In today’s overly competitive SaaS marketplace, “customer success” is not a department—it fuels your growth and provides market advantage. Companies aren’t just selling a product but investing in customer education as a strategic focus. But what’s making customer education such a hot topic for business leaders?
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Why Customer Education is the Future of SaaS Success
The SaaS model is essentially built on retention, expansion, and advocacy. Unlike the transaction-oriented nature of a typical software sale, where the sale is really over the moment you purchase the software, SaaS companies need to continue to wow customers throughout the entire customer life cycle.
Customer Education is No Longer Optional
Customers becoming more educated is beneficial in several significant ways:
- It decreases time-to-value (TTV), moving users to their “aha moment” sooner
- It drives product adoption by convincing customers to use more product features and functionalities
- Education fuels upsells and cross-sells with organic paths to premium products
- It reduces churn by providing customers with a very engaging and successful experience
- It creates product champions, turning casual users into promoters
As they say in the trade, “The educated customer is the best customer.”
Research backs this up: in a broad-scale survey done by TSIA (Technology & Services Industry Association), “Companies with strong customer training programs see a 6.2% increase in customer retention compared to companies who don’t” in a study of over 430 businesses. Just this number alone has serious revenue impacts in the subscription economy.
According to a 2023 Forrester Research report, customers who engage with educational content are 131% more likely to make an additional purchase from the same company. In the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, this practically leads to an increase in lifetime value (LTV).
Customer education is no longer a “nice-to-have” benefit that companies should invest in—it’s essential for ensuring growth.
The Revenue Impact: How Customer Education Drives Business Growth
The most direct result of customer education is more profit through a few channels. Here’s a detailed breakdown:
Enhanced Product Adoption and Feature Usage
The more your customers know about the capabilities of your product, the more likely they are to use it to its full extent. Pendo found that feature adoption improves by 47% if the feature is coupled with contextual education.
This is important because underutilization is the quiet killer of SaaS subscriptions. Customers rationalize the subscription with a justification to keep the spare features they’re paying for, eventually resulting in resentment and dissatisfaction at the end of the subscription term.
Lower Cost of Support and Success Communities
Well-educated customers need far less hand-holding, which means less strain on your customer support and success teams. Based on data from a Zendesk benchmark, education inherently reduces simple support requests by 30-50%. And when customers do require assistance, their store of basic knowledge can help sort out the issues more quickly. Furthermore, streamlined onboarding frees up customer success managers to provide strategic advice instead of basic instruction.
These operational efficiencies add directly to the bottom line and allow companies to scale without a corresponding increase in support costs.
Accelerated Expansion Revenue
Once customers start to get the hang of things, they’re going to be significantly more receptive to additional advanced features or add-ons. With more cross-sell conversions, educated users get the context of the suite of solutions better. Expanded deployment also takes place when enlightened champions push the envelope inside their organizations. Easier enterprise adoption is achievable as education closes the gap between the first deployment on a departmental level and deployment throughout the company.
“When belts get tight, the companies that are leading their customers to success are the ones customers will subscribe to.” —Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight
Brand Advocacy and Lower CAC
Educated community members are your branded advocates who share consistently. Satisfied, educated users have satisfaction scores that are 24% greater than those of non-educated users, according to industry benchmarks. Customers who go through educational programs are 3x more likely to refer new customers. And these leads come at a 70 %+ discount to their acquisition cost from other sources.
By doing the right things in the early days of customer success (getting your customers educated properly), SaaS companies are now poised for more predictable and scalable growth with great unit economics.
The Evolution of Customer Education: From Documentation to Experience
The days of printed manuals and simple FAQs are far behind us, and customer education has come a long way. There are modern techniques that are all-inclusive, entertaining, and thoughtfully created.
Modern Forms of Customer Education
The education format depends on how complex your SaaS product is and who your audience is:
- Interactive onboarding flows to lead users through in-app tours with completion tracking
- Segmented, structured courses sequenced to make it easy to go from beginner to intermediate level
- Industry certification programs that offer official recognition of product knowledge
- Searchable, categorized self-service content served from comprehensive knowledge bases
- Community and independent forums that support peer-to-peer learning
- Live and recorded webinars and virtual workshops presented by experts
- Contextual help systems that offer user guidance within the application, invoked by the behavior of the user
- Video tutorials and microlearning that provide small chunks of content for tasks
- Virtual labs and sandboxes that provide a safe place to try technology that can put production at risk
Each of these touchpoints is an opportunity to create deeper product engagement and gain the customer’s trust in your solution while doubling down on your value proposition.
Case Study: HubSpot Academy’s Ecosystem Approach
HubSpot Academy provides free courses, certifications, and resources beyond basic product training. Their all-encompassing strategy includes:
- Industry education: Training on the basics of marketing, sales, and service
- Product-specific training: In-depth tool functionality and usage purposes
- Certification courses: Credentials with industry value
- Career progression: Skills that make you stand out to potential employers
This has been key to HubSpot’s ability to scale globally and build a true ecosystem around its products. Their academy has granted more than 200,000 certifications, and that’s 200,000 product evangelists invested in the HubSpot ecosystem.
The most amazing aspect about HubSpot’s approach is how they have successfully made education a customer acquisition channel. Many people join for free certifications before they become customers!
Customer Education’s Impact on Retention Metrics
Retention is the lifeblood of SaaS. When you lose a customer, you don’t just lose whatever that customer is paying you now, but everything they might conceivably have paid in the future and in advocacy.
Related Article: https://www.adlabz.co/the-b2b-saas-marketing-metrics-to-track-in-reports
Education as a Factor for Key Retention Metrics
Customer education impacts churn through several avenues:
- It explains the value of your product by making sure users understand how your solution solves their problem
- Education contributes to building stronger relationships by exposing people to more relevant touchpoints with your brand
- It minimizes stumbling blocks by offering unambiguous instructions that help prevent users from making mistakes and getting confused
- The education system generates success momentum, where early wins prompt sustained involvement
- It also establishes switching costs, as learning investments make it harder for the user to leave the platform
The Loyalty Loop: Education to Stickiness
Customer education also helps in accumulating positive feedback:
- Teaching leads to successful product use
- Using the product effectively causes customers to feel confident
- Being positive makes customers want to learn more
- Deeper learning indicates a higher value of the product
- Stronger loyalty comes with more value realization
This “loyalty loop” only strengthens over time, especially with well-informed consumers who are presented with competitive offers.
Case Study: Asana’s Customer Education Hub
Asana, a top project management SaaS, has an extensive education hub that includes classes, webinars, guides, and certification tracks. Their philosophy acknowledges the differences in the user base and supports their different use cases.
The organization offers role-based learning paths, with content designed for project managers, team members, and administrators, recognizing their unique viewpoints and job functions. Their use case libraries demonstrate how to use Asana for a variety of business use cases, giving customers a sense of how it could be applied to their industry or job.
Customer stories showcase actual use cases they have managed to implement successfully, which helps create social proof and provides practical implementation tips from peers. Community forums facilitate peer-to-peer learning, with users sharing tips and tricks, asking questions, and sharing workflows with others experiencing similar challenges.
By investing in continued learning experiences, Asana is making users more informed and self-empowered, driving stronger loyalty and longer subscription cycles. Their educational campaigns have led to an estimated 45% decrease in churn among customers who view the educational materials.
The Hidden ROI: Secondary Benefits of Customer Education
Beyond the primary benefits of revenue growth and retention, several “hidden” advantages create substantial business value:
1. Product Feedback Engine
Well-educated customers give better and more actionable feedback:
- Features with more context provided: These requests have more information about why the idea is important, often including examples, use cases, or details about how it works in a different product
- Deeper beta testing: Experienced users can experiment with more advanced and innovative features
- More feature use case articulation: Better understanding of how customers use your product
- Community-led innovation: Education breeds communities that generate ideas. An operating system like Ubuntu Linux is just one of many open-source projects that serve this purpose
This flywheel allows product teams to prioritize future enhancements based on what real customers want, not what they think customers want.
2. Accelerated Time-to-Value
In today’s competitive environment, the time-to-value (TTV) is very important. If your customers don’t experience value quickly enough, they’ll abandon your product before they even realize the potential of the solution that you offer.
Education resources can accelerate the ramp-up and bring out success:
- Rigorous onboarding maps out a user’s first steps towards understanding how to use the product
- Progress tracking allows users to see how close they are to proficiency, and gives them a sense of motivation to continue on target
- Quick-win cases show early successes that lead to more confidence to engage in deeper exploration
These features help to expedite your customer’s time to value post-purchase.
According to research by Wyzowl, 86% of customers say they’re more likely to be loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them post-purchase.
3. Brand Authority and Thought Leadership
Businesses offering top-notch learning content for free become industry experts. They show expertise beyond the features of the product, establishing market credibility that stretches into much larger industry discussions. This thought leadership helps to build a reputation that draws talented individuals to work for you and with fellow thought leaders.
Training content builds media opportunities by developing subject matter experts internally, who then have a propensity to be asked to keynote at industry events and to be featured in publications. This approach provides competitive distinction, so companies stand out in already saturated markets not only based on feature comparison but on the knowledge shared through contributions.
The authority positioning also has value in terms of product sales, as it opens up partnerships and gateways to new markets.
4. Internal Organization and Efficiency
Easy-to-understand educational content also helps inside sales. Salespeople become better armed with consistent messaging and more thorough knowledge of the solution, enabling them to better articulate the value. Standardization helps support teams that have a common language and follow the same approaches across all their support channels.
With the leverage of education and self-service, customer success teams can manage more accounts with the same number of people on the team. Cross-functional alignment gets clearer as teams establish a shared view of product value and how people use it, chipping away at silos.
“Your most effective sales team is a customer who knows how to use your product.” Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Consultant
The Evolution from Support to Enablement
Traditionally, businesses have their support teams solving customer issues as and when they come in. But the best SaaS businesses are now shifting toward “customer enablement,” where they proactively get customers on the fast and right track to success.
The Enablement Mindset
SaaS companies that are ahead of the curve don’t sit around and wait for tickets to roll in. They provide learning journeys that users can take through the natural flow of product capabilities that make sure they understand the basics before they delve into advanced functionality.
These vendors attempt to anticipate the typical downsides and compensate with predictive content delivery modeled after typical usage. They deliberately push for greater product usage by leading users to the more powerful features as they become ready, increasing the value the customer is getting out of the subscription.
Enablement-oriented companies succeed by ceremonializing customer achievements and recognizing learning achievements as work to keep momentum and engagement high. This incentivization cycles into continued learning and product adoption.
Case Study: Salesforce Trailhead
Salesforce Trailhead is the gold standard for investing in customer enablement. It’s an interactive platform for learning, with modules and trails custom-built for various customer personas and skill levels.
Trailhead gamifies progress with badges, points, and ranks, incentivizing learning by utilizing the psychology of achievement. The platform provides various learning paths tailored for administrators, developers, marketers, and others, which recognize how different personas interact with the product differently.
Learners have hands-on activities to complete based on practical labs in the course environment so that theory can be translated into practice. The professional identity aspect generates high professional achievement pride and peer recognition by displaying individuals’ achievements on public profiles.
Trailhead not only opens up Salesforce’s complex platform but turns users into certified “Trailblazers” who advocate for the product. The initiative has been cited as contributing to Salesforce’s continued dominance in the market, despite stiff competition.
Practical Implementation: Starting Your Customer Education Initiative
Even young startups with little cash to burn can start to invest in education. Here’s a practical roadmap:
For Early-Stage SaaS Companies
Start small but strategically:
- Build basic onboarding guides and first tackle the essential workflows
- Create explainer videos without breaking the bank by taking advantage of free or low-cost software such as Loom, Canva, or YouTube
- Schedule consistent webinars with live demonstrations and Q&As to give a human touch to your educational efforts
- Start by creating basic knowledge; even a well-formatted FAQ can help a lot in self-service
- Use community platforms, such as Slack or Discord groups, to enable peer-to-peer learning amongst your early adopters
The secret is establishing the consistency and infrastructure to grow your educational content over time.
For Scaling SaaS Companies
As your company scales, so should your training:
- Employ specialist education staff, such as instructional designers and education managers, with specialization in adult learning principles
- Invest in educational platforms that come equipped with purpose-built LMS or customer education software for tracking and optimizing the educational impact
- Develop certification programs that allow customers’ expertise to be certified, by which professional and career development can be enriched
- Create role-based curricula for each key user type at your client organizations
- Embed education into your product with in-app guides and contextual help
- Define education-impact metrics, such as completion rates, and correlate them to retention data to demonstrate ROI
The Continuous Education Imperative
Customer enlightenment is not a capital investment or project. And just like your product and market, it has to grow over time.
The Education Lifecycle
Each targeted feature launch, update, pricing change, and market shift is an opportunity and obligation to educate our customers:
- New feature roll-outs: Education material to go live at the same time as the release
- New customer segment: Custom content based on new user personas
- Competitive positioning news: Focusing on the differentiated value proposition
- Pattern of use insights: Battling common adoption barriers
- Industry trends alignment: Matching product capabilities to emerging requirements
Static information storage won’t do any more. The leading companies view education as a living, breathing program that grows and changes with their product and customer base.
Measuring Education Success
You’ve asked management for the money to produce content, and now you have to justify receiving that same level of investment for another six months or a year or however long until you have to ask for more money.
Metrics to track:
- Completion rates: Percentage of users who finish educational material
- The ranks of certified users: How many got certified
- NPS relationship: How education correlates to satisfaction
- Effect on feature adoption: Use disparities of educated vs. non-educated users
- Churn difference: Improvement based on education engagement vs. all others
- Support ticket volume: The change in support requirements following training initiatives
- Revenue expansion: Upsell/cross-sell effectiveness among informed users
These measures will deliver the business case for sustainable investments in customer education programs.
Final Words: Education as The Competitive Advantage
The SaaS landscape is becoming more crowded in almost every category. The winners will not necessarily be the companies with the most features, or even the lowest price. They will be the ones whose customers understand, value, and master their products.
Customer education as an asset; investing in customer education creates a long-lasting competitive advantage that is hard to compete with. It makes for smarter, happier customers—education is a sustainable competitive advantage that’s hard to copy. It builds intelligent, satisfied clients who:
- Put down roots: From turnover to lifetime value
- Spend more: Scaling their use and adoption of your solutions
- Advocate passionately: Become one of your marketing teammates
- Provide better feedback: Shape your product roadmap
- Need less support: Boost efficiency across your operation
If you’ve yet to do so, now is the time to begin strategically investing in customer education. Your future growth depends on it.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1: What is customer education in SaaS?
Customer education in SaaS simply means purpose-built initiatives, materials, and tools to teach customers how the product works and how they can get the most out of it. This could be anything from onboarding materials and training webinars all the way through to certification programs and knowledge bases, to in-app tips and coaching.
Q2: Why do SaaS companies need to focus on customer education?
Placing bets on customer education impacts product adoption, decreases churn, drives customer satisfaction, and also drives up sales through expansion. Well-informed customers are most likely to recognize the real value in the product, need less hand-holding, and remain paying customers.
Q3: How can customer education decrease churn?
Empowered customers who know how to use the product are less frustrated, have success sooner, and gain more value from the subscription. That makes it less likely they will cancel or turn to the competition. Research has demonstrated that well-instructed customers enjoy much higher retention rates.
Q4: Can you recommend some SaaS companies that are excellent at customer education?
Great examples are HubSpot Academy, Asana’s Education Hub, and Salesforce Trailhead. They’re providing complete learning paths that build confidence and product loyalty. Other notable examples include Miro Academy, Zendesk Training, and Atlassian University.
Q5: Is it worth it for resource-strapped startups to focus on customer education?
Yes. For smaller startups, you can start simple by making some onboarding guides, having webinars, and building out a knowledge base. These efforts can develop into something more formal as they grow. The trick is to begin with the most important user journeys and build out from there.
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