Customer training is the excellent way to reduce customer support interaction and to improve customer retention. It develops a sense of trustworthiness for your business while involving customers with your products and services.
Many large enterprises are now using training programs to put nonemployees ‘in the know’ particularly resellers, partners, vendors and majorly customers. Following are the results of Extended Enterprise survey that shows some great benefits of incorporating customer product training.
According to the Brandom Hall Group Extended Enterprise 2017 survey results:
- 26% of businesses reduce their client support interactions
- 55% of businesses improve customer relations
- 41% of businesses maximize their client retention
But before we dig deeper into the essentials of customer product training, let us first have a brief understanding of customer product training. What it involves and what benefits does it offer?
Customer product training occurs when an organization introduces new products or services. Typically the training aims at providing customers with all the information and material that they need in order to experience success with the service or product. Customer training can be done in multiple ways. It could be done through seminars, welcome gatherings or by offering online training etc. it can be self-paced, guided or may be a combination of multiple training approaches.
However, the most recommended way to offer customer product training is through an online training program. This provides the customer with the information for self-paced learning. It also empowers the customers to search the material they need at the point of need.
Customer facing knowledge base and on-demand training material are two most common examples of self-paced customer product training.
The core purpose of developing customer product training is to organize your material into a comprehensive program. A program that is easy to use and provide support for each step of your customers’ journey.
Customer Product Training Increases Business Revenue and Improve Productivity
Many enterprises are now making the most of the customer product training. They make a package and sell these training programs to customers that open a new stream of business profit such as the purchase of training program via subscription. Also, companies oftentimes deploy advanced learning technology that makes customer product training a way to increase innovation and improve productivity.
For instance, whenever a product update is released, the training program will assist in ensuring an incident-free rollout. Since latest learning technology encourages collaboration and feedback, it also enables customers to interact with the business through regular feedbacks and suggestions. This, in turn, encourages companies to show their innovative side by incorporating customer feedback.
Prime Reasons to Incorporate Customer Product Training
Customer success is changing constantly. Long gone are the days of support tickets. With the latest technology, businesses are now producing a lot more complex products and services. While this is the only way to stand out in today’s competitive industries, training customer about the new product and services is becoming a top priority for businesses.
There are many large or mid-sized enterprises that specifically hire customer success managers who build customer training programs. Their job is to mitigate churn, promote customer loyalty, and increase retention of their customer base. However, these training programs are indeed in their infancy. Previously they consisted of extensive user manuals or expensive onboarding session. But now it has compacted into more efficient to deliver training programs. For instance, just by implementing a complete enterprise learning management system – LMS, an extended enterprise can easily provide the customer with required information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and at much lower cost.
Here are the top reasons to incorporate an advanced and efficient to deliver customer training program:
Prevent Manual Onboarding of Customers
Generally, onboarding is a tedious and time-consuming task that requires your onboarding team to develop a comprehensive onboarding course for the customers. But if you incorporate online training program it will empower the customer success team to familiarize themselves with the services and products in their own time and in accordance with self-learning pace.
More Customer Engagement
Many businesses today focus on employees training but only a few values training their customers. As per the Gallup survey, businesses having high customer engagement usually outperform other businesses by at least 30% to 50% revenue margin.
Nothing could be a better way to engage customers than training. When you involve your customers and educate them about your product and service, you strengthen the bottom line and use one of the most compelling forms of customer engagement.
Foster Customer Communities
The growing trend of customer success is encouraging various tools, discussion forums and communities to help customers. Communities facilitate customers to connect with a peer while engaging and discussing the product features, product updates, and their best practices and other knowledge. These communities also provide a great opportunity to the business to get valuable insight about customer behavior and to develop their product and services accordingly.
Less Support Cost
Every business strives to keep its cost as low as possible. May it be the overhead cost or the cost of developing customer training program; nothing could be more favorable for a business that reduces support cost. By implementing online customer training program you can do just that. A customer training program that leverages LMS allows customers to get familiar with your product and services wherever and whenever they like. This eventually reduces support calls and instead foster relationships with customers. It also cut down the traveling cost of trainers.
Thus, a successful customer training program is the one that can instantly scale and fully reach all the customers and at every stage of the lifecycle. One way to avail these benefits is to adopt online training programs like many large enterprises are now focusing on. It is also one of the most preferred approaches by customers.
However, when we develop customer training program to nurture customers through products, we fail to realize that our customer is not just excited about the features but they also want to know what your product can do for them.
The biggest mistake made by businesses is that they spend plenty of time creating training courses that are aimed at onboarding and nurturing customers. However, in the end, your customer is only interested to know the benefits offered by such features.
Speaking of which, the most commonly talked about concept in marketing, sales, and success is featured versus benefits. If you want to understand the main difference between the two concepts then it’s about ascertaining the impact of these on customer training course and eventually your business’s bottom line.
