Author: Vinay Londhe

Let’s Know How to Engage & Retain Customers with Effective Customer Training Program?

A range of elements goes into establishing a successful business. At the center stage of it, all is customer service training programs. Any interaction a company or its employee has with a customer affects the business. Hence, in the business world, what separates the chaff from the wheat is the one that offers a succinct customer training program.

As seen in most cases, it is often the customer services that help a company to thrive. It is hence imperative that businesses need to invest in creating the best customer training programs.

Offering excellent and comprehensive customer service training to the employees, stakeholders, and even customers will add value to your product and customers. It will also drive sales and give you an edge over your competitors.

Getting your customers to understand your product and service is vital. By creating a successful customer training strategy, you are putting the business ahead of others.
So if you are still finding this article important and want to acquaint yourself better with the customer training guide and want to know more about it, let’s continue.

We will explain customer training, why it is essential, and how it can help your business.

In businesses, most often, the addressed audience is the internal employees when it comes to eLearning. But in the last few years, there has been a constant surge in expanding the customer service training program outlet. With this service, the target audience is the non-employees, including the stakeholders, distributors, and customers.

The space given with this training allows the customers to enjoy the centralized space to get the answer to their queries and get faster results for their issues.

What is a Customer Training Program?

If we look into a customer training guide, it needs to have materials and information about the services or products that are part of your business’s objective. These learning materials can be categorized into three ways:

• Guided learning.
• Self-paced learning.
• Combination of guided and self-paced learning.

The kind of category you want to offer depends on your business and also what your customer base prefers and responds to.

A good customer training example is guided onboarding. This can be essential in helping your customers with the launch of new software or products. With this strategy, you can see the result of your product soon.

Along with this, it is also essential to offer customers materials on the product to empower the self-paced learners. They need to have the information they seek at the point of need. One example that we can offer is the on-demand training material or offering a knowledge base.

Why Does the Customer Need to Be Trained?

There are several benefits to creating customer training best practices. This includes a dynamic approach to reaching out to new customers—the opportunity to increase loyalty among the existing customer base.

The simple reason that customer training program work for your benefit is that, like your employees, they also need the knowledge about your products to get the full utility of it. However, without a proper training program in place, mainly an eLearning platform, your customers don’t have access to that knowledge.

Since customers don’t always know where to find the information, often which are hidden in FAQs, Terms of the Service, and Users Guide, providing them with a separate learning module is much more beneficial.

It has often been recorded that most of the information hidden in these formats goes unnoticed while presenting them in a course format does wonder for retaining the information.

Benefits that a Business Can Achieve From Implementing a Customer Training Program Are:

• Building customer loyalty.
• Customers will get to know the best way to use your products or services. Also, enjoy the maximum benefit out of it.
• Ongoing training of the customers also is part of your ongoing marketing strategy.
• Educating the customers helps with increasing the conversion rate and eventually the ROI of your business.
• You can engage your customer service team for critical issues instead of mundane know-hows.
• If you don’t want your customers reading about how to hack into your products, or see unauthorized YouTube tutorials, training them with proper material is essential. They should get the information from the expert, and that is YOU.

How Effective Customer Training Program Helps in Engaging & Retaining a Customer?

If you want to know how to create an effective customer training program, the simple reason you need to bear in mind is to create a module that will help engage your customers and retain them.

Often when businesses do not engage with their customers, it leaves them unhappy and leads to churning. So if you want to reduce the churn rate, you need to keep them engaging. Relevant training will give them the excitement to know something new. It will give the customers the knowledge and tools to do their work better with your products.

So while you keep the existing customers happy by engaging them, you are also opening up opportunities to get new customers from the references done by the existing pool.

There is also the option of offering an on-demand customer training program, where your customers can access the learning materials directly from your eLearning platform. This method allows you to introduce new products, train them on how to use them in real-time.

The method ensures standardized training for customers while delivering consistent material irrespective of the location.

By creating engaging content, you allow customers to understand your product, the solution, thus enhancing customer loyalty. The process also engages them in a way that support tickets are unable to do with customer services.

Nowadays, many organizations use a learning management system (LMS) to offer online effective customer training programs. LMS helps you measure and track your training material’s success in real-time and see the customer engagement. This ensures valuable insight into the training tools that you offer. You can tie this to the KPIs to analyze the impact it has on your business.

Final Thoughts

If you want to build customer loyalty, keep them engaged and allow them to get the best from your products or services, you must start an effective customer training program. If you are not yet convinced, just think about how your customers will react to the value-added service your competitors will provide with the training program.

This article will give you the chance to know more about customer training. At the same time, everyone acknowledges the value and benefits of training the employee and the workforce. This helps to increase production, revenue, and efficiency while cutting back on costs and waste. The training also helps to increase compliance with regulation and less employee and customer churning. But, in the last few years, customer service training programs are becoming a talked about subject.

This article will look into a customer training program, its benefits, how to build the best and successful customer training program, and a couple of associated questions.

What is the Customer Training Program?

As part of creating an effective product strategy, many companies invest in customer education, marketing, and customer support. While providing a customer service training program outlet about the product, it helps you make better customer engagement, it also helps you differentiate between you and your competitor.

Suppose we put it in the simplest terms. In that case, the customer training program is offered to the end-user of your products by adding extra materials to educate and support the development. The purpose is to ensure that the customer can enjoy the product to the fullest.

The customer training best practices program is primarily found in the tech industry, particularly SaaS. The reason customers are given the option to receive training is because of the complex nature of the product. It is typically a branch of eLearning, also known as an extended enterprise.

The customer training program guide is given to external people of the business; primarily the stakeholders, partners, and resellers of the product, at times even the customers.

The training is created in the software company is has been gaining popularity because of the experience it offers the users. Apart from providing an improved experience, there are other benefits of the training too.

Benefits of the Customer Training Program

Before we jump into the benefits of the customer training program, let’s take a look at some figures.

Userlane has revealed that up-sells and renewals generate SaaS’ 70% to 90% profit.

American Express revealed in a study that 62% of the millennials (they are officially now surpassing Gen X) have openly advocated sticking to their preferred brand.

Research showcased that 68% of trained customers use a product more often. 56% of the respondents have a better understanding of more products than those who did not get the training. 87% of the trained customers are more capable of using the product independently.

These figures become essential in understanding the benefits of the how the customer training strategy program since it offers:

Customer Onboarding: One of the critical places to improve customer onboarding is by providing them training at critical times. A good product’s ability to showcase its efficiency can be easily equated with training and giving it the ability to click with the customer and encouraging them to use it.

Increased engagement with the product: A trained customer can derive more excellent value from the product, thereby clicking with it better. If you use metrics like NPS or CSAT, you can see the direct impact of customer satisfaction from engaging with the product.

Better customer retention: A customer training program allows a business to address the pain points of the customer’s experience and solve them. This often goes beyond mere troubleshooting, thus decreasing customer churning and increasing loyalty.

Reduce support costs: Training a customer will reduce the burden on your support team, who will have the time to address serious issues than just simple troubleshooting.

Increase in customer upgrades: Customers with better experience and training of the software are likely to upgrade to higher plans.

Better brand promotion: With improved customer satisfaction, they are likely to promote your product to their friends and colleagues, for which you don’t even have to pay them.

With all these benefits in place, it’s time to look into the steps that should be incorporated in building a successful customer training program.

Important Steps to Build a Customer Training Program

Any company that wants to optimize the customer training program can and want to know how to create customer service training program, here are simple 7 steps.

1. Know Your Customer: Understanding your customer needs is the key to developing the training program. It is vital to prioritize your ‘ideal’ customers since they are loyal and recommend you to others. Conduct interviews and surveys to understand the areas that these loyal customers are confused about. Identify the problem areas with their help and what they want to achieve with your product.

2. Identify the Gaps: If you already have training materials or when you start to gather those materials identify the gaps in the materials where training needs to be developed. The best way is to contact the product, marketing sales, and customer care team since they are likely to have their customer help content already. Identify the gaps there that need to be addressed and begin by prioritizing them.

3. A Collaborative Effort: The ideal situation is developing the customer training programs when the product is being developed by sitting with the product development and other teams. Using the agile method is the best way to develop training content at each stage to provide a complete package for the customer.

4. Use A Focus Group: Instead of deploying off the new training material to all your customers, it is better to have a focus group and test the content. Get feedback and work on them to make it better.

5. Use Tracking & Analytics Tool: It is essential that once the customer training program material is put in the market to track closely how and what tracking content is being consumed most. Also, you can use rating tools to get direct
analytical feedback.

6. Continue To Upsell: Though the initial target is to achieve ‘quick wins’ with a training program. But you must keep assisting your customers to continue with the training to meet your and their long-term goals. You will also minimize the customer churn while increasing the upsell.

7. Increase ROI and Growth: When the customer training program is successful, you will have more free-trial users upgrade to paid plans while existing paid ones are likely to upgrade to higher versions. A satisfied training course will also lead to increased referrals, thereby increasing ROI and better business growth.

How to Measure the Success of a Customer Training Program?

One of the important ways to know whether your customer training course is a success is not is to measure it. But, you much ask how to do that. There are two ways in which you can measure the success of your customer training course. They are:

• Compare the LMS report with your business data. It will show the impact the training is having on the customers. The analysis should indicate that the customers are on board and understand the purpose of the service or product.
• Compare the LMS data with the customer support data. When the customer training program is successful, there will be a reduction in support queries. Customer support software is a goldmine to get a range of information, which can be used for analysis.

How Long Should the Customer Training Program Be?

Customer training examples need to be crisp and engaging. Hence to ensure that the customer stays focused, it shouldn’t be more than thirty minutes. Also, it should be available just in time as required by the customer.

Wrapping It Up:

As a business, to enjoy success, it is vital to keep your customers onboard. The best way to do it is to offer a customer training program that will ensure your products are being used to their fullest.