Customers are demanding product and skills training. If you aren’t offering training you’re missing out on a big opportunity to help your visitors. In this article, Steve Penfold shares five explanations why you should invest in customer training.
why customer training important
You’ve got a fantastic product or service and you have a PDF user guide on your website to share customers how to use it. Job done, right?
Maybe that was true once, but not anymore. Increasingly, vendors are providing complex customer training programs to augment their products, services or brand.
But why would vendors go to this trouble? Surely if a person has bought into a product, they’re happy with it, right? Again, this could be a dangerous assumption. Listed below are five explanations why providing training to your customers is important.
1. Training teaches customers how to use a product
Just because you understand your product inside and out, and its nuances and logic make sense for you, it’s unwise to assume this would be the case for your customers. As well as the more complex or complex a product is, the less intuitive chances are to be.
I’m willing to guess you’ve used software and at some point you’ve hit a dead end. You’d obviously done something amiss (or the software let you take a wrong turn), and a cryptic error message popped up requesting to repair the mistake.
Maybe you could actually figure it out, or possibly you contacted a support representative who explained where you went wrong. In acute cases, perhaps you switched software vendors! Regardless, it wasted your time and probably had you cursing the merchandise.
Providing training can minimize this type of frustration and time wastage.
2. Training shows customers how to get added value from something
Even if your visitors are not running into problems when using your product, are they getting the most from it?
Perhaps there are features customers could use that could make their lives easier. Perhaps showing customers an alternative solution way to make use of the features they know would open new opportunities on their behalf.
Having untapped potential in your product does no good for you or your visitors. The greater empowered your visitors are, the more likely it is the fact that other prospective customers will hear about your product and want to buy, too.
Providing training is a way for customers to extract the utmost value from your offering.
3. Training stops potentially unhappy customers from leaving (reduces churn)
Churn, or churn rate, is marketing-speak for the number of customers who leave a vendor, in accordance with the quantity who join. If you’ve changed insurer or cellular phone carrier because of dissatisfaction or because a much better deal has lured you away, you’re part of those companies’ churn statistics.
Customers leaving you is bad. It’s generally accepted that it’s less costly to keep existing customers than it is to win new ones.
Losing a person is a double whammy; you’ll lose ongoing earnings from that customer, and it’s unlikely they’ll be directing clients to you.
Relevant training that excites and provides customers the various tools and knowledge to do their jobs (or hobbies) better could keep them from churning.
4. Training delights customers and creates advocates
If customers who churn are in one end of the spectrum (the bad end), customers who are delighted are in the other end (the nice end).
And much like dissatisfied customers who offer you a double whammy, delighted customers can give you a double win! Not merely will you continue steadily to get earnings from a satisfied customer, but there’s every chance that customer will actively push other prospects the right path.
Providing training can help delight customers and drive additional customers to you. Let your existing customers be your very best marketing tool!
5. Training provides an possibility to gain valuable comments from customers to improve product and customer experience
Training can provide you invaluable insight into how your customers use your products and services.
Suppose you have a library of how-to videos for several features of your software product. You see any particular one video specifically has been viewed 60 percent more than some other. Exactly what does this let you know? Perhaps that software feature is confusing and could be improved.
Perhaps one of the other videos hasn’t been viewed whatsoever. This could be because the feature is already correctly clear, but maybe it’s because customers don’t know the feature exists.
The ways customers connect to training might not exactly always give definitive insights into what they’re thinking, but it’s an avenue of intelligence to prompt one to ask more questions and make your offering.
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In conclusion
These five known reasons for providing training on your products and services show that we now have benefits for both you as well as your customers.
In the event these haven’t convinced you, here’s one final thought. Think about how precisely your visitors would respond if your rivals started offering useful customer training as a value-add. Could that take some of your market share? If you believe it could, then you should leverage the information in blogs such as this to observe how to commence to build your training program – because it’s only a matter of their time before your rivals will, if indeed they haven’t already.
