The ROI of Customer Education: What the Data Actually Says
Every time someone proposes investing in customer education, the same question comes up: "What's the ROI?"
Fair question. Here's what the data says.
The Short Answer: 96% Report Positive ROI
A 2024 Forrester Consulting study surveyed 300 customer education decision-makers at U.S.-based companies. The headline finding: 96% of customer education programs report positive returns on their investment.
Not "break even." Not "mixed results." Positive.
The composite organization in Forrester's Total Economic Impact analysis showed a 372% ROI with a 7-month payback period. That's faster than the 15-18 month payback period most B2B SaaS companies see on customer acquisition spend.
Let's break down where those returns come from.
1. Retention: The 12-Point Gap
The most consistent finding across every study: trained customers renew at dramatically higher rates.
TSIA's research shows customers who receive effective training renew at 92%, compared to 80% for untrained customers. That's a 12-percentage-point gap.
Compound that over three years:
Trained: 92% → 84.6% → 77.9% retained after 3 years
Untrained: 80% → 64% → 51.2% retained after 3 years
The 12-point gap becomes a 26.7-point gap. For a $5M ARR company with 100 accounts, that's the difference between retaining 78 customers and retaining 51.
The Forrester/Intellum study puts the lifetime value increase at 35% higher per trained customer.
2. Support Costs: 15.5% Reduction
The Forrester study found a 15.5% decrease in customer support costs from education programs.
TSIA's data shows why: 60-70% of support tickets are knowledge-gap questions — things like "how do I...?" and "where do I find...?" These are questions that structured education eliminates before they become tickets.
The math: if you're spending $400,000/year on support (8% of $5M ARR, the SaaS Capital benchmark), and 60% of those tickets are knowledge-gap questions, that's $240,000 in potentially deflectable support costs.
You don't need to deflect all of them. Even a 30% reduction in those tickets saves $72,000/year.
3. Product Adoption: 38.3% Increase
The Forrester/Intellum study reported an average 38.3% increase in product adoption for products targeted by training programs.
This matters because feature adoption drives retention. Pendo's data shows that customers who adopt 3+ features have 40% higher retention rates than single-feature users.
The average SaaS product has features where only 6.4 out of every 100 drive 80% of usage (Pendo 2024). Most of your product is invisible to most of your customers. Education makes the invisible visible.
4. Customer Satisfaction: 26.2% Improvement
The Forrester study showed a 26.2% improvement in customer satisfaction scores from education programs.
This isn't surprising when you think about what education does: it helps customers achieve the outcomes they bought your product for. Satisfaction isn't about features or UI polish. It's about results.
5. Win Rates: 28.9% Increase
Here's the one that surprises people: customer education doesn't just retain existing customers. The Forrester study found a 28.9% increase in win rates for new customers.
Why? Because education content (tutorials, webinars, guides) creates "prior experience" with your product. And 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report found that 95% of B2B deals go to vendors already on the buyer's Day One shortlist. Education gets you on that shortlist.
The Cost of NOT Educating Your Customers
Flip the data around. For a $5M ARR B2B SaaS company, the annual cost of NOT having customer education breaks down into five categories:
1. Churn penalty: $180K-$360K (12-point retention gap × average account value)
2. Support waste: $180K-$280K (60-70% knowledge-gap tickets at $25-35 each)
3. Onboarding failure: $150K-$300K (30-50% drop-off × replacement cost)
4. Missed expansion: $200K-$400K (NRR gap between educated and uneducated accounts)
5. Tool fragmentation: $50K-$100K (overlapping tools, duplicated effort)
Total: $760K-$1.44M per year. That's 15-29% of ARR leaking through structural holes that education addresses.
The Forrester TEI study found that the investment to close these gaps starts at about $5,100 in the first year. The payback period is 7 months.
So Why Haven't More Companies Done This?
If 96% see positive ROI, why do only 4% of companies have formalized customer education programs (Intellum 2024)?
Three reasons:
1. The content creation bottleneck. Traditional e-learning takes 49 hours to produce 1 hour of content (Chapman Alliance, 250+ organizations). That's not viable for a small team.
2. The measurement gap. 43% of companies with education programs have no process for measuring ROI (Thought Industries 2021). You can't justify budget for something you can't measure.
3. The missing middle. Enterprise platforms (Docebo, Skilljar, Intellum) start at $30K-$60K+/year. Free tools (Notion wikis, YouTube playlists) lack analytics, automation, and compliance. The gap between "free but limited" and "powerful but expensive" is where most teams get stuck.
What to Do With This Information
If you're reading this and thinking "OK, the data is clear, but we're not ready for a $50K platform" — you're the person we built Omumu for.
Omumu is customer education infrastructure for small teams. The kind of team where the person who creates the content is also the person who answers the support tickets.
Here's what you can do this week:
1. Pull your top 5 support tickets. Sort by frequency. These are your first 5 education topics.
2. Calculate your knowledge-gap cost. Monthly support tickets × % that are "how do I...?" questions × $25-35 per ticket. That's your baseline.
3. Run a 30-day pilot. Write 5 articles addressing those top tickets. Measure the before/after ticket volume. That's your proof.
Want to see what this looks like in practice? Join the waitlist — we'll show you how teams like yours are doing it.
Sources
- Forrester Consulting/Intellum, "Customer Education Benchmarks & Trends" (2024, n=300)
- Forrester Total Economic Impact Study (2024, n=122, commissioned by Intellum)
- TSIA, "State of Education Services" and Customer Success Research
- Pendo, "2024 Software Benchmarks Report" (n=6,800+ products)
- SaaS Capital, "SaaS Support Cost Benchmarks" (2024)
- 6sense, "B2B Buyer Experience Report" (2025)
- Intellum, "State of Customer Education" (2024)
- Chapman Alliance, "How Long Does It Take to Create Learning?" (250+ organizations)
- Thought Industries, "2021 State of Customer Education"