Why Customer Education & Community Goes Together Like Peanut Butter & Jelly (PBJ)
Harald F. A. Overaa
Learning Nerd and Tech Advisor @Docebo | L&D Coach | Here to help you navigate the learning tech jungle ????
Part 1 - Product-led growth
The golden years of SaaS are over, at least for now. We do not have capital flowing freely like champagne, and investments are not easily accessible across the board.
The sales-led growth mantra is not status quo anymore. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are going up, leading GTM teams and SaaS execs to rethink their approach.
One of the biggest shifts, especially in SaaS is product-led growth (PLG - see photo below).
In the subscription economy and current economic times, PLG is the way forward as the retention of customers becomes increasingly important. Metrics like Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is top of mind for Execs across the board.
So what can GTM teams do to make a shift towards becoming a PLG company? In my view, they should unify their customer education and community programs under one umbrella ??
?? 90% of companies have seen a positive return on their external education and community investments
?? Companies with formalised education and community programs see a 7.4% increase in retention and a 7.1% increase in lifetime value.
?? 90% of external education programs grew last year
?? On average, 29% of customer user base is engaged in training annually
Part 2 - Six Reasons Why Customer Education & Community Leads to Product-led Growth (PLG) ????
1) Increased Sales & Profit
It is easier to get sales from existing rather than new customers. Customer education & community can supercharge this and drive adoption which results in increased revenue.
2)? Shorter Sales Cycles
If they educate themselves on your product, they’re more likely to buy it and do so quicker. They essentially become an “educated qualified lead”, which is extremely valuable, especially in SaaS.?This can come from CEd or Community alike.
3)? Lower Customer Support Costs
Every interaction with support costs you, and lowering this is a massive upside to customer education. Better adoption and knowledge = less customer support and more cost savings.?
领英推荐
4)? Increased Customer Satisfaction
A proactive self-service approach that increases satisfaction as users know how to use your product effectively. Win/win, adoption drives time to value for customers and is key to upsell or cross-sell for companies
5) Cost-savings from customer education & community,
6) Building your brand exposure and loyalty
If your competitors are doing this, so will you. Enable adoption, advocacy and community - a bigger and bigger part of customer education programs. Education + Community are often interlinked, or closely aligned with each other.
To help the customer along the PLG motion, customer education can be extremely powerful, as it helps customers find a map and a compass to go from the stage of Activation --> Engagement --> Loyalty and creates a win-win for both customers and companies alike.
Part 3 - Why Education and Community Belong together:
Education and community are like Peanut Butter & Jelly, they belong together. CEd aims to educate and certify a customer with a baseline understanding of the product. Community aims to engage the customer in dialogue and conversation around the product. The goals are the same, engaging customers about a product, but the means of getting there is different.
Vendors working in this market are realising that they need to offer both a customer education platform (LMS) and a community-platform in one. This needs to be a seamless integrated experience where learners can be 1) educated about new features and subsequently 2) discuss set features with peers in a singular platform.
Learning in the Flow of Work has been a big topic for learning teams for years. I think this will reach Community as well, as customers do not want to go to separate platforms for Education and Community. Why? They see it as one customer enablement experience, so why separate them?
In the future, Education + Community will happen is the "Customer Flow of Work" and allow customers to educate, engage and empower themselves from a singular platform.
Part 4 - How Docebo Addresses Customer Enablement in the Flow of Work
Most of you know Docebo as a learning or an education company. This will inevitably change, as we are also adding Community to our portfolio. With our acquisition of Peerboard this year, we are looking to embed their Community-as-a-service product together with our learning platform.
I can't spill all the beans, but part three here essentially is the vision - Education + Community in one embedded customer enablement experience.
Are you integrating education + community in your company?
Are you planning to do so in 2024?
Curious to hear your thoughts ??
- Harald
Helping SaaS companies to deliver, grow, and monetize Customer Value with the CSM Operating System.
1 年I consider community as one pillar of customer education. It can be powerful if properly managed but I don't believe that it's the silver bullet.
Customer Education Leader | Building Results Driven Academies For SAAS To Reduce Churn & Drive Customer Success
1 年Community as part of the CED 'Learning Universe' has the power to contribute user expert best practice and offer tips and insights as peer to peer learning that you can't replicate through other support channels - which is mighty powerful. I believe you get the product / service impression chatter that clients and partners might normally be talking about behind their closed office doors or elsewhere - for some reason people feel they can share more candidly in a community. Community is a massive listening post for CED and CS to spot feedback and improvements on all levels.
Marketing Executive | Storyteller & Keynote Speaker | Strategy & Growth Advisor
1 年Couldn't agree more. From an operational standpoint it makes sense to have these teams working in unison (as you pointed out, shared resources and knowledge) but the result of that unison is a seamless and cohesive customer experience. The goal should always be to ensure the customer can easily find what they're looking for at the moment of need so they're less likely to contact support (among many other benefits). Connecting the dots across education platform, community and knowledge base is critical, and even better if all that is seamlessly connected to the in-product experience (at least in the case of SaaS products). I also think most companies are only just scratching the surface of what's possible with blended education and community programs. We tend to think digital community when we talk about community, but community is so much more than that. Think about the community element in cohort based ILT, or the ability to leverage all the SMEs in the community for content creation in the academy (as Dan Braithwaite pointed out)... A thriving community is the best way to scale customer education, IMO. Great article Harald, thanks for sharing!
Senior Director of Product Training @ Mediaocean | CEdMA Board Member | CEBeers EMEA host | Customer Education Leader
1 年Yeah, I agree. I think that community has become more vital as part of an overall education offering. You can help support your CX teams through hopefully reduced tickets or a lower volume of foundational questions, as well as potentially encouraging user-generated content to support your instructional design team or cases where your customers may use your product very differently and need specialist resources.
I help B2B SaaS Companies Educate and Enable their Markets at Scale
1 年Great article Harald F. A. Overaa! This clearly sells the value of #community and #customereducation. It's peanut-butter-jelly-time!