Beyond the Help Desk: How Customer Education Slashes Support Costs and Increases Satisfaction

Your customer support teams are overwhelmed with tickets, while customers become increasingly frustrated as they wait for help. Or perhaps your organization is facing a more challenging issue: your customers are struggling but are avoiding calling customer support until a major problem arises.

Sound familiar? These are costly problems that affect your operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. The solution? Customer education, like that provided using Absorb, a Brandon Hall Group™ SmartChoice® Preferred Provider. Customer education can empower people to solve problems the way they want — independently and ideally without interacting with customer service.

Organizations that leverage learning technology designed to educate customers report a clear benefit: customers who know how to use the product can resolve more issues on their own.

This education-first approach reduces support burdens and transforms the customer experience. By investing in customer knowledge, businesses can simultaneously cut support costs and deliver the autonomy customers want.

The Modern Customer’s Self-Service Preference

Today’s customers increasingly prefer self-service options when seeking support. Customer education is a great way to enable customer self-service. Brandon Hall Group™ research reveals that 77% of organizations see improved customer relations as a direct result of customer education. The shift reflects a fundamental change in customer preferences, with speed, convenience and autonomy becoming essential expectations.

Modern customers:

• Value immediate resolution over waiting for support responses
• Prefer maintaining control of their problem-solving journey
• Experience greater satisfaction when successfully resolving issues independently
• Avoid the perceived friction of traditional support channels

Building an Education Program That Empowers Self-Service

Creating an effective customer education program requires a strategic approach that anticipates customer needs and organizes knowledge in accessible, actionable ways.

Essential components of a self-service-focused education program include:

1. Diverse, Accessible Content Formats

The Brandon Hall Group™ research shows that easily accessible, interactive, bite-sized learning experiences align with what modern learners expect. For customer education, this means creating resources that balance different learning modalities:

• Video tutorials: Short, task-focused demonstrations
• Interactive guides: Step-by-step walkthroughs with embedded practice opportunities
• Knowledgebase articles: Searchable, scannable text resources
• Decision trees: Guided troubleshooting paths for complex issues
• Community forums: Peer-to-peer knowledge exchange opportunities

2. Strategic Content Development

When developing your content strategy, embracing design thinking principles is crucial. Start from a place of well-informed empathy for your customers – understand their context, challenges and goals before creating any educational materials.

Not sure where to start? Not to worry! Your support ticket data holds the blueprint for your educational content strategy. By analyzing common support requests, you can:

• Identify high-volume issues to prioritize content development
• Map the customer journey to anticipate educational needs at each stage
• Break complex processes into manageable learning segments
• Create targeted resources that address specific pain points

This approach ensures you solve real problems rather than just explain features. Taking time to observe customer behavior, analyze support interactions, and conduct user research pays enormous dividends in creating truly effective educational content.

3. Searchability and Discoverability

Even the most comprehensive educational content is worthless if customers can’t find it when needed. Your self-service strategy should include:

• Intuitive, natural language search functionality
• Contextual help embedded within the product experience
• Logical content categorization aligned with customers’ mental models
• Proactive resource recommendations based on user behavior and patterns

Measuring the Impact of Customer Education

As our research emphasizes, improving learning measurement and analytics is the second highest priority (64%) for learning functions, behind only better business alignment. For customer education programs, establishing clear metrics is equally critical.

Key measurements to track include:

• Support ticket volume reduction: Track changes in overall support requests and by specific issue categories addressed by educational content.
• Knowledge base effectiveness: Monitor search success rates, article ratings and content engagement metrics.
• Self-service resolution rates: Measure the percentage of users who successfully resolve issues through educational resources without escalating to support.
• Time-to-resolution: Compare resolution times between self-service and traditional support channels.
• Customer satisfaction: Correlate education engagement with NPS or CSAT scores.

Organizations implementing strong customer education programs frequently report:

• Significant reduction in support ticket volume
• Increased customer satisfaction scores
• Higher product adoption and feature utilization
• Improved customer retention and reduced churn

Leveraging AI to Enhance Self-Service Education

The Brandon Hall Group™ findings on AI adoption in learning provide valuable insights for customer education strategies. The research reveals that 35% of organizations use AI for personalized learning recommendations and generating learning content. However, barriers exist 59% cite data privacy concerns and lack of AI expertise as challenges.

For customer education programs, AI presents transformative opportunities:

• Personalized learning paths: Recommending specific resources based on customer profile, behavior, and needs
• Intelligent search enhancement: Understanding the intent behind search queries to deliver more relevant results
• Content gap identification: Analyzing support interactions to identify missing educational resources
• Automated content generation: Creating first drafts of common how-to guides and documentation

Implementation Best Practices

When launching or enhancing your customer education program, consider these proven approaches:

1. Start with high-impact areas: Focus initial efforts on issues driving the highest support volume.
2. Integrate with the product experience: Embed contextual learning opportunities within the customer journey.
3. Train support teams: Equip agents to guide customers toward self-service resources.
4. Create feedback loops: Establish mechanisms for continuous improvement based on content effectiveness.
5. Promote educational resources: Actively market your knowledge base through multiple channels.

The Future of Self-Service Customer Education

Several trends will shape the evolution of customer education:

• Immersive learning experiences: Brandon Hall Group™ research indicates that 73% of organizations plan to add AR/VR platforms and simulations to their learning technology stack, suggesting that more immersive customer education experiences are on the horizon.
• Hyper-personalization: Educational content will be tailored to specific customer segments, use cases, and learning preferences.
• Community-driven content: Greater emphasis will be placed on facilitating peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
• Embedded, contextual microlearning: Just-in-time guidance will be delivered precisely when and where customers need it.

Customer Education: Your ‘Ticket’ to Better Support

As customer expectations continue to evolve, education-powered self-service will become an increasingly critical competitive differentiator. Organizations that invest strategically in customer education will deliver the autonomous, efficient experiences that modern customers demand.

By building effective educational resources, measuring their impact and continuously optimizing based on customer needs, companies can transform their approach to support while significantly improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To learn more about strategic education initiatives and how learning powers all stages of the customer lifecycle, check out this whitepaper on how you can enhance your customer experience with an LMS for customer education, with the bonus of handy worksheets to help you get started.