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The Ultimate Guide to Planning a Customer Education Strategy
Building a solid customer training program takes more than just throwing content together. It needs careful thought and planning. But while it might feel complicated and big, with the right approach it’s totally doable—and the long-term rewards are more than worth it.
Organizations that take the time to understand their audience, assess their content needs, and set clear goals are the ones that see real, measurable results. On the other hand, those who rush into it without a plan often waste time and resources.
In this post, we’ll guide you through the key steps to create a customer education strategy that works—one that sets you up for long-term success.
Involve the right teams in your customer training plan
While customer training programs are often led by one team—like Customer Success—that doesn’t mean it’s a solo project. In fact, the more teams involved, the better. Each department brings unique insights and strengths that can help shape a truly impactful education strategy.
Think about it—your customers interact with different teams at various points in their journey, from pre-sales to support. So, when planning your customer education program, it’s important to involve all these key stakeholders. Identify who will play a part in creating, delivering, and refining the training materials. Each team has something valuable to contribute.
Here’s how different teams can add value:
- Customer Success Team: Creates the course content, manages the LMS, and communicates with customers about training.
- Sales Team: Provides key customer insights and acts as subject matter experts based on prospect feedback and questions.
- Support Team: Offers firsthand knowledge of where customers struggle the most, helping tailor the training to address these pain points.
- Design Team: Ensures the training content is visually appealing, engaging, and in line with your brand’s look and feel.
Mapping out your stakeholders and their roles is critical to making sure everyone is aligned and knows exactly how they’re contributing to the program’s success. Plus, having a collaborative approach will help you create a more cohesive experience for your customers.
Use research to strengthen your customer education strategy
Before you can start building a strong customer training program, you need to know where you’re starting from. That’s where research comes in. By conducting a thorough process audit, you’ll get a clear picture of what’s working, what’s missing, and where there’s room to grow.
These key questions will help guide your research:
- What training and resources are we already providing?
From formal guides to snippets of advice shared in emails or on calls, gathering all this content helps you see what training is currently in place. This overview will help you spot gaps and redundancies. - Which teams are involved in customer training?
While the Customer Success team often leads the charge, we’ve talked about how other teams—like Sales and Support—play a huge role in shaping your customer’s experience. Take stock of the touchpoints where other teams are already providing insights, and figure out how to bring their expertise into your official training plan. - What tools are we using?
Do you already have an LMS or other tools for developing training materials? Are they being used effectively? Taking a look at your existing tools will show you where there are opportunities to improve, streamline, or add new resources to make your strategy more effective. - What does our internal data tell us?
Dive into your CRM, support ticket history, or customer feedback to see where customers are getting stuck or what common questions are popping up. These patterns will help you prioritize which areas of training to develop or improve. - What do our teams and customers say?
Beyond data, don’t forget to gather qualitative insights from both your internal teams and customers. Your teams can point out areas where they’re seeing customer confusion, and your customers can provide honest feedback about their experience with your current training. These insights will give you a real-world view of what’s working and what needs adjustment.
By answering these questions, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of where your customer training currently stands—and a roadmap for how to improve it.
Set clear learning objectives for your customer training program
Once you’ve gathered your research, the next critical step is developing clear learning objectives. These objectives act as the foundation of your entire customer education strategy. Without them, your courses risk becoming unfocused and ineffective.
The goal of learning objectives is simple: to define exactly what your customers should be able to achieve after completing the training. Think of them as measurable outcomes that guide the structure of each course. For example, if you’re teaching customers how to use email software, a learning objective could be: “Customers will be able to import a CSV email list into the system.”
Why is this so important? Because it keeps your courses focused, helps you measure success, and ensures that your training directly supports broader goals like adoption, engagement, and retention. Well-defined objectives also make it easier to set meaningful KPIs and evaluate the performance of your training program over time (more on that later!).
Divide and conquer to streamline course creation
By this stage, you should have a clear idea of how many courses your training program will need. Whether you’re developing 10, 20, or even 50 courses, it’s crucial to break down the workload so it’s manageable for your team—and so nothing falls through the cracks.
Start by assigning courses based on each team member’s strengths. Have someone who’s an expert on a specific product feature? They should own the courses related to that. If you have team members experienced in creating videos or editing, let them handle the multimedia aspects. Playing to your team’s skills will not only make the process smoother but also ensure that each course is delivered with quality and expertise.
Also, consider prioritizing courses based on customer need and business impact. Focus on the most critical topics first—the ones that will deliver the most value for your customers right away. This will help you get your program off the ground quickly while ensuring that the most important content is available when it’s needed.
Collaborating across departments and assigning work strategically allows you to build your program efficiently and keep momentum without overwhelming your team.
Establish a consistent approach to customer training experiences
When multiple people are creating content, it’s natural for different writing styles, explanations, and formats to emerge. But this can quickly create confusion for your customers. That’s why establishing a set of rules for course creation is so important. It ensures that every piece of content is cohesive, reflects your brand’s tone, and makes sense for your learners.
A structured course document is your go-to guide for making sure all courses look, feel, and read the same. It should outline everything—from the structure of each module to how you assess learning. For example, at LearnUpon, we ensure every course ends with an exam and includes interactive elements to keep learners engaged throughout.
Following these rules doesn’t just create consistency—it builds trust. Customers will come to expect a certain standard from your training, making it easier for them to engage with the content and get the most out of it.
Start small, then scale your customer training content
Now that you’ve mapped out your topics and structure, it’s time to start creating the course content. But don’t try to do everything at once. Starting simple will not only make the process more manageable, but it will also give you room to improve and scale your courses over time.
Start with the basics: simple slide decks with images, PDFs, and other text-based formats are perfect for getting your first courses off the ground. As you become more comfortable, you can expand into more complex content—like videos using tools such as Camtasia, or interactive courses built with authoring tools like Articulate Rise or Elucidat.
Why mix content formats? Because it helps cater to different learning styles. Some learners prefer reading through guides, while others absorb information better through videos or interactive modules. A good LMS will allow you to combine multiple formats in your courses, helping keep learners engaged and ensuring your content resonates with a wider audience.
Don’t forget to leverage the resources you already have, too. Whether it’s eBooks from Marketing, decks from Sales, or internal guides, repurposing existing assets is a great way to save time while creating high-quality content.
Get your customer education strategy going with an MVP
Creating a customer training program is a journey, not a sprint. You won’t be able to launch every course you have in mind right away, and that’s perfectly okay. This is where the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach comes in.
The idea is to focus on the most important courses first—the ones that will deliver the most immediate value to your customers. Start with content that addresses their most pressing needs or common challenges. This way, you’re able to get your training program off the ground faster, while still providing meaningful support to your users.
By prioritizing what’s most essential, you set realistic expectations for your team and your customers. This phased approach also gives you room to gather feedback and make improvements along the way. As you roll out new content, you can refine and expand your training library to cover more advanced topics or niche areas.
Remember, an MVP approach doesn’t mean settling for less—it’s about being strategic and intentional with your content, so you can continuously add value without overwhelming your resources.
Measuring the success of your customer education strategy
Bringing your strategy to life is just the first step. To truly understand its impact, you need to track the right metrics and measure how effective your program is in driving real results. By regularly reviewing key data points, you’ll be able to fine-tune your strategy, improve engagement, and ensure that your customer education efforts are delivering long-term value.
Here are three critical metrics to focus on:
- Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a direct reflection of how well your training meets the needs of your users. Post-training surveys and feedback forms are great ways to gauge satisfaction, while metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) provide insight into whether customers would recommend your product based on their training experience. The higher the satisfaction, the more likely customers are to stay loyal and become advocates for your product. - Course Completion Rates
Completion rates are a clear indicator of how engaging and relevant your content is. If customers are completing your courses, it’s a good sign they’re finding value in the material. Low completion rates likely mean that the content is too difficult, too long, or not relevant enough. Segmenting completion rates by customer role or journey stage can also help you pinpoint where improvements need to be made. - Product Usage
One of the ultimate goals of customer education is to increase product adoption and usage. By tracking how frequently and effectively customers use your product after completing training, you can measure the long-term success of your program. Are customers engaging with more advanced features? Are support tickets decreasing because customers feel more confident navigating the platform? These insights will help you align training outcomes with broader business goals, like customer retention and growth.
By keeping an eye on these metrics, you’ll be able to continuously optimize your customer education strategy and ensure it’s driving meaningful results for both your customers and your business.
Voila – there’s your blueprint for a successful customer education strategy
As you can see, creating an effective customer training program is more than just developing training materials—it’s about crafting a complete plan that aligns with both your business goals and the needs of your customers. By collaborating across teams, setting clear learning objectives, and using the right metrics to measure success, you’ll ensure your program delivers lasting value.
If you’re ready to refine your approach and build a customer training academy that truly drives results, download our free eBook How to Build a Customer Training Academy That Drives Results for actionable insights and step-by-step customer training steps.
