What is the impact of Customer Education?
Customer Education Impacts can been organized into three categories. Skip to the metrics most important to you by using these links:
Marketing and Sales metrics
Product adoption & churn metrics
Operational efficiency metrics
Why is Customer Education important?
A well-designed customer training program positively impacts the most important drivers of business success —including driving product adoption, reducing support and success costs, improving CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), growing revenue, and generating leads.
This article brings together several different industry sources so you can benchmark your impact and advocate for resources. When you are building or growing a program, it helps to have statistics that articulate the ROI of a Customer Education program.
Determine your program's ROI using the Training Budget & ROI Calculator
Marketing and Sales metrics
Customer Education solutions can be used to build brand awareness and nurture prospects into your sales funnel. Product training solutions built for external audiences often serve to teach sales and field reps on features, which increases their product knowledge and directly results in more compelling sales motions. Once people become customers, training increases the stickiness of your solutions which has a positive impact on upsells, renewals, and new feature awareness.
Improved Marketing / Brand awareness
80% increase in Certified Techs maintaining their certification YOY (Skilljar Case Study, Alarm.com)
51% increase in users (Skilljar case study, Zywave)
Increased Sales / Revenue / Upsells
6.2% increase in organizational bottom-line revenue (Forrester report)
150+% higher annual, recurring revenue with trained customers (Skilljar case study, Nintex)
Increase their direct sales by 53% (Thought Industries Case Study, IA Med)
5-10% uplift in upsells for customers engaged in learning (Thought Industries Case Study, ZoomInfo)
Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new customers (Markinblog)
Increased Customer Retention / Renewal
7.4% increase in customer retention (Forrester report)
15% increase in renewals for customers with at least one user completing a course (Thought Industries Case Study, ZoomInfo)
Increased retention by 95% YoY (Skilljar case study, Entelo)
The subscription renewal rate for trained customers was also higher at 92%, compared to 80% for untrained customers (TSIA blog article)
It costs up to 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one (Markinblog)
Increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits by 25-95% (Markinblog)
65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers (Markinblog)
Determine your program's ROI using the Training Budget & ROI Calculator
Product adoption & churn metrics
Customer discovery and adoption of your products is a critical phase for every company. In addition to making these processes more scalable, training has a direct impact on the core SaaS business metrics surrounding stickiness, churn, and satisfaction.
Increased Product Adoption
108% growth in product adoption for customers who have completed a course (Thought Industries Case Study, ZoomInfo)
280% increase in “My Binder” activity (Articles saved from the knowledge base for easy access while on the job) (Skilljar Case Study, Alarm.com)
Increased User Engagement by 78% (Skilljar Case Study, IPRO)
Nearly 200% increase in product usage as a result of partner training (Skilljar case study, Zywave)
77% of our survey respondents indicated there is a positive correlation between customers who consume training and improved product adoption (Skilljar Blog Article)
Product adoption increased 26% for existing customers compared to those who didn’t take related courses in AgriWebb Academy (Northpass case study, Agriwebb)
When customers are trained on a software product, 68% use the product more often, 56% use more of the available features and 87% use the product more independently. (TSIA blog article)
NPS increase
15-point increase in NPS (Skilljar case study, Clever)
Improved Net Promoter Score by 200% (Skilljar case study, Entelo)
Loyal customers spend 67% more than new ones (Markinblog)
Determine your program's ROI using the Training Budget & ROI Calculator
Operational efficiency metrics
Customer Education reduces costs associated with both onboarding and supporting customers. In addition, when eLearning solutions are used to augment high touch training, many programs see an increase in training consumption because it can be completed asynchronously.
Reduction in Support Costs
6.1% decrease in support costs (Forrester report)
25% decrease in support tickets (Skilljar case study, Clever)
90% decrease in support tickets (Intellum case study, IDeaS)
When partnered with Professional Services, a company was able to reduce PS project implementation time by 66% and a 51% reduction in cost (TSIA blog article)
Reduction in Training Hours
Reduced Training Hours 74% (Thought Industries Case Study, Arrowstream)
75% reduction in manual onboarding training hours required (Skilljar case study, Automox)
Customer Success Team increased productivity by 30% (Skilljar case study, Qualia)
When partnered with Professional Services, a company was able to reduce PS project implementation time by 66% and a 51% reduction in cost (TSIA blog article)
71% increase in course registrations (Skilljar case study, Zywave)
Extra: Company sentiment about training solutions
Many company executives are not familiar with the impact of customer education or how to implement these solutions effectively. It is helpful to consider what leaders often feel about their programs following implementation. These are a few examples of how companies react to their training programs after they have been stood up and the costs associated with running a successful initiative.
Internal sentiment about ROI
Our study found that 90% of respondents’ organizations have had positive returns on their investment in customer education. (Forrester report)
60% of companies interviewed consider their [extended enterprise training program] efforts to be either effective or highly effective (Brandon Hall report [gated])
Cost of customer learning programs
Respondents whose companies operate fully or partially formalized customer education programs report that their companies spend an average of $780,000 per year on their efforts (Forrester report)
For companies that charge for this learning, more than one-third are able to cover 25% or more of their overall learning technology costs (Brandon Hall report [gated])