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8 successful practices to train your customers

How do you train your customers to achieve long-term business success?

Do you want to offer your customers a training that increases their loyalty and gives value to your brand?

Consider that around 5 billion videos are shown every day on YouTube: according to Google, tutorial searches are growing 70% each year. Is your company taking advantage of this trend? Are you offering training to your customers?

What do we mean by customer training?

Customer training is a training offered to customers so that they can take full advantage of an organization's product or service. While customer support helps customers solve problems after they occur, customer training is a tool to support them before they even need.

What are the challenges for customer training?

The main challenge is motivation: unlike employees and partners, who have external incentives to complete training, for clients, training is entirely voluntary.
Secondly, your customers are heterogeneous: you will train people who hold different positions, speak different languages and have different learning styles.

What are the advantages of customer training?

Offering training to customers means empowering them, teaching them to make the best use of your product ... so much so that, becoming experts, they are likely to recommend it to others.
There is also a direct and indirect link between customer training and increased loyalty: experienced customers (who know how to get the most out of your product) are more likely to be satisfied and less likely to leave you. If you can keep your customers in place, you will lower your costs because, as you know, it costs more to get a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
Customer training also increases innovation (which in turn increases revenue): as customers use your training program, you will receive valuable feedback to improve your product.

How to train your customers in order to achieve long-term commercial success?

1. Find Your Purpose

To set the strategy and define the themes of the training and the targets to which it is addressed, gather information from the different departments that are in daily contact with the most common problems of customers.

2. Establish Measurable Goals

Setting measurable goals will help you monitor the progress of the project. To be measurable, the objectives must be specific, such as: "We want X% of customers to start using the Y function".
Measurable and specific objectives will be useful in creating content and evaluating your training program.

3. Create Content That’s Easy To Absorb

The contents should be useful and engaging, so:

  • Be synthetic
    be concise in the duration of the course (30 minutes maximum), in sentences (concise), in the length of each video (3 - 5 minutes). In fact, if you want to treat a complex subject it is better to divide it into different modules.
  • Be human
    Even if you are training your customers remotely, set the content as if you were to expose them in the classroom: skip the technical jargon, tell stories and engage customers.

4. Choose The Appropriate Customer Training Software

You will need a Learning Management System (LMS) to store, distribute and manage content and make it usable by customers.

5. Deliver Both Informal And Formal Learning

Your customer base is varied and therefore the training groups are different one from the other. You want to offer a solid foundation of knowledge in structured courses, but you must also include informal learning. To do this, choose an LMS that supports formal learning methods and also has functions for social learning (I like it, discussion forums and webinars). These features encourage students to share information, ask questions and get suggestions from other customers.

6. Get Everyone On Board

Training will be more effective if you receive help and information from other departments in your organization focused on the customer, such as marketing and customer support.

7. Track and Improve

Customer training programs must evolve as you get to know your audience better. You will need an LMS that can track the metrics you can use to adapt and improve your training (for example, customer satisfaction over training). Get more specific information using the information you receive with customer support requests. What are the specific training needs of your customers?

8. Measure Success!

LMS provides metrics on student activity to find out what is working and what needs to be reviewed in your course. These are the parameters that will also give you the opportunity to measure the success of the course. Verifying the results of the training, comparing them with the measurable objectives established in principle.

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