Your organization’s offerings are essentially valueless if your customers lack an understanding of how to adopt or interact with your products. As a result, businesses are turning their attention to improved customer training efforts — to ensure seamless customer onboarding by providing value early and often.
Customer training is a powerful tool that organizations leverage to help consumers get the most out of their offerings and become powerful brand advocates. However, training solutions must be built to scale and deliver frequent value for a consistently high-quality customer experience. Read on to learn more about the importance of implementing robust customer training efforts and how your organization can create a scalable program with ease.
Defining customer training and education
Customer training, also commonly referred to as customer education, is essentially content that’s designed to onboard, engage and retain your new and existing customers. It is typically delivered in a programmatic fashion via in-person and on-demand channels. Courses or programs are intended to help users of your product or service understand your company and improve time-to-value.
The importance of a robust training program
Training is becoming increasingly essential as customer expectations reach an all-time high. In fact, as many as 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.1 As a result, customer training is needed to ensure a great customer experience and guarantee their expectations are adequately met.
Moreover, industry leaders consistently cite a lack of product adoption as a top customer journey challenge. With a comprehensive training and education program in place, customers can quickly learn how to use a product or service correctly and get added value from these offerings.
Meeting customer expectations and improving product adoption is an effective strategy to retain customers, reduce churn and ultimately provide an important opportunity for feedback.
The benefits of improved customer training and education efforts
Prioritizing your initiatives for customer education can help your organization see a host of considerable benefits, including:
- Improved customer satisfaction.
- Enhanced customer loyalty.
- Higher customer retention rates.
- Increased chances of upselling.
- Positive word of mouth and brand advocacy.
- Higher revenue.
Creating a scalable customer training program
While the importance of introducing proper customer education initiatives is clear, it’s equally important to ensure these solutions are scalable. Here are five tips for scaling your customer training efforts successfully:
1. Assess educational needs
Before making changes or improvements to the programs you already have in place, review your current training opportunities and assess any educational needs of your customers that aren’t being addressed. It’s beneficial to consider the barriers to success your customers are facing — whether that be onboarding, slow time-to-value or any other area where you identify pain points. This ultimately sets the foundation for your training and education programs moving forward.
2. Re-evaluate current training content
With a clear picture of your areas for improvement, take stock of the training materials you have in place and determine whether these tools are meeting customer needs. Additionally, consider how you’re sharing this information and evaluate outcomes from those efforts, like where your training might utilize webinars, 1:1 training sessions and more. This evaluation will be a linchpin in your training content creation and strategy in the long run.
3. Transition to Virtual
In-person training can be costly, inefficient and difficult to scale as your customer base grows. Instead, start hosting virtual instructor-led training (VILT) — where information is delivered to customers in a virtual, online environment. This can help your organization reduce training costs significantly while producing the same results. It’s important to remember these sessions can still be highly interactive through the use of digital tools like chat, polls and questions.
4. Offer flexible and on-demand training opportunities
A significant obstacle to onsite customer training is the inability to provide support at the customer’s time of need. By offering flexible, on-demand training programs your customers can access resources whenever and however they prefer with no restrictions on time zone, location or room capacity. You can create an archive of content through recorded webinars, infographics, slideshows and more to develop on-demand learning opportunities, which ultimately reduces customer reliance on support and success teams.
5. Use FAQs and feedback as a source of training content ideas
Addressing customer support inquiries is an invaluable resource to foster new training content ideas. You can compile your most frequently asked questions and use them as a foundation for developing new material. This might include questions surrounding a particular product feature, update, or general “how-to” questions, which are typically the most common. Creating training content that teaches customers to understand your offerings and use them correctly can help mitigate and field repetitive questions moving forward.
Frequent customer questions can be useful beyond training content inspiration. You can also use common inquiries to create a knowledge base for customers so they find answers to simple questions quickly, without having to create a customer service ticket.
Leveraging an LMS to Kick-Start Your Customer Training Program
For a great customer experience, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more, and a robust, comprehensive customer training program is a linchpin in improving the customer journey.2 With Absorb LMS, you can elevate your customer education opportunities with ease. As the leading customer training LMS on the market, Absorb LMS can help your organization implement customer training programs that:
- Ensure customers get the most out of your offerings.
- Earn your customer’s trust and loyalty.
- Act as a powerful competitive advantage.
- Improve the customer experience.
- Creates advocates to build your brand and drive revenue.
At Absorb, we understand the importance of powerful customer onboarding and training efforts, and we’re here to help. Learn more aboutcustomer training through Absorb LMS, Or, If you’re ready to drive positive business outcomes, track customer success and foster an advocate community, request a demo today.
1. https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/customer-expectations/?sfdc-redirect=369
2. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/pwc-consumer-intelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf
