Customer success (CS) and customer education (CE) are both essential to helping customers thrive. Despite their shared goals, these teams often face friction that isn’t fun for either party and makes it harder for them to have real impact.
Customer success is on the front lines working directly with customers to ensure they’re getting value from the product. Customer education operates more behind the scenes, creating educational content that empowers customers to understand, use, and get more from the product.
Both teams are focused on driving usage and adoption, but CS is more focused on doing whatever it takes to renew the client, while CE has the benefit of creating a more holistic plan to drive sustained adoption.
Ideally, this would look like a powerful partnership, where CS and CE work together to identify learning needs, CE uses their expertise to create high-impact content, and finally, CSMs enable their clients with those materials.
That’s true alignment. But in reality, it often looks more like this:
- CS does their own customer training based on a customer’s most pressing needs.
- CE creates world-class content that <1% of licensed users ever access.
- CSMs send lengthy emails to clients hyperlinking videos and articles that might be helpful to their client based on their question or use case.
- Only the most engaged clients visit your product academy, and they have no easy way to proactively drive their licensed users to your academy for easier learning.
- Product support teams and customer education teams wind up competing for resources with unclear swim lanes
- Data around customer education are outdated, focusing on vanity metrics like course completions rather than impact on usage
Does that sound familiar? You’re not alone. And unfortunately, it’s the customer that ends up suffering the most.
So, it’s time to buckle down and take a closer look at how you’re structuring, measuring, and equipping these two business critical teams. Here are three actionable ways to align customer success and customer education into a stronger partnership.
1: Align on shared goals and metrics
Both CS and CE ultimately want the same thing: customer success. But to work together effectively, they need to agree on what success looks like and how to measure it. Beneficial shared metrics could include:
- Correlation between user learning activity and usage activity: This gives insights into knowledge gaps and helps measure the impact of CE content.
- Impact of learning activity on retention: Allows teams to design targeted initiatives that boost product understanding and ultimately, behavior changes.
- Support ticket volume: Insights into frequently raised issues can help CE identify where customers need additional training.
- Impact of educational content usage on user retention: Identify training assets and resources that are most effective for long-term product adoption.
- CSM call time: The time CSMs spend on calls supporting customers could be lessened with better customer education.
- Overall time-to-value: Both teams should track how long it takes for customers to start seeing value from the product after onboarding and training.
When it comes to metrics, be careful when using “vanity metrics” including engagement metrics like monthly active usage, training content viewed, and content interaction. Although these are relevant metrics that are easier to report, they don’t give insight into whether end-users are changing their behavior based on their training. (With BrainStorm’s platform, it’s easy to pull any important metric you might need to understand the impact of your product training.)
Remember, the key is to focus on effective metrics that show changes in behavior for a better indication of the value of your product education and the likeliness of renewal rates. Finding a regular time for CS and CE to review data can ensure that if customers aren’t engaging with educational content, adoption rates are lagging, or customers keep churning, both teams should work together to adjust their strategies.
2: Focus on making education content more actionable for CSMs and customer admins
To truly empower CSMs and customer admins, it’s essential to make educational content as actionable as possible. Instead of just offering a passive library of resources, provide ready-to-use tools that can be immediately implemented.
For example, create email templates that CSMs can quickly send out to customers, or design courses that are pre-packaged and ready for admins to assign to users with minimal effort. (BrainStorm doesn't just store all our content in a massive portal but offer a dynamic, personalized training platform for each user that is easily globally managed.)
An approach like this not only saves time but also makes it easy for CSMs and admins to deliver training, significantly enhancing the impact of customer education efforts.
3: Involve CSMs in building adoption campaigns and courses
Involving CSMs in the creation of adoption campaigns and courses can significantly boost the impact of your customer education efforts. When CSMs have a say in what’s being produced, they bring valuable insights from their direct interactions with customers, ensuring the content is both relevant and tailored to real-world needs.
For instance, CSMs might recommend including specific pain points they frequently hear from customers in training modules or suggest creating a step-by-step guide to address common workflow challenges.
By positioning CSMs as advisors or consultants in the content creation process, you not only tap into their expertise but also increase their ownership and commitment to driving product adoption. This involvement makes them more likely to actively promote the resources to their clients.
The takeaway
Building a stronger partnership between customer success and customer education is more than just about improving internal collaboration—it’s about driving real, measurable outcomes for your customers. When these two teams align, they create a seamless experience that boosts product adoption, reduces churn, and ultimately, ensures customer success.
By involving CSMs in content creation, making educational resources more actionable, and focusing on the right metrics, you can turn customer education into a powerful tool that supports long-term customer retention and satisfaction, exceeding customer expectations. When CS and CE are aligned, everyone wins.
Customer Success
