66% of consumers expect companies to understand their expectations and tailor their deliverables to suit them. By a similar token, they don’t want to struggle while using your products. Rather than allowing them to raise the same support tickets multiple times, provide them with customer training. Through this proactive approach, you can educate your customers on how to use your product or service more effectively.
Strong customer training reduces support costs, improves customer satisfaction, and increases product adoption. It also elevates and optimizes the customer experience. Customer experience training is not a new concept but has seen significant evolution and growth over the last few years.
“90% of Customer Education programs grew last year, with more than 60% of respondents increasing their investments by more than 30%.” After completion of training, 68% of customers report that they use the products more.
The benefits of customer training
- Increased customer satisfaction: Thanks to customer training, customers learn how to use the product properly. For that reason, they’re more likely to be satisfied with the experience. This improves customer retention over time.
- Reduced support costs: Since they use the product right, fewer support tickets are raised. Since fewer tickets need to be processed, your customer support team can become more streamlined and support costs reduce.
- Competitive advantage: Customer experience training can be a key differentiator in competitive markets. If you have a first-rate customer experience, your organization is likely to bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors.
- Better product adoption: Customers have a better awareness of product capabilities and use cases. This results in increased usage and adoption of the product.
- Decreased time-to-value: As users understand your product better and more comprehensively, they find value in your product faster. This decreases the overall time-to-value.
- Flexibility and scalability: Since customer training is available on-demand, users can access it anytime and anywhere. Multiple users can be trained at the same time.
The types of customer training
- Self-paced e-learning courses: This includes videos, interactive exercises, and quizzes hosted on a customer LMS. It allows customers to learn at their own pace and on their own schedule.
- Instructor-led training: Such training can be delivered in-person or virtually. This type of training allows customers to clarify doubts in real-time. It’s more effective for complex or technical products, and ideally supported by resources shared online for learning in the flow of work.
- Webinars: These live online events can be attended by anyone, from anywhere. It’s a cost-effective way to deliver training to multiple customers across geographies. Customers can ask questions and receive feedback in real-time.
- Virtual support: Share searchable resources online on your LMS – these can include videos, FAQs, user manuals, flow charts, infographics, and more. You don’t need instructor-led training for every requirement! Instead, you can include an AI chatbot to help your customers search through the resources available. This enables learning in the flow of work.
Regardless of the type of training, it’s important to ensure that the content is effective. Start with the specific training needs of your customers. When you identify the users’ needs, you can create concise content to address them using a variety of multimedia elements to keep learners engaged.
How do you develop effective customer training?
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- Customer training audit: Study the current programs you are offering, and the results they are producing. Look into the resources available to customers; how they are accessing the tools; when they are engaging with the resources; available engagement and learning data; etc. Also consult with your existing customers. Ask them what they need to know to use your product effectively and any pain points.
- Addressing gaps: Once the audit is complete, you would have identified a number of gaps and issues. It’s important that you address these gaps through a customer education program that delivers more successful outcomes. This program should include e-learning content and resources needed to fill the gaps; instructional plans; and the technology or LMS tools to facilitate the delivery. Centralize all organizational training resources through a customer LMS.
- Measuring effectiveness: E-learning is not a ‘one-and-done’ exercise. Keep track of the quality of the program over time, and keep making improvements to ensure that the program remains effective. Metrics can include customer satisfaction, product adoption, and support ticket volume.
Customer support training
While customer training is important, this is a reminder not to neglect your customer support training either! Customer support training helps improve each interaction with your customer service executives, which improves the experience with the organization.
At every stage of the process, keep your customers’ needs at the forefront. Create engaging content that is of real value, because customer training improves customer experience and 86% of buyers will pay more for a great customer experience. Help your customers get the most out of your products, and get the most out of your customers. Empower them with quality customer training.
