The benefits of customer training range from improved day-to-day satisfaction with a product to increased trust in the brand. But before you start planning your customer education program, it’s important to understand that it’s not only new customers that need to be trained.
Educating customers is key to success across all phases of the customer lifecycle. Potential and newly acquired customers should be onboarded to use a product for the first time. Existing customers will continue to need education on added features, new products, or upgrades.
1. Improved customer satisfaction
Imagine you’ve just bought a new car. It’s fresh off the showroom floor, and is supposed to sport some mind-blowing new features that make driving easier and more enjoyable. The only problem is that you haven’t driven in years.
Your first drive is meant to be fun, but instead, you stall repeatedly and keep confusing the windshield wipers with the air conditioning. Needless to say, you’re unsatisfied with your purchase. The great shame is that there’s nothing wrong with the car, you just need some training on how to use its cool features.
The point is, customer satisfaction soars when customers are properly educated in using the product or service. This is because they’re able to take advantage of all the tools and features, without running into problems that make their user experience frustrating.
2. Boosted customer engagement
Customer education improves the experience they get with your product, which in turn increases customer engagement with your brand. And of course, everyone engages more with brands they trust and enjoy.
Through this increased engagement, customers will be more likely to renew or repurchase your product. They’re also more likely to spread positive word-of-mouth about your product and brand to their friends and colleagues.
3. Increased loyalty
This probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but satisfied and engaged customers are less likely to shop around for an alternative product or service. Why? Because they’re loyal. And customer loyalty has many benefits.
Some of the benefits of customer loyalty relate directly to ROI, like:
- Lower costs to secure each purchase — securing repeat purchases costs companies much less in marketing spend than it does to secure a new customer.
- Improved brand advocacy through positive customer word-of-mouth and testimonials, which translates to free high-quality advertising.
4. Higher quality customer support
When companies invest in customer education, there are fewer complaints and questions to be handled by the customer support department. This is because customers are able to figure out these snags using their product knowledge.
Removing most minor issues from the customer support queue means that the customer support team gets to focus on the more complex issues that are still reported. And because the support team is free to assist customers with complex issues more quickly, improved customer support feeds back into increased customer satisfaction.
5. A more trustworthy brand
When customers are empowered to find useful information on products, services, and their benefits, their trust in your brand increases. They understand that you’ve got their back, and they value your professionalism.
And why build this trust with your customers? A trustworthy brand improves customer advocacy and repurchases, and reassures new customers that they’re in good hands. All of this increases customer loyalty and improves ROI.
So, make your customer education materials easy to find. Your customer support team should be well-trained in recommending relevant resources to customers who report an issue. Don’t just focus on product training. Your customer service reps should also hone their soft skills and learn, for example, how to build long-lasting relationships and how to increase trust.