Customer Education

Educating Users: A Journey, Not a One-Time Event

Constantly educating the users, has enourmous potential for your upsales

Many people consider customer onboarding as something that is a once-and-done process. Thinking like that misses a big opportunity.

Educating your user constantly—not only on how to use your product most effectively or what base concepts they need to understand but also informing them about potential new features—can even lead to upselling.

Customer education, sales, and adoption should always be interconnected.

How does good product-led growth look like?

Just throwing click journeys at the user when they first open the product never helps. The truth is that every product has its own challenges when it comes to onboarding and education. This is why you need to actually combine analytical efforts with your content creation. Meaning, you need to cross-check customer support requests with your education content.

Making content that explains the product is simple. Making educational content that spot-on hits the blank spot of the person you are onboarding is very hard but way more effective than forcing a user through a 1.5-hour course.

Our interviews and user tests suggest that most of the users actually skip all the initial onboarding and just try to figure it out themselves, which means showing a modal in the beginning is, for the biggest part of your user base, useless.

What you rather need is placing hints that the user can open by choice on spots that are hard to understand so that in case the user gets lost they can just click on the hint and get a video that explains that concept and all the relevant options.

AI in onboarding?

Or you need to give your user the ability to describe their problem and get the right material at the right time. This is where LLMs and AI come into play. Now it’s possible to semantically understand a problem and give the right content and even a subsection of the content to the user. It is still tricky to get AI agents to be precise and good, but it offers very different approaches that have been unseen before.

Resume 

Product-led growth will never work by just mindlessly throwing content at your users. You need to find out when is the right point in time to show user "x" content "y." Only using videos or only using click journeys is not going to drive your digital adoption. It is the combination and timing.

Pascal Lohscheidt

CEO of Stepsailor