The role of Customer Education in CS

At some point as your business grows your CSMs are not going to have the capacity to continue to educate your customers individually. So, when should a SaaS company start adding customer education into its business? How do you use customer education to grow customers, gain new prospects and educate your market? And what are the KPIs and data points that you need to measure for a successful customer education department?

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Bill Cushard, General Manager at Dragonboat about everything you need to know about customer education.

Bill recently joined Dragonboat, the product portfolio management platform for outcome-driven product teams. He’s also a former host of Helping Sells Radio, the world's longest running customer success podcast.

One of Bill's specialties is helping software companies design their customer education business model and strategy in order to enable customers, grow customers, win customers, and create new markets of customers. So where does customer education fit into customer success?

“If you just think about any technology company in the world, they are all designed to help a customer do something. And doing training courses is one way to help a customer learn, use, adopt, learn the next thing, and educate their new employees on how to use your software.”

Knowing when, where and how to start with customer education can be tricky. But starting small usually eliminates the red tape and there's no permissions or budget needed. Whether it's a screen recording, a slide, something to help them understand your product or how to better utilize your product is really the first place to start. And you don't even need a customer education person.

“You should always be thinking, what can I do by Friday to help a customer learn something? You need to start with figuring out your company’s culture and what works for your company. The smaller you start, the less permissions and approvals you have to get from people. I usually say, the more of the customer education that I do, the less customer success work I need to do.”

Listen now to the full conversation with Bill and Anika to learn everything you need to know about customer education.