If you’re planning to leverage customer education for its many benefits, start by understanding who you’re training. Knowing your audience is the first step to designing customer education that genuinely adds value to their user experience.
Sounds difficult? Just follow these best practices to help you deliver valuable customer training:
Make your team an asset
There’s good news. You don’t have to guess what your customers need. There are already people in your team that spend time with customers and understand their problems and desires.
Invest some time in talking to your salespeople, vendors, and customer support teams. Aim to understand the causes behind frequent customer questions, and where training will be most effective in providing the right answers.
These “frontline” team members will also play a special role in your customer education efforts. They’ll be directing customers to educational materials, and educating customers in using your products, while onboarding them or resolving their issues.
Rely on existing communication channels
You’ve already invested in a blog, social media marketing, and customer support forums. So, why not use these channels to share your educational content?
Join forces with your content marketing team to create training resources for customers that are engaging, user-friendly, and easy to share.
Using channels that your customers are already comfortable with, like Facebook and Instagram, to support your customer education efforts is a quick win. But do think carefully about the kind of content you create, and how it will perform on platforms designed for bite-sized information and quick entertainment.
Offer video tutorials
The old saying “show, don’t tell” is especially important when creating educational content.
Do you need customers to learn a process, or understand a use case? Well, short videos are a powerful tool for customer enablement. Consider how the use of your product or service can be practically demonstrated, and create a punchy video tutorial that covers the basics.
A Learning Management System (LMS) with video functionality can be a great platform for customers to access your video tutorials in a user-friendly and convenient way.
Leverage the power of webinars
While you’re leveraging the power of live demonstration through video, don’t forget to consider the role of webinars in your customer education strategy.
Perhaps there’s something new happening with your brand, or with one of your products? Offer a free webinar on your LMS, and advertise it on your blog and social media channels. Webinars bring a sense of active discussion and collaboration to your training, and this can be invaluable in making customers feel considered, engaged, and satisfied.
Create relatable case studies
Case studies and scenarios provide a valuable opportunity to practice new skills. They provide a safe space for customers to fail and try again, and also to get feedback that helps them succeed in the future. This can make them feel comfortable with a product before making the financial commitment to purchase it.
The key to successful case studies is making sure that they’re relevant and relatable to your target customers. So, you might need to create tailored cases and scenarios for sub-groups of customers.
An LMS to support customer education
With an LMS that integrates with your CRM, you’ll be able to upload your training content in various formats, and your customer education efforts are bound to pay off. Even better if your LMS provides mobile features so you can truly deliver customer training anywhere, anytime.
By using the best practices we’ve outlined here in combination with a powerful LMS, your customer education won’t only improve customers’ product knowledge, but also their ongoing trust in your brand.