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.
