eLearning significantly boosts the value of employee training, but what about training your customers? Knowledge is power, which is why it’s important for the people who buy your product or service to know how to get the most out of it.
A customer who understands how to use what you are selling will have a better experience with your business. Online customer training can also be used to highlight benefits, best practices, and much more.
This is especially true for companies that sell tech and SaaS products. Learning more about LMS platforms will help you elevate your customer experience and, in turn, increase your organization’s earning potential.
What is Customer Training?
Customer training refers to the education of people outside of your business. This can include the end-user or consumer as well as partners and resellers. Anyone who has an interest in your product or service that isn’t an employee can fall into this category.
There may be overlap between customer and employee training, however, there will also be some differences. The training content should be tailored to each audience. Employees may have access to more back-end topics while customers will focus on topics that help them get more out of your service or product.
To provide the best customer training, you must:
- Identify the needs of your customers and base training on those needs
- Provide content in smaller segments to increase knowledge retention
- Ensure that customer training content is accessible to all users
- Present content using different methods to address all learner types
- Create content based on the customer’s current knowledge level
A good eLearning platform will empower your business to create effective training content that meets the needs of your audience. Many platforms lean heavily into microlearning, which is a good tool for customer training.
Remember that creating a positive learning environment with eLearning will go a long way with your customer base.
The Benefits of Trained Customers
The bottom line is that any type of training content requires time, resources, and knowledge to create. Most organizations want to know that the resources they pay for will give them a good return on the initial investment.
Why should you consider adding training to your customer experience?
- Onboard New Customers Faster
Onboarding significantly elevates the customer experience. Customers who feel like they were thrown into the deep end with no information will be more likely to go elsewhere.
eLearning makes customer onboarding easy. Providing a knowledgebase, self-guided course, or other training content will allow customers to dive in well-prepared. They will see the benefits of your product or service right away, along with the knowledge required to utilize those benefits.
- Training Increases Customer Loyalty
A customer who is happy and feels supported is more likely to come back in the future. Training leads to an increase in customer loyalty. Your customers will be less likely to buy from competitors when they know that you provide everything that they need to get the most out of their purchases.
- Reduces the Workload for Your Customer Support Team
New customers are more likely to have questions for your customer support team. Even though some may be simple inquiries, they take up precious time.
Customer training will reduce the workload for your support team. Instead of answering simple questions, your support professionals can focus on more complex problems that require their attention. That also means less hassle for new customers who don’t have to take time out of their day to call or email support.
- More Likely to Receive Customer Recommendations
Customers who view your product or service as a good value will be more likely to recommend your company to others. This can be done through online reviews or word of mouth. Those recommendations are worth their weight in gold when it comes to bringing in new customers.
- Boosts Your Brand Reputation
More successful customers will lead to an overall better reputation for your brand. Customers will feel more confident in your product or service when they see you providing support from day one. They will be more likely to tell others or come back to buy other products or services.
LMS Features That Support Customer eLearning
Do you need a customer education program? The real question is: How much revenue will you lose by not training your customers?
The first step is to gather the tools that will allow you to provide a convenient, effective training program that meets customer needs. Which LMS features can you use to educate your customer base?
- Gamification
Gamification uses a gameplay approach to training. Even though your content isn’t a game, it creates a similar level of engagement. This is often done through leaderboards, point systems, badges, rewards, and social learning.
- Learning Paths
Learning paths are a practical tool found in most LMS platforms. This feature is a structured sequence of resources that guide the learner through the training process. Each path should have a specific goal, whether that’s teaching the basics or an advanced skill.
- Assessments
Assessments help customers understand what they learned and what they may need to revisit. They can also give insight into what your customers know. Most LMS platforms provide assessment tools using different formats, like true and false, multiple choice, and matching.
- Analytics
Analytics is essential to monitoring the performance of your customer training program. An LMS can compile all data and make it easy to access. Analytics can show you what your customers know and where they may struggle with knowledge gaps.
- Interactive Training Videos
Interactive training videos are an excellent customer training resource because they address multiple learning types at once. Visual content is presented in the form of a video while audio can provide spoken word information. Interactive videos can also include text overlayed on the video.
- Localized eLearning
Customers should feel like the learning experience is authentic to them. Localized eLearning content can help. This is content that is adapted to cultural nuances, languages, and other things that are unique to a target audience.
Customers are essential to the survival of any business. When your customers are successful, your organization will be, too.
