It is vital to connect with the customers early on from the awareness stage. This is where customer education plays a role and takes into account the customer's needs and pains.

To understand the transition between the two approaches to education, let’s first look at each of them closely. 

Product-centred approach

Product-centred approach definition comes from marketing, where it means focusing on new features and innovations. Product-centred education is similar, it showcases the product and its features to educate customers. 

How to recognise it?

• Information is usually presented as instructions on how to use certain goods 
• No pointing at the customer’s needs. 
  

Where to use it?

• It can be great for complex solutions which require explanation for the usage. However, if the education is customer-centred instructional materials could be built to point at sore spots of customers which saves the company's resources and reduces tickets to customer support. 
  

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Customer-centred approach

We already mentioned some characteristics of the customer-centred approach; it also can be referred to as learner-oriented. 

How to recognise it?

• Focuses efforts on the learners, giving them various types of assignments and self-study materials, like quizzes and ebooks. 
• Takes into account customers’ needs and wants. 
  

But how to understand the customer needs? No one knows them better than the clients, so try asking. A good source of customer requests as well as pains can be found in customer support or in the comments section on social media. Direct questions to customers is another way of collecting the data, customer research is a long-term investment in marketing and education. 

How to proceed with the transition from a product to customer orientation? 

First, as we said, understand the customer’s desires and pains. Even small research before creating new educational material is helpful to make it more efficient. Gather information from different sources and classify them, look for things that are repeating. When you recognize a common problem or request which is reported by the customer segment, you can build your material around it. Listening to your customers saves your time, brings value and solves clients problems. 

Customer-centred education is a powerful approach to enhance your customer education journey, thus making customer-centred education a powerful approach to enhance your customer education journey.