If you want to inform and engage your customers, you need to help them understand your product and make well-informed purchase decisions. 

We recently wrote about customer education best practices and, since the post attracted a lot of attention, we decided to take it a step further and help you with developing a customer education strategy and goals for next year. Now is the time to do the planning and set yourself up for success (and not only yourself, but your customers too!). 

Before you even start thinking about your strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• What did you do this year?
• How did it go?
• What do you want to continue doing that worked well?
• What do you want to stop doing?
• What new things do you want to implement?

The answers to the above questions will help you think about how to improve customer education. After this first step, you might want to dive deeper into the topic. To make it easier for you, we have prepared a set of themes that will help you work on your customer education strategy and define your goals for 2021. Let’s review them.

1. Goals – First, analyze what your end goal is when it comes to customer education. This will help you determine what you need to do to achieve it.

2. Strategy and Implementation – It is not only important to develop a great strategy, but also to implement it and, even more importantly, improve it along the way as you figure things out and receive customer feedback. 

3. Proactive Programs – Customers will come to you with questions on their own, so instead of having to respond to all the questions separately and come up with a customized answer every time, proactively communicate and address common problems/questions through a good customer education program. 

4. Type of Content – Another thing to think about is creating programs the way your customers want to consume educational content. Depending on your product/service and the type of customer, you will need to define the type of content you will utilize for the best results. 

5. Technology – It is also important to define what technologies you have available to deliver your customer education program. Consider implementing new technologies that will help you be more effective.

6. Team – Do you have a team at your disposal, and do they have the necessary skills and specialties? Think well about this and do some staff augmentation, if necessary. 

7. Marketing and Communication – Once you create your programs, you also need to figure out ways to communicate them. How are you going to market your customer education programs? Time to meet up with your marketing team and synergize!

Additional Tip: Analysis and Improvement – Determine ways to analyze whether your programs were successful. Make sure to gather customer feedback after completion, and keep improving.

These are some of the topics you need to think about when it comes to developing a customer education strategy. 

You can do it! All you need to do is fill out this assessment and get started. We will provide you with a free follow-up coaching session where we will discuss your goals and help you shape your customer education strategy!