© FORRESTER RESEARCH, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Formalized customer education programs have gone from a niche initiative enacted by only a select few organizations to being table stakes for successful customer engagement. As early adopters found significant success, competitors scrambled to catch up and prevent being left behind. However, effective education is complex, and navigating these murky waters is not always easy. In February 2024, Intellum commissioned Forrester Consulting to explore how the customer education landscape looks today, what benefits organizations are seeing from these programs, what challenges they are facing, and what makes a program successful. This study refreshes one commissioned by Intellum in 2019 and includes a look at how programs have changed over the past five years. Through this research, we found: 1. Customer education is growing — and changing — rapidly. Our data finds that average spending on customer education has nearly tripled in the past five years, and decision-makers expect it to more than double over the next two. Firms have shifted away from traditional workshops and certification programs toward prebuilt courseware and in-app guides. This accompanies a move away from programs being run entirely in-house to utilizing outsourcing and AI. 2. Organizations see massive benefits from their education programs. An astounding 96% have at least broken even on their education programs, with 86% seeing a positive return. And our data shows the average education program leading to a 38.3% increase in adoption of products targeted by training, 26.2% improvement in customer satisfaction, 35% increase in average lifetime value per trainee, 7.6% increase in revenue of products targeted by training, and a 15.5% decrease in customer support costs for trainees. Executive Summary And Key Findings
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