What is customer training?
Customer training is the act of educating your customers on the best ways to use your offerings and succeed at their business objectives. It involves sharing content and other forms of information to help your customers learn how to use your products to achieve their goals.
Customer training could involve guided learning as well as self-paced learning.
Guided learning could include live customer onboarding sessions with agents or even live webinars. Self-paced learning materials like tutorial videos, knowledge bases, instructional articles, etc. are also very important. They help your customers find the information they need as soon as the need arises. You could even make use of customer training software to help your products understand your product and succeed with it.
Customer training is essentailly a part of eLearning known as the extended enterprise. This is because it focuses on training people outside your organization. Customer training programs are courses that teach your customers how they can use your product and what they can do to get more out of your product. They can be delivered through means of a corporate training platform and are now very popular among software companies.
Customer training programs are courses that teach your customers how they can use your product and what they can do to get more out of your product. They are now very popular among software companies.
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Why is it important to train customers?
Customer training can help your customers see value in your offerings faster. It can help them understand how your solution can help them achieve their goals and also shows them exactly how they can achieve their goals with the use of your offerings.
Since it makes it easier for your customers to set up and use your solution, customer training can even result in a quicker time to value.
It helps you strengthen your relationship with your customers, as 55% of businesses stated in a 2017 survey on the Extended Enterprise that was conducted by the Brandon Hall Group.
The main reasons why customer training is conducted is that it reduces customer effort and improves the overall customer experience.
What are the benefits of customer training?
The benefits of customer training do not stop at better customer relationships. Here are a few of the other significant customer training benefits that your business could gain:
1. Customer satisfaction
When you focus on customer training and create & distribute the necessary learning materials, you help your customers use your solution to the fullest, with minimum bumps along the way. This helps them achieve the objective that they seeked to achieve with your product as quickly as possible, leading to high levels of customer satisfaction.
2. Customer loyalty
Engaging in customer training and further, creating a customer training program shows your customers that you have their best interest at heart. It shows them that you care about their success and are not the kind of organization that would simply sell them a product and leave them hanging. It makes clear the fact that you wish to help them make the most of your product.
Combine that with the fact that using your offerings as per your instructions brings them great results and satisfaction and they will stay loyal for a long time.
3. Reduces customer effort
When your customers are trained, they know how to use your product. They’re not spending hours trying to figure out what to do while pulling out their hair in frustration. Customer training ensures that your customers always know exactly what they need to do in order to achieve the goal that they had in mind. They don’t have to figure things out on their own, which means that you’ve made it much easier for them to do business with you.
This is a major benefit because the easier you make it for a customer to do business with you, the more likely they are to come back again and again and keep doing business with you over a long period of time.
4. Less support requests
Guided onboardings help your customers learn how to use your product and get many of their questions answered at the very beginning. In addition to this, the self-paced learning materials that you provide will help them find answers and solutions as soon as issues arise, helping to lower the burden on your support staff.
5. Higher engagement with your product
Customers want products that are easy to use. Customer training allows you to show your customers how to use your products, which means that it’s easy for them to use your products. This helps them to get more value from your product, which means that they use it even more, basically increasing their engagement with your products.
6. Increased customer lifetime value
In addition to making your customers more loyal, focusing on customer training also creates upselling and cross-selling opportunities, thus increasing your customer lifetime value. It basically helps you sell to your customers without coming across as overly salesy. When you engage in customer training, you can sell to your customers while making them feel like you’re trying to help them get the best results, rather than seeming like you just want to catch up on your sales targets.
Essentially, customer training helps you sell to your customers while still making them feel like you are in their corners and have their backs.
7. Word-of-mouth
When your customers succeed because of the training that you have provided them with, they become more likely to tell others about you, essentially becoming brand evangelists. It’s obvious, if you don’t help them and they don’t manage to achieve their goals with your product, they won’t bother telling anyone about you. Or maybe (and this is much worse and far more likely to happen), they’ll talk about how useless your product is and how unhelpful your team is. But if you help your customers out by training them, it’s very likely that you’ll find them singing your praises and telling everyone how amazing your product is and how helpful your team is.
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