Using Customer Education to Reduce Customer Churn: ChurnZero

Zendesk defines “customer churn rate” as the percentage of a company’s total customers that stop doing business with the company over a specified time period.  It’s quite simple – no business wants to lose customers. In fact, you want your churn rate to be zero!

If any company knows the value of using customer education to reduce churn rates, it’s ChurnZero. We sat down with Bora Lee, Manager of Customer Enablement for ChurnZero, to find out what she’s learned about keeping customers engaged through customer education.

Skilljar: Can you describe ChurnZero Academy? What types of courses are available and for whom?

Bora Lee: Within our courses, our customers can access guided videos full of step-by-step instructions and best practices to help them understand and navigate ChurnZero. This helps them get set up quickly, with knowledge checks to test their comprehension.  

Skilljar: Your role involves delivering the best customer experience through implementation, training, adoption, and expansion across the ChurnZero platform. How is your team set up to do this?

Bora Lee: The ChurnZero Academy falls within my team. We saw our investment in a customer education platform and program as a competitive advantage against others in the industry.  

When we released the initial version of ChurnZero Academy, we had three people, including me, working on the content part time. Right before release, we hired a Customer Learning and Education Specialist, Peter Adams, to focus on content development because we knew that we’d need the capacity to keep up with future expansion.

We saw our investment in a customer education platform and program as a competitive advantage against others in the industry.  

Skilljar: How was your team conducting customer education prior to Skilljar?

Bora Lee: We held one-on-one, live trainings with our customers which was very time consuming and not scalable for our Implementation and Customer Success teams. As we grew, we began to transition to group training sessions via live webinars that included cohorts of customers who were onboarding around the same time.

This was an improvement from individual customer trainings, but was still time consuming. This model required that the courses be repeated on a weekly basis, which was still not the best use of our team’s time.

Skilljar: Why did you decide to seek out a learning management /customer training platform?

Bora Lee: We started looking for a learning management and customer training platform to be able to offer customer education that was standardized, scalable, and more effective for our growing customer base. We were also looking for a solution that we could integrate with our own ChurnZero platform to incorporate customer training interactions into our customer health scores and other Customer Success processes.

Skilljar: Can you share any specific goals you were looking to achieve with ChurnZero Academy?

Bora Lee: We wanted to enable customers to find the information they need in an organized, bite-sized manner so consumption and learning across multiple methods (audio, video, written, and practical) was as effective and user friendly as possible. Our objective as a Customer Success platform is to enhance the achievements of our customers through the fastest time-to-value and adoption.

We wanted to enable customers to find the information they need in an organized, bite-sized manner…

Skilljar: How has Skilljar been able to help you with your onboarding process?

Bora Lee: We have been assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM), and Skilljar’s Customer Success team supports us by providing benchmarks, best practices, and advice on different ways to use the platform to enhance our customer’s learning experience.  

Skilljar: How do you use customer education to help SaaS companies fight against churn?

Bora Lee: As a Customer Success company, we deeply understand that customer training increases user adoption, which ultimately reduces churn. So, by offering a positive training experience to our own customers, it allows them to learn not only how to use our product to help them fight customer churn, but also learn Customer Success best practices that they can implement within their own organizations.

Also, ChurnZero Academy allows our customers to become more self-sufficient. By making adoption of the ChurnZero platform easier for them through education, they have more time to dedicate to solving their own customers’ problems.

Related: Why Customer Education Is Key To Increasing SaaS Adoption

Skilljar: What do you think the future of ChurnZero Academy will be?

Bora Lee: Our focus at the moment is our customers. Our customers are really at the heart of everything we do so we want to make sure we provide all the resources we can to meet their needs.

But as we dive further into the Skilljar platform, we could imagine different ways that this could provide motivation and clarity in many other aspects.  

As we dive further into the Skilljar platform, we could imagine different ways that this could provide motivation and clarity in many other aspects.  

A platform like Skilljar can enhance the customer experience from all learning perspectives. Our goal is to create a space where customers can learn about ChurnZero in different mediums through a variety of methods that allow them to enhance their initial adoption and continued use with as little friction as possible. It’s what our business is all about, so we’d better get it right.

If you are a Skilljar customer and have a story to share, email us at stories@skilljar.com. Not a customer yet? Request a demo.