3 Critical Questions for Maintaining Healthy, Satisfied Customers [Part III]

In the previous two posts, we discussed the importance of measuring time to value and analyzing support tickets as a means of regularly evaluating your Customer Education program. In this final post of the series, we’ll discuss one additional question to consider: What is the relationship between Customer Health and Customer Education at your organization?

Skilljar customers regularly share their observations that cohorts of trained customers renew and expand at a higher rate than untrained customers. While it’s useful to uncover this correlation in your own organization, truly innovative companies are taking it one step further and using customer education data as an indicator of customer health. 

Creating a Customer Health Score

When gauging account health for a given customer, it’s important to build a standardized health score that can be used across accounts. This score can be based on a number of elements: product usage, customer education adoption, support ticket volume, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) inputs, among others. More specifically, these inputs could include: 

• Training breadth: What percentage of users in a given account are engaging in educational activity? If you’re assigning licenses or selling subscriptions to a training portal, how many of them were purchased, and how many of them are in use?
• Training depth: How much training are your customers taking? If you offer multiple courses, what is the average number of courses that each contact at a customer account take? How many hours have customers invested in training?
• Training feedback: Many training programs ask customers for feedback scores. Consider which customers are rating your training favorably and enjoying the training experience.
• Certifications: If you offer certification as part of your training program, how many contacts at a customer account have gotten certified on your product?
• Training Investment: How much money has a customer invested in training for their team?

Your CRM system can act as an excellent single source of truth for this data, and tracking this data consistently lets you act on it in the form of email nurture streams, direct outreach and more. 

Uncovering Customer Health Trends

With a customer health score in hand for each customer, the next step is to look for trends across accounts, verticals, and users. As a starting place, consider some of the following questions to find these trends:

• How long do onboarding activities and milestones take to complete for customers engaged with training vs. those that are not?
• Looking at data from the last several months, how many of the accounts that churned were engaged with training? 
• Relatedly, how many of the accounts that renewed or expanded took part in training?

The answers to these questions will not only help you uncover overarching trends among your customers, but they will also help you create formalized benchmarks that you can use as goals for new accounts and gauge the progress of existing accounts. 

Conclusion

Benjamin Franklin is heralded as saying that “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.” Although Franklin was focused on preventing literal fires with this axiom, his words also ring true for maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction and health. Letting your Customer Education program simmer on the backburner is, at best, ineffective at addressing your users’ needs. At worst, a stagnant Customer Education program will leave your customers feeling frustrated and unsupported as they try to use your product. These sentiments, if left unchecked, can lead directly to reduced growth across existing users or churned accounts.  

While the work required to regularly monitor and evaluate your Customer Education program is not insignificant, the long term value is clear; customers who feel supported, knowledgeable, and valued will be more satisfied with your product and your company.

For more information about assessing the effectiveness of your Customer Education program, download our eBook: 3 Questions to Evaluate the Health of Your Customer Education Program.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Skilljar can help your company, request a demo below and we will reach out!