What are the benefits of customer training?
The benefits of customer training include a more dynamic approach to reaching new customers and the ability to increase loyalty among your established consumer base, among other things. Like your employees, your customers crave knowledge, but unlike your employees who often have access to an e-learning platform, customers don’t always know where to find the information they need.
The most important thing about training your customers is the engagement you create. When you offer education to your customers, you’re speaking directly to them in a way you can’t when you’re marketing, selling to them, or even providing customer service. The best customer training doesn’t feel like training at all. There are some additional factors that come into play when your train your customers:
Training builds loyalty
Want loyal customers? Train them. You’re investing in their success by training them how to excel when it comes to your product or service, and customers respond well to that. For software-as-a-service businesses, where churn is often an issue, education is a great way to keep customers engaged and coming back to you for more information. Some companies may even consider offering certifications, as Litmos does with its Dojo Training. Such credentials offer more than information to your customers, they let them display their talents so they can improve their own business.
You’re training customers how to get the most out of your product
Your customers invested in you and your product or service. Why not make sure they’re getting the most out of it? By providing training, you can onboard customers effectively at the start of their relationship with you. Then, as they grow more confident, you can release training as they need it: micro-training related to new releases, for example, or hacks to make their use of your service more effective.
Ongoing training is also ongoing marketing
Jeannie Walters wrote about how education in marketing helps to increase conversion rates. 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? The engagement that training creates keeps your customers engaged, and you can also add training that educates existing customers about other products you sell that they might enjoy.
Reduce calls to customer service
Every time a customer gets frustrated and calls customer service, it costs your organization at least $4, according to a report from PWC. Complaints handled online cost less — between 10 and 15 cents per contact, but that’s still money you wouldn’t have to spend if your customers don’t need help. Also, most calls to customer service are about simple things and don’t really require the help of a representative. A survey by Bain and Company found that up to 70 percent of calls to contact centers are avoidable or about easily-handled matters. If you address these basic issues in your training when you onboard a new customer, chances are good you’ll reduce contacts with customer service. Additionally your onboarding modules can serve as a resource your customers can go back to if they need a refresher.
If you don’t provide learning, your customers will find it for themselves.
Do you really want your customers going on YouTube to find a 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. According to a recent study by Google, more than 7 in 10 viewers use YouTube to solve a problem at home, school, or work. 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 that learning before your customers even go looking for it, you get out ahead of their questions and make sure they’re getting the right information from an expert: you.
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