Many out there believe that a customer education platform is only an investment into an expanded support component, especially for highly complicated products. Yet, in reality, a properly developed customer education platform leads to much healthier margins and an excellent ROI on your overall product.
It Helps to Reduce your Costs
Ultimately, with a fully fleshed-out customer education platform, this is an engaging guidebook for anyone to become a subject matter expert. That means there’ll be a significant reduction in needing a customer service team, as the answers a customer seeks will most likely be somewhere in the customer education platform.
This can even be extended to technical support issues in many cases, reducing the need for specialized customer support services.
It Helps to Increase Sales
This is a big one. As the confidence of your customers grows through the customer education platform, there will be an uptick in activity, and their level of expertise will also increase. That means more usage of your product. Eventually, there will be a need to expand the product features, which could lead to a higher pricing tier resulting in successful upselling.
The more powerful a customer education platform is, the less there will be a need for an actual sales team to help with the upselling since the customer becomes educated enough to make the decision on their own.
Suppose the company offers other relevant products with native interconnectivity as an example. In that case, this can also lead to cross-selling, where customers start to see the benefits of getting all their products and services from one company alone.
With such a dedication to your product, you’ll start seeing increased retention rates, which is especially beneficial for subscription-based business models and ongoing revenues.
In addition, with a minimized churn rate, there’s also a reduction in the costs it takes to keep those customers on board if they ever consider leaving. Of course, that always starts with a refined and thorough customer education platform.
It Leads to Fresh New Business as Well
With an efficient operation and highly satisfied and retained customers, word starts to get out just how great your product actually is. This leads to a wonderful brand image and reputation that helps reign in would-be customers from the prospects pool into conversions more often as they see the social proof happening.
A customer education platform shows the company’s dedication to investing significant resources to ensure that new customers aren’t left behind trying to figure out a sophisticated product on their own. This leads to shorter sales cycles and the ability to upsell new customers sooner, which continues to maximize the ROI on the initial investment of the customer education platform and always improves the overall margins.
No Need for a Large Investment Upfront
Do keep in mind that while one may be eager to enjoy all the benefits that can come with a customer education platform, one of its features is the fact that it tends to be scalable with the product itself. That means only an initial investment needs to be done with the product’s core and most sellable features first.
Then, as the business grows, reputations increase, and margins improve, you can allocate additional resources to your customer education platform, which helps to manage the costs and showcase a much stronger ROI in the long term, only improving the customer education platform as needed.
Also, listen to your empowered and growing community on what they would like to see next in the customer education platform. This helps the business develop a platform already in demand by the existing user base, which helps show that customer feedback matters, improving the reputation further down the line.
In addition, customers being heard leads them to recommend the company more often as the company themselves have shown they are open to this feedback and implement updates as requested.
As your business grows and becomes a market leader, it is possible to derive income from the customer education platform. You can start to develop certifications or even curate paid course offerings for enterprise levels and larger businesses. This educational revenue stream only helps to maximize the ROI of your overall customer education platform investment.
