Customers are demanding product and skills training. If you aren’t offering training you’re passing up on a big chance to help your visitors. In this specific article, Steve Penfold shares five explanations why you should spend money on 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 tell customers how to utilize it. Job done, right?
Maybe that was true once, however, not anymore. Increasingly, vendors are providing complex customer training programs to augment their products, services or brand.
But why would vendors go to the trouble? Surely if a customer has bought into something, they’re pleased with it, right? Again, this could be an unhealthy assumption. Here are five reasons why providing training to your visitors is important.
1. Training teaches customers how to employ 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 visitors. Plus the more complex or complex something is, the less intuitive chances are to be.
I’m willing to guess you’ve used software and sooner or later you’ve hit a dead end. You’d obviously done something wrong (or the program let you have a wrong turn), and a cryptic error message popped up asking you to repair the mistake.
Maybe you could actually figure it out, or maybe 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 effort and probably had you cursing the merchandise.
Providing training can minimize this type of frustration and time wastage.
2. Training shows customers getting added value from something
Even if your customers aren’t running into problems when working with your product, are they getting the most from it?
Perhaps there are features customers might use that could make their lives easier. Perhaps showing customers an alternative solution way to use the features they know would open new opportunities on their behalf.
Having untapped potential in your product does no healthy or your visitors. The more empowered your visitors are, the much more likely it is the fact other prospective customers will hear about your product and want to buy, too.
Providing training is a means for customers to extract the maximum value from your offering.
3. Training stops potentially unhappy customers from leaving (reduces churn)
Churn, or churn rate, is marketing-speak for the amount of customers who leave a vendor, in accordance with the number who join. If you’ve changed insurer or cellular phone carrier because of dissatisfaction or because an improved deal has lured you away, you’re part of these companies’ churn statistics.
Customers leaving you is bad. It’s generally accepted that it’s less costly to maintain existing customers than it is to win new ones.
Losing a customer is a double whammy; you’ll lose ongoing income 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 will 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 good end).
And much like dissatisfied customers who offer you a double whammy, delighted customers can give you a double win! Not only will you continue to get revenue from a satisfied customer, but there’s every chance that customer will actively push other prospects your way.
Providing training can help delight customers and drive additional customers for you. Let your existing customers be your best marketing tool!
5. Training has an possibility to gain valuable comments from customers to boost product and customer experience
Training can provide you invaluable insight into how your visitors use your products and services.
Suppose you have a library of how-to videos for certain features of your software product. You see any particular one video specifically has been viewed 60 percent more than every other. Exactly what does this let you know? Perhaps that software feature is confusing and may be improved.
Perhaps one of the other videos hasn’t been viewed by any means. This may be because the feature has already been perfectly clear, but maybe it’s because customers don’t know the feature exists.
The ways customers connect to training may not always give definitive insights into what they’re thinking, but it’s an avenue of intelligence to prompt that you ask more questions and transform your offering.
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In conclusion
These five reasons for providing training on your products and services show that we now have benefits for both you and your customers.
In the event these haven’t convinced you, here’s one final thought. Think about how precisely your customers would respond if your opponents started offering useful customer training as a value-add. Could that take a few of your market share? If you think it could, then you should leverage the info in blogs such as this to observe how to commence to build your training curriculum – because it’s only a matter of energy before your competition will, if they haven’t already.
