The practice of training customers is not a new one. The concept has lived in the business landscape in the form of user manuals for several decades.
Despite this, many businesses only think of employee training when they think of providing training.
While employee training sure has its benefits, the advantages of having a customer base that is trained to make the most of your product/service are too significant to be ignored.
So, what are these raving benefits of customer training? Why is it so important? Here are just a few of the reasons:
The Importance of Training Customers
Improved Customer Retention
This is a direct benefit of training customers. With training, you enable your customers to use your product or service to its full capability. When they are able to do this, they are able to enjoy the maximum possible advantages of your offering.
In other words, while your offering solves a customer’s problem, the training you provide will help them use your product to solve said problem without running into additional issues.
All of this will translate into a more positive customer experience and a positive customer experience will definitely contribute to improved customer loyalty.
Reduced Support Costs
With better-educated customers, the number of support queries your team has to handle will go down dramatically. As a result, you will not need fewer support executives for the same number of customers.
Besides reducing the support cost, fewer support requests have another benefit which is, improved customer experience.
When your customer support team has fewer queries to deal with, they can spend more time resolving serious queries and issues. Moreover, with fewer queries, your company’s turnaround time of resolving each query will be reduced.
Better Word Of Mouth
With a great experience with your offering, coupled with a delightful support experience, you can create a loyal customer base that is ready to vouch for your product.
Satisfied customers will be happy to provide you with video testimonials and potential leads in the form of friends and acquaintances that also convert into paying customers. Even today, 92% of customers believe suggestions given by their friends and family more than advertising.
Easier To Roll Out New Features And Updates
When you have a training mechanism set up, it will be easy to add training material for new updates and features that you may eventually introduce to your product.
This will enable your business to roll out updates and features without any mishaps or incidents.
Now that we have understood the benefits of customer training, let’s understand how modern businesses can start deploying it.
The Most Efficient Way To Provide Customer Training
Traditional ways of providing training to customers (user manuals) have become outdated and obsolete. Not only are they difficult to understand and consume for customers, they are irrelevant to most of the digital products being sold today.
So how should you provide training to your customers?
The most efficient way is to deliver training in an online environment with the help of a learning management system (LMS).
Before we get into why a LMS solution is the best way to deliver customer training, let us briefly understand what a learning management system is:
A learning management system is a platform that enables training providers to distribute and manage training content.
Modern learning management systems (LMS) come loaded with administrative features that allow training administrators to deploy different courses to specific learners, and track their progress.
Some LMS even offer the ability to record learner feedback, which can be used to improve the learning experience. Such a feature can prove especially advantageous in the case of customer training.
Now that we understand what a LMS is, let’s see why it is such a great tool for providing customer training.
Benefits Of Using A LMS For Customer Training
A learning management system is created with one purpose in mind- to streamline the process of delivering and tracking training. The features offered by a learning management system provide a number of advantages:
The Ability To Create A Centralised Training Content Repository
The LMS enables you to create a training content repository that your customers can access from anywhere, as long as they have access to the Internet.
This central repository is also incredibly easy to update. With cloud based access, your team can upload and share updated training content with your learners with ease.
The Ability To Deliver Training With Multimedia
All modern learning management systems offer multimedia support. This means, your customers don’t need to be trained with boring text based presentations that last forever.
Instead, you can make use of videos, GIFs, infographics, and other visual and audio content assets to provide your customers with an engaging and user friendly training experience.
The Ability To Provide Just In Time Training
With an LMS, your customers can have on-demand access to the training material. With this, whenever they find themselves stuck, all they need to do is log on to the LMS, find the relevant training module, and look up the information they need.
Having access to the training content even after the training is complete will enable your customers to resolve minor issues without the help of your support team.
The Ability To Track Learner Progress
The tracking capabilities of a learning management system can enable businesses to continually improve the customer training experience they plan to deliver.
When you can track how your customers are interacting with the training content, you can use this data to guide decisions that will make your customer training experience more focused and user friendly.
Conclusion
With the required technology becoming more accessible than ever before, modern businesses have no reason to overlook customer training. Sure, there are a few upfront costs involved, but the return on this investment, in the form of a larger and more loyal customer base, is simply too lucrative to pass up.
Does your business provide customer training? How are you currently doing it? Share with us in the comment section below!
