Introduction
A successful customer training program starts with... you guessed it: your customers.
You want to identify what your customers need, provide them with great (relevant) content, and enable them to access that content through multilingual platforms in a digital learning environment.
If you focus on the value and accessibility of your training content, you'll improve your strategy, reduce churn and encourage customer love.
But to understand the right training strategy, let's first discuss the importance of customer education.
Customer training isn’t new — it’s as old as sales is. If you’re selling something new or creating some new idea, you need to tell customers what it does and how to use it.
Education can come in various formats, beginning from manuals that you can commonly find on electronic products you buy or inside online customer training programs. Customer training can be offered for free. According to Systeme.io you can also create customer training membership sites.
Here are some of the different types of customer training:
1. Instructor-led training
This training is interactive in nature allowing for knowledge sharing between different team members and high levels of employee engagement. This training can be interactive and helps employees learn soft skills to improve their customer service skills.
This method however isn’t ideal for training small groups with highly disparate skill-sets. Instructor-led training can use powerpoint slides, or whiteboards, and manuals as training materials
2. Webinars
Webinars are good for large groups. They’re useful when training many people who are branched out in different locations. Webinars provide more convenience as it's easy to record and watch them later for those with busy schedules.
There is no need for a central venue or for conducting travel as this option is cost-effective.
The disadvantages are in lag time.
3. E-learning training programs
Online training programs are suitable for any group size. As a result, they can be set up in less time and resources. Training is possible anywhere with an internet connection.
Employee motivation for e-learning programs is less because they need to follow it at their own pace. Most of the material in e-learning programs is available as PDFs, or videos.
Customer training can help customers navigate the complex terrain of B2B products and help propel B2B growth marketing.
There are many benefits to customer education. They boost product awareness and can be a big market differentiator.
Note: Creating a customer training program takes time and money, but happy customers are more likely to recommend your business to other clients which means higher business income. Being limited by budget, you may want to check out websites like TGL to connect with lenders and get your business loan.
Once you're ready to learn about the process, here's how to optimize the customer training program:
Step 1. Know your customers
Ever gone through a product manual only to discover that none of it is easy to understand? All you want to do is understand how to use the product and you simply can’t.
Other manuals give instructions in a simplistic format targeted at 10-year olds. It’s best to avoid creating content that’s either too complex or too basic.
The key is in knowing your customers, their educational background, and their level of familiarity with your products. You can even book appointments with them to facilitate this.
If you address multiple markets, it’s best to create multiple versions of your training program.
You need to know about the kind of audience you are targeting.
Customer education in its simplest form is creating an environment for your audiences to easily arrive at buying choices.
The audience has different mindsets and explores different buying choices too.
Mapping the training program with different segments produces higher customer retention.
In the race to be a multi-national high revenue-based business, people became consumers and also products. However, customer experience is critical in building a brand and that means elevating the status of your consumers beyond products and seeing them as human beings. For example, if your fashion website or t-shirt site isn’t human centric and hasn’t got a great returns policy, it won’t go very far. One part of this puzzle is creating a good buyer persona.
You must imagine how customers are in your mind and connect behaviors and situations to those faces. Sketch your personas, perceptions, ideologies, and choices based on this information.
Now set up boundaries considering the different solutions you provide and keep that range tight.
Step 2: Set smart goals & set content specific value
Once you lay down your ground strategy, next, identify SMART goals.
Your customer training program is far from an academic course. That’s an easy-to-make mistake and also one easy to avoid. While you could give customers some theory to understand your product or service. It’s not your job to make them understand the theoretical statement behind the design.
Focus on the knowledge that provides a unique value proposition, on how to use the product.
These goals construct a clear channel that aligns well with your resources.
How far-sighted is your customer training strategy?
- Do you want your audience to learn to use your products well?
- Do you want to create a knowledge-based rich environment?
- Do you want to implement your learnings to their interest
- Are you planning segment-specific learning hours?
Step 3: Make the content interesting to read
It is beyond training and can be interesting.
Companies constantly strive to create engaging employee training engage. That doesn’t often carry over to providing a great learning experience to customers.
For example, TravelPerk has put together this guide that pulls in several real-life examples ultimately helping you make budget travels.
There are multiple ways to educate customers besides long walls of text.
- Start with a light tone. You can even use emojis to keep the tone fun and light.
- Cut to the chase. Only keep what’s essential.
- Long texts are boring and it’s best to avoid long and winding text (You can always use the help of an AI writer to edit the text)
- If your LMS offers it, add some gamification elements
- Use interactive presentation makers or video presentation makers whenever you create collateral
- Make a video, and create an engaging and memorable learning experience for your customers.
- Who said completing customer training can't be valuable and fun?
The brand evolves out of a customer's needs.
Keep your buyer’s journey in mind. Be mindful of the fact that any brand evolves out of the customer’s needs. Keeping your buyer’s journey alphabetic means you’ll end up with graduates endorsing their time & experience spent learning with you.
We need to learn how to perceive things naturally and bridge gaps within different projects in an organization. You always have access to both data and operations.
Step 4: Use the right platform to deliver to distinct audiences
You need a platform like Thinkific to nurture customer training and its different aspects like progress reports, feed, self-paced learning, and automated support bots. For example if your customers are HVAC learners, a course detailing HVAC license exam is a must-have. Similarly if you’re talking about more complex tools like Microsoft Dynamics eCommerce; you need to provide adequate training for customers in that.
A consistently stimulating training program makes for a more personal experience.
Customers need attention during the learning program You must address the diversity of customers’ needs at different sessions of learning sessions.
What a diverse platform must deliver
It should provide a self-paced learning environment to customers. The content should be accessible from any device and should be easy-to-use.
Another characteristic is that you can create specific course content and track success.
Localize foreign languages to create a diverse learning platform. Sync both mobile and tablet-based learning.
Step 5: Provide support
People will have questions that you may not have covered in the customer learning modules. If you offer a great customer training experience, always be prepared to answer additional questions. Support team members too.
A web-based forum often does the trick and can serve as a permanent record for anyone who wants to ask similar questions.
A good LMS can be the difference between a mediocre customer training experience and a good customer experience.
With an intuitive platform, it’s easier to create and format and update educational content.
It's more reliable.
- Most LMSes provide you with real-time Historical and real-time insight on training statistics and uses.
- You can integrate webinars and gamification options. This makes your program even more engaging. The best webinar platforms have built-in engagement features.
- You can add tests and quizzes that assess the learner’s progress through the course.
- You can use surveys to get valuable feedback from customers
- Certificates and commercial training certifications allow you to monetize the product training.
A learning management system is your software in the world of e-learning.
To understand the benefits, consider this:
- The LMS should be a connecting hub for teammates and customers
- It should offer an easy way to access data and analytics.
Scribe is a great solution that helps you create training materials by auto-generating step-by-step guides — complete with written instructions and annotated screenshots.
Use Scribe to build documentation in seconds. Then edit, store, share or embed in your favorite platform.
Or, you can combine Scribes with videos, images and more with Scribe Pages. Build templates and other visual process documentation to:
- Strengthen your customer onboarding process.
- Upskill your customer service team.
- Create internal and external SOPs.
- Build a robust customer-facing knowledge base.
You can track data on usage and view analytics of how customers are accessing your at your fingertips.
Conclusion: Test the training progress
Finally, test if your training is making an impact.
Delivering content value to your audience is one thing. The question is if they are deriving full value from this. Conduct surveys to understand how useful people are finding the content to be.
Customer training is a necessity in some industries. It’s a way to attract customer attention as well as delight the audience.
