Customer Education's Epic Battle Against SaaS Churn

B2B SaaS companies are locked in a constant battle against customer churn. It's a relentless cycle: teams scramble to understand evolving customer needs, help users achieve their goals, refine products, and deliver top-tier support. All while keeping a watchful eye on competitors and adapting to market shifts.

And that's a tall order, especially for SMBs with limited resources.

But here's the good news: you can leverage the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) to maximize your impact on churn with strategic effort. The key? Focus on two critical goals: keeping your product both useful and easy to use for customers..

Basically, there are two goals: ensure the product stays useful and easy to use for the customers.

And you can achieve those by staying updated about your customers’ needs and helping them use your product to meet those needs. 

The first one is pretty straightforward. Ask your users how you can improve your offerings for them, validate the suggestions, and add them iteratively to your product.

The second one requires a more nuanced approach. Communicating with your users to help them integrate your product into their workflows can be challenging. Creating educational content that drives customers' action has a lot of moving parts like audience preferences and use cases.

To get to grips with either, we need to

Understanding Churn in B2B SaaS

Typical B2B SaaS businesses can experience two types of churn: voluntary and involuntary.

‍Voluntary Churn

Voluntary churn occurs when customers actively decide to leave. This can be further categorized into logo churn (complete loss of a customer) and revenue churn (reduced usage or downgraded subscriptions). 

‍Involuntary Churn

Involuntary churn, on the other hand, happens due to payment failures or administrative oversights (like forgetting to send a subscription renewal reminder). This can also occur due to regulatory changes, mergers, and acquisitions, or when businesses themselves discontinue a product or service.

While the causes of involuntary churn are direct (making them straightforward to fix), the driving factors behind voluntary churn can be more complex.

For instance, if you add a feature based on the needs of certain customers, others may feel your app is getting bloated and difficult to use. Similarly, when customers have to depend on your support team to learn how to use your product, they might get frustrated. 

The latter is crucial. A 2022 report reveals that 81% of customers seek more control while availing the offerings of a business and want better self-service options.

The friction experienced by your customers may motivate them to look for solutions that address their problems more effectively.

So, it’s beneficial for you to keep an eye on some tangible indications to identify customers that are about to churn:

Now, let’s understand how customer education can help reduce B2B SaaS churn.

What is Customer Education?

Customer education provides B2B users with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively use and derive desired value from a SaaS product.

It ensures users understand the product's relevance to their needs and equips them with the skills to leverage its features effectively. This alignment between user expectations and product capabilities can significantly reduce the risk of churn.

B2B SaaS brands educate their customers through various methods. Live training sessions, hands-on courses and certifications, and knowledge bases (KBs) are commonly used.

Large businesses with tech-savvy customers can also create online forums and communities where users can share their tips and suggestions.

Each method of customer education content has its merits. For instance, live training can make the learning process more interactive and fun whereas dedicated video tutorials and courses are beneficial for power users.

For businesses that are just beginning to invest in such content or companies with limited resources, it is crucial to start with options that are affordable, effective, and scalable.

Knowledge bases can be an ideal starting point. Based on the product’s features and the needs of your audience, you can start creating one article at a time. 

The help articles can be as simple as a simple how-to video complemented with a concise step-by-step guide. We, at Clueso, follow this exact pattern to cater to the varied preferences of our customers. We start with a video, followed by a text guide, like this:

We included images in the text guide to enhance the readability and scannability which can make these articles more user-friendly while improving knowledge retention.

As you create various kinds of help docs for your knowledge base, you can discover more efficient ways to educate your customers. This newfound insight can help you create use case-specific tutorials or courses around your product.

Various B2B SaaS brands invest in product training academies to deliver these kinds of educational content to their customers. Salesforce offers such training programs with product certifications on their Trailhead platform:

It is interesting to note that Salesforce offers a lot of premium certifications. This can also serve as a new source of revenue.

Keep in mind that maintaining a dedicated product training platform can require more time and human resources. Additionally, you have to create quizzes and tests along with an evaluation process to ensure the certifications are awarded based on merit.

Whether you go with a KB or a product academy, you will have to create two kinds of customer education content — how-to videos and step-by-step text guides.

These two formats are essential for delivering a comprehensive learning experience. Videos can help new customers get a grasp of features and functionalities quickly. Text guides can make it easier to revisit specific topics or steps.

And you can create them both in minutes using Clueso.

Just record your screen while demonstrating how your product works and narrating the steps, and upload the raw footage on Clueso. 

The platform will produce a studio-quality video and a polished step-by-step guide within minutes.

Clueso uses AI to write a concise script from the audio of the original footage and give a natural voiceover. Then, it adds special effects like pan and zoom, background music, etc., to draw the learner’s attention to important details.

Similarly, for the text guides, it adds perfectly cut GIFs for easier comprehension for customers who quickly want to check a particular step.

Get started now.

How customer education reduces SaaS churn

So far, we talked about how customer education can help decrease friction within products and increase feature adoption to reduce churn.

But how?

What values does customer education provide to the user that boosts retention and fosters loyalty?

There are three core values:

Let’s dive into them.

1. Enables self-service

As we briefly touched upon earlier, customers prefer to explore a product or service by themselves, at their own pace. Waiting for a customer support rep to answer a question or clear a confusion is never preferable.

While creating customer education content, B2B SaaS businesses should think about this requirement of their audience as well. The support resources created should hand over the control to their customers while adopting their solution.

This is more important for B2B SaaS companies serving enterprise customers because their products tend to be used by multiple departments. A generalized customer training program may not be enough 

CloudEagle, a SaaS tool that helps companies manage their software subscriptions, is used by IT, procurement, and finance departments in software companies. Customer education content helped them accelerate user onboarding by 50% and reduce support ticket query volume by 60%.

Moreover, with Clueso, CloudEagle created videos and guides 80% faster.

2. Accelerates product training

Product training is crucial for helping customers derive value from the SaaS solution sooner. It relieves user frustration as customers won’t have to spend time struggling with unfamiliar interfaces or functions.

Educational content for customers speeds up this process by:

1. Providing pre-requisite knowledge: Additional information or explainer content users may need before starting to use the product. This could be essential for setting the right expectations from the get-go.
2. Familiarization with the product and terminologies: Customer education content creates a shared vocabulary while introducing the interface and functionalities. This plays a pivotal role in reducing the cognitive load.
3. Supports targeted microlearning: Not every customer needs to know about all the features or all the use cases of your product. Learning material, particularly videos, can help you break complex concepts and procedures into simple bite-sized content.
4. Gives freedom to the customer: Users can watch videos or read guides that are relevant to their needs and at their own pace. This way, they won’t have to pay attention to anything that doesn’t directly help them with their problems.

Vidyo.ai, an AI-powered video repurposing platform, expedited product training by 75% with Clueso. On top of that, the team saved 90% of their time spent on creating educational content.

3. Gives customers a voice

We discussed earlier how customers may unsubscribe from SaaS products if they feel their needs are inadequately addressed. This requires B2B brands to pay attention to all kinds of feedback their paying users provide.

Broadly, customer feedback is classified into two categories: direct and indirect.

Direct feedback is what the customers directly tell you. Whether it is by sending you an email or commenting under a how-to video. 

Indirect feedback refers to what you glean from their behavior. This includes how they interact with your training content. The views count, completion rate and volume of support tickets can give you insights into whether your customer education content is hitting the mark.

As you create improved support resources for your customers based on their feedback, they can solve their problems quickly using your product. Additionally, they will also feel valued and heard, which builds a stronger relationship and fosters long-term loyalty.

Wrapping up

Reducing churn is crucial for B2B SaaS businesses to maintain growth and customer satisfaction. Customer education plays a vital role in this by enabling self-service, accelerating product training, and giving customers a voice.

By providing comprehensive and engaging educational content, companies can ensure their users are well-equipped to utilize the product effectively and independently.

Clueso aids in this process by streamlining the creation of high-quality training videos and documentation, helping B2B SaaS businesses enhance their customer education strategies efficiently.

With Clueso, you can produce educational content faster and more effectively, leading to improved user satisfaction and reduced churn.

Ready to revolutionize your customer education efforts? Book a demo today.

FAQs

What are some examples of customer education content?

Examples include tutorials, webinars, knowledge base articles, interactive guides, live training sessions, and community forums. These resources help users understand and effectively use the product, enhancing their overall experience.

What tools are required to create customer educational videos?

Tools like screen recording and video editing software are necessary to produce quality customer educational videos. Leveraging AI-powered tools like Clueso can streamline this process, saving hours in the process.

What are the elements of a customer education strategy?

A customer education strategy includes identifying customer needs, creating relevant content, utilizing various delivery methods, integrating feedback mechanisms, and tracking engagement metrics to ensure continuous improvement and effectiveness.

How to reduce churn rate with customer education?

Customer education reduces churn by enabling self-service, accelerating product training, and giving customers a voice through feedback mechanisms. This ensures users can fully utilize the product and feel supported, increasing satisfaction and retention.

How B2B SaaS teams can produce customer education content efficiently?

B2B SaaS teams should build a workflow around customer education to understand their audience's needs accurately and create relevant content efficiently. It is also crucial to adopt AI-powered tools like Clueso to complete editing tasks like adding zoom effects, improving audio, etc., within minutes.

Can AI help with creating customer education content?

Yes, AI can help B2B SaaS teams create quality knowledge-base articles and how-to videos much faster. Teams can immediately produce support resources to help customers get value from the product quickly and, ultimately, reduce churn. Tools like Clueso can produce studio-quality videos and polished articles in minutes. 

Can customer education bring in more revenue?

Yes, customer education improves retention and can increase CLTV, leading to higher revenue. It can also boost revenue by offering paid certification courses within product academies for power users and enterprises.

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