Education Increases Customer Satisfaction

When customers know how to use a product to do their jobs; they can do it efficiently. As a result, they will no longer encounter challenges, and their satisfaction will soar. So, product education and user experience are directly connected.

Product Education Improves Retention

The higher the customer satisfaction, the better the retention rates.

Identify customer needs and give them every little detail about using your product. It drives customer engagement. The more engaged they are, the more they will discover value.

Product Education Impacts Business Revenue Positively

Good product education efforts mean higher user adoption and increased retention. Therefore, your SaaS business profitability can skyrocket if you leverage product education correctly.

Moreover, if you provide good product education to your customers, there will be fewer support tickets and queries for the customer support team. Thus, it can reduce support costs and positively impact your business revenue.

Product Education in Action

Shopify is a DIY platform that offers several simple, no-code tools for customers to sell their products online. However, the company soon found that customers were not really comfortable using the multiple features and tools.

In short, “the more, the better” didn’t go well with the Shopify users. Moreover, they were not able to use the platform’s full potential.

The Shopify team understood that they needed a fun and manageable product education system to retain customers and increase product loyalty. Thus, Shopify set up an engaging and frictionless learning system for customers that led to solving significant customer experience issues. It also increased Shopify’s monthly learner’s usage by 491%.

Read the full case study here.

How to Educate Your Customers on Product?

CEO of Marketo (a marketing automation provider), Phil Fernandez says, “The biggest growth limiter for our market is customer education.” Hence, educating customers is a must to ensure growth, especially in dynamic industries like software and tech.

In this section, we’ll tell you a few effective ways to educate potential users about your product.

User Manuals

User manuals are detailed explanations of how to use the product. They are long and comprehensive technical articles loaded with screenshots and guidelines.

Though critical to a few B2B businesses, user manuals may not be the best option for product education. In fact, research says that only 25% of the time, people read product manuals. That’s because seeing the product in action helps customers understand its functionalities better, which brings us to our next point.

Product Tutorials

You can also call it a product education video, where businesses explain their product and its features and display its usage through video or a video series. This option is better than a user manual but could be more efficient as it lacks interaction. However, product walkthrough videos help product users to learn things more effectively than a user manual.

Interactive Product Demos

An interactive product tour is the best and most popular way to educate customers about your product. These are interactive tutorials where users are made to perform assisted tasks using the product.

This product education approach is completely user-oriented. Hence, it’s fun and engaging for customers. Additionally, users learn to use the product more efficiently.

Click on the 'Start Interactive Tour' Button to check it out 👇

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There are two ways you can create interactive product tours.

• First, do it yourself. It requires dedicated time, effort, multiple resources, and technical knowledge.
• Second, use tools/ software. There are easy-to-use tools to help you build killer product demos, like Storylane. Learn more about guided product demos here.

Besides the above three ways, here are a few digital channels that can aid you in educating your potential customers.  

Website

Your website is perhaps the most accessible platform for customers. Hence, leverage its power. Provide helpful content like educational blogs on your website.

Further, you can add videos, eBooks, white papers, and case studies outlining how your product works and its relevant features. Thus, customers can educate themselves with the help of these resources, eliminating the need for as much real-time support as you might need to provide otherwise.

Tools and Forums

We have already covered interactive walkthroughs. So, here we’ll talk about seminars, webcasts, and social media channels.

• Conducting seminars effectively establishes face-to-face contact with the customers and explains the product’s feature usage.
• Call it a webcast, webinar, or live stream; it helps you reach many customers simultaneously, accelerating customer education. Hold interactive webcasts about your product, and record and upload them on your social media profiles or website.
• Link your product education content and promote them on your social platforms to communicate your product usage and benefits to a wider audience. Create social posts on your product, share product demos, videos, and more.

Top Benefits of Product Education

A report by Intellum-Forrester confirmed that customer education programs directly benefit a company. The study showed that with a customer education program in place, the bottom line revenue increased by 6.2%, customer retention by 7.4%, and support costs reduced by 6.1%.

Let’s see what more benefits product education offers.

Quality Customer Support

89% of customers changed loyalties because of poor customer service. Hence, the quality of customer supports you provide matters.

Investing in product education results in fewer complaints as customers can resolve snags based on their product knowledge. As a result, the customer support team gets to focus on the reported complex issues.

They can provide great assistance to customers facing critical issues. Hence, the problems are resolved quickly, leading to quality support services and increased customer satisfaction.

Brand Credibility

Customers (especially in B2B SaaS) appreciate transparency. So, never take the ‘ignorance is bliss’ approach. Instead, provide every possible assistance to educate your customers about your product or service to enhance their product education experiences. Once customers know your product, they trust you more.

Further, a ‘trustworthy’ brand improves satisfaction level, adoption rates, customer advocacy and encourages repurchases. Also, customers refer the brand to people, bringing in new customers. And all of this directly impacts your bottom line ROI.

Faster and Easier Onboarding

Onboarding means giving customers the information essential to using the product, and product education is what you need.

Product education details the use of the product, its features, and its benefits, making it easier for customers to use it for their business tasks.

With interactive product demo tools, customer success managers can attend to every customer. As a result, they can easily create personalized demos and onboard several customers with minimal effort.

Online Communities

Today’s tech-savvy customers network over social channels to know about a product before buying. They also take help from forums in the post-purchase phase of their journey.

Product education can help you start online communities on different platforms where educated customers can respond to the queries of new users. According to HubSpot, its online community is for users to “connect with peers, maximize your HubSpot knowledge, and learn how to grow better with HubSpot."

These communities are quite profitable for your business as they reduce customer support tickets and costs. Also, the communities foster word-of-mouth referrals and user-generated content.

Notion is the perfect example of a company with a strong online community that helps users understand their product better. Notion has a 270k-strong Reddit community where users can connect, solve issues, discuss features, share setups and templates, and get tips from other users.  

5 Tools to Educate Your Customers

If product education is on your priority list, you’ll need these tools to get started. Here are five tools to help you educate your customers.

1. Chameleon

Chameleon is a no-code customer education platform for product success. It helps SaaS teams develop a self-service onboarding process, feature adoption, and feedback collection. Your customer success and product teams can build, handle, and improve product experiences with any coding knowledge.

With Chameleon, you can highlight product changes and key functionalities to new users, reduce confusion, improve feature discoverability, and reduce support requests. You can also deploy customer surveys and let the tool collect data automatically. Thus, you can optimize product tours based on the data.

Key features

In-product Microsurveys – Build no-code in-app Microsurveys to collect customer feedback. Pick a template, design a quick survey based on user attributes, and launch to improve your product tours.

Self-service platform – Add custom branding, chatbots, and self-service portals to improve workflows or customer experiences.

Integrations – Connect Chameleon to different tools in your stack – Delighted, Amplitude, HubSpot, Calendly, Slack, Heap, Salesforce, Typeform, Vimeo, and more.

Pricing

There are three pricing options.

• Startup - $279/ month
• Growth - $999/ month
• Enterprise – Get a custom quote.

2. Skilljar

Skilljar is a customer education platform that helps you tailor customer trainings. The platform offers multiple tools to help you onboard, engage, and retain customers.

The tool is purpose-built for external education. Partnering with the company will help you to educate customers at scale, reduce the number of support calls received while allowing the customer success teams to focus on strategically driving engagement, customer satisfaction, and returns.

Key features

Customizable user experience – Create customer training portals to match your brand’s vibe with personalization options. Use the ready-to-use templates, dynamic theming control, and advanced customization options.

Analytics– This feature allows you to track learner’s progress, measure business performance, and assess content.

Integrations – Skilljar seamlessly integrates with multiple tools HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Zoom, Vimeo, and others.

Pricing

Contact the Skilljar team to get pricing details.

3. Storylane

Storylane is a product demo software that makes educating customers easy. The tool can speed up the process of getting your product in front of the right people.

An easy-to-use platform, Storylane lets you build interactive product demos and engaging tours to convert prospects into customers. It also helps you improve your MQLs and educate buyers quickly.

Key features

Interactive product demos – Share personalized demos with customers to ensure complete product education. Create demos aligned with buyer personas and support customers with product tutorials.

Interactive demo library – Create a repository of interactive product walkthroughs to assist your customers and get them started quickly.

Pricing

There are three plans by Storylane with a 7-day free trial.

• Solo – Free plan. Sign up to use specific features.
• Startup - $40 per month
• Growth - $500 per month

4. UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a customer onboarding software that helps you with product education. The tool has all the essential features to educate customers about a product.

UserGuiding is a no-code onboarding software that helps in user adoption and reducing customer churn rates with interactive product tours. With the help of this tool, you can guide your users and offer them articles they read without having to leave the app. Moreover, UserGuiding’s drag-and-drop interface lets you use the tool’s features without technical knowledge.

Key features

Survey implementation – This feature allows you to deploy NPS surveys to users and makes it easier to collect customer feedback.

Analytics – The analytics feature lets you get insights into customer experience and interests, helping you create more effective product walkthroughs and user onboarding.

Resource center – Keep all your resources – blogs, how-to guides, whitepapers, webinars, and help center articles – all in one place for easy access.

Pricing

There are three pricing plans.

• Basic plan - $69/ month
• Professional plan - $299/ month
• Corporate plan - $499+/ month

5. Litmos

Litmos is a customer training software that enables you to provide sophisticated training programs to users at scale.  This learning management solution is best-known for its easy-to-use features. A cloud-based solution, Litmos, allows HR teams, marketing managers, and other departments to collaborate to offer personalized customer education.

Key features

Integrations – The tool integrates with several platforms like Mailchimp, DocuSign, Okta, dropbox, Shopify, Zoom and others.

Analytics & Reporting – Get real-time insights from user analytics reports. Track customer progress, identify problem areas, and resolve issues before they cause friction in the product education process.

Pricing

There are three plans you can choose from.

• Litmos LMS
• Litmos Training Courses
• Litmos LMS+Courses

Get custom quotes for both plans by reaching out to the team.  

Get Started with Product Education

Product education is not something you can figure out later. It deserves utmost priority like other significant tasks. So, don’t keep it for the sales and support teams after product development. Instead, start working on it right away as a part of your product plan.

Coming to the tools you need to start to educate your customers, pick the one that fits your bill😎. And if you’re still stuck, sign up for free trials.

Storylane gives you the golden opportunity to try its features for seven days. Likewise, it also offers a free plan. Click to kickstart your product education journey.

FAQs

📖What is Product Education?

Product education explains to customers what a product does, its features and benefits, and how it can help them complete their tasks.

⌚When to Start Product Education?

Provide product education throughout the customer journey. For example, as users sign up, start with the initial product know-how and distribute it across different journey stages.

💲What is the Benefit of Educating Customers on Products?

Product education helps customers understand the product better. It increases user engagement, driving user adoption of products and increasing loyalty, and retention.

🤔What is the Best Way to Educate Customers?

The best way to educate customers is through interactive product demos as users learn by doing, and it keeps them engaged in a fun way.