Self-Service Customer Training: Empowering Customers and Driving Loyalty

Jul 10, 2025 | Articles, Customer Training and Customer Experience Design

Key Takeaways:

  • Self-service customer training improves loyalty and reduces support calls by empowering clients to help themselves.
  • Most customers prefer self-service options for simple problems and expect accessible resources from brands.
  • Well-designed training can double as ongoing marketing and create opportunities to promote additional products.
  • If businesses don’t provide effective training, customers may turn to unreliable outside sources for help.
  • Top-performing companies use chatbots, knowledge bases, and customer portals, but poor experiences with these tools can drive customers away.

Self-service has become an integral part of our world. We use self-service at the grocery store checkout, the gas station, and at the ATM. We shop online and are used to being able to find almost any information within seconds.

However, does the public’s affinity for self-service extend to customer training? Customers are more knowledgeable than ever. Agents report that today’s customers demand increasingly personalized service; they expect your business to be familiar with their problems and to adapt to their changing needs.

This makes the jobs of customer experience professionals tough; 69% of customer support representatives say that balancing customer speed and personalization is a challenge. AI and self-service options can help ease agents’ workload, but will increasingly sophisticated customers embrace a self-service approach to customer training? Can a chatbot or AI-guided learning provide your clients with the engagement they crave from your brand?

The benefits of customer training

Customer training is any learning a brand provides to its customers. This training can take many forms. Courses, videos, FAQs, and interactions with agents can all fall under the umbrella of customer education.

Why provide it?  Research has shown that a trained customer is a happy customer. Your clients crave knowledge — they want to know how to use your product well, for example — but unlike your employees, who often have access to a learning platform, customers don’t always know where to find the information they might need.

Why train customers?

1) Training builds customer loyalty

Want loyal customers? Teach them. Customers want your brand to engage with them, and they appreciate your investment in their success with your product. For software-as-a-service businesses, where churn is often an issue, education is a great way to keep customers coming back to you for more information. Some brands may even consider offering certifications, as Hubspot does. Such credentials offer more than information to your customers, they let them display their talents so they can improve their own business.

2) You’re teaching customers how to get the most out of your product

Your customers invested in you and your product or service. Make sure they get the most out of that investment. By providing training, you can onboard customers effectively at the start of their relationship with you. Then you can provide continuous engagement in other ways, like webinars about special use cases, or through a chatbot that answers questions.

3) Ongoing training is also ongoing marketing

Good news: if you’re engaged in ongoing customer training, the tips and tricks you’re sending out to existing customers also serve as marketing. After all, who doesn’t like to learn a new hack for something they use all the time? These continuous learning opportunities keep your customers engaged, and can also serve to educate existing customers about other products you sell that they might enjoy.

4) Training can reduce customer service tickets

Every time a customer gets frustrated and calls customer service, it costs your organization money and ties up representatives. Also, most calls to customer service are about simple things and don’t really require a ticket to be opened. A survey by Bain and Company found that up to 70% of calls to contact centers are avoidable or about easily-handled matters. If you address such basic customer support issues through customer training, chances are good you’ll reduce customer support ticket volume, and the extraneous costs associated with it.

5) Proactive training helps customers avoid inaccurate information

People are used to finding their own answers to problems. Do you really want your customers searching for a YouTube tutorial about your product? Do you want them reading message boards and talking to other users about how to hack your product? This is the risk you run when you don’t provide customer training. If you aren’t providing the answer in your own training materials, chances are, your customers are going to head over to YouTube to see if someone online has made a video answering their question. The problem? Not all the information in those videos are necessarily correct, and some of the workarounds might result in more calls to customer service. By offering self-service customer training, you can ensure that customers are looking up information in the right place: your site.

Do customers like self-service?

Self-service has been around a long time, as has anxiety about whether customers will appreciate it. To see the impact of self service, however, we need look no further than your local bank.

Self-service: lessons from the banking world

Decades ago, bank tellers did everything: they cashed paychecks, made deposits and withdrawals, and even checked account balances. In fact, the only way to check how much was in your account (aside from keeping a balanced checkbook) was to physically walk into a bank and ask. This could mean long lines and long waits — especially on payday. To take some of the pressure off tellers, banks introduced two forms of self-service:

  • Call centers: Introduced in the 1980s, call centers were meant to free bank branch employees from basic transactions like balance inquiries and enable those tellers to concentrate on activities that turned a profit — handling loans, for example. However, the banks underestimated how much customers would love the convenience of checking their balance from their home phones — transactions actually increased.
  • ATMs: Customers were similarly enamored of ATMs, which became mainstream in the 1990s. At the time, banks thought the proliferation of ATMs might decrease teller or even eliminate teller jobs, but that wasn’t the case. Bank customers do like self-service — they like getting their cash from a machine — but they also want to talk to a teller when they need to handle a more complicated banking issue. The result was that the teller job changed, and while there were fewer tellers per bank branch, more branches opened, resulting in more teller jobs.

Customers and self-service: the numbers

Your customers are used to self-service, and according to researchers, they usually prefer some self-service options. A recent study found that 61% of customers prefer to use self-service for simple issues — the sort of quick microlearning they might not want to take a full course for.

The same study shows that high-performing customer service organizations are extremely likely to offer self-service options. For example, 81% of top organizations offer a chatbot. Other self-service options offered by top companies include knowledge bases, help centers, and customer portals.

Just having a chatbot isn’t enough, however. Customers aren’t forgiving if a chatbot or a self-service option isn’t helpful; 72% of customers won’t go back to a company’s chatbot after just one negative experience.

The future of self-service customer education

Customers are not only open to self-service options, but often prefer them — especially for simple queries about how to complete a task.

Just as ATMs and call centers revolutionized banking by providing convenient access to information and basic transactions, self-service can empower your customers to find answers on their own — while still engaging with your customer training content.

This reduces the burden on customer service agents, allowing them to focus on more complex issues, and ultimately leads to more satisfied customers.

By providing comprehensive, easily accessible, and high-quality self-service training resources, businesses can meet customer expectations, foster loyalty, and enhance the overall customer experience. The goal is not to eliminate human interaction but to optimize it, ensuring that customers have the tools to help themselves while still having access to personalized support when they need it.

For a deeper dive into effective customer training and its benefits, download our Customer Training Playbook. This comprehensive guide to customer education offers strategies and tips executing and measuring the success of frictionless self-service customer training, as well as real-world customer training case studies from Litmos customers. Download your free customer training guide today!