What Is Customer eLearning Training and Why Do You Need it?

When employees are onboarded, they want to foster their talents and develop new skills. But what about your customers?

Successful customer service enablement training revolves around educating your customers on how to use your product for maximum benefit. These types of training are especially useful for SaaS and tech products and often come in the form of FAQs and user forums.

What Is Customer Enablement Training?

A customer training program is a facet of eLearning that helps educate individuals outside of your organization. This may include partners, customers, or resellers, although we will focus on customers for this article.

Each course is designed to help users understand your products and use them to their maximum potential. As software companies and other cloud-based technologies grow in popularity, customer service training programs have also become more prevalent.

What Are the Benefits of Customer Training Programs?

If you aren’t currently training customers on your products, consider the following benefits.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Why not take the opportunity to show customers how to use your product the way that you intended them to? Showing your customers exactly how they can use your product ensures they are getting the most value from it, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.

Increased Customer Loyalty

Happy customers are loyal customers. By developing a customer training plan, you are setting yourself apart from your fiercest competitors and increasing the chances of customer loyalty. In addition to catching the attention of your customers, it shows them that you want them to experience the product to its fullest potential. This is a small yet powerful gesture to increase customer loyalty.

Better Word-of-Mouth Advertising

When customers have such positive experiences with your company, they are more inclined to leave positive reviews and spread the word about their experience. Word-of-mouth advertising isn’t only incredibly effective, it’s also free, coming from real users who are sharing their firsthand experience with your company. It comes from unbiased people with no personal gain, helping to build authority around a positive customer experience.

Increased Chances of Upselling

The happier your customers are with your product, the more they will trust your company as a whole. This makes it easier to provide them with additional features and upgrades down the road. Building trust from the jump helps entice them to explore your other offerings as opposed to turning to a competitor.

More Revenue

Who doesn’t want to increase profit? Customer enablement training can drive additional customers to your business and build brand authority. In addition, it will encourage them to buy more products and pay for advanced features that all impact the bottom line. Finally, because client training answers many frequently asked questions, it allows you to reduce costs by operating with a smaller customer service team.

Why Use eLearning for Training Customers?

The benefits of customer training programs are extensive, particularly when the training is delivered via an engaging set of eLearning courses. While we have already discussed a handful of benefits, there are even more that may not have crossed your mind yet.

• eLearning makes it both practical and affordable to reach millions of customers who are located throughout the world, all through a single LMS platform.
• Speed is never an issue as customers can get through the material at their own pace. If needed, they can speed up, slow down, or repeat sections until they have all of the information that they need.
• It’s incredibly affordable and has straightforward logistics compared with arranging classrooms for in-person seminars or renting teaching spaces.
• eLearning allows for the use of many multimedia assets — from images to video to custom presentations, it’s easy to increase user engagement and ultimately increase customer knowledge.
• Easily monetize your training courses by putting them online. If you’d like, you can connect your eLearning portal with popular payment processors and put a paywall to prevent outsiders from accessing your content for free.
• Utilize in-depth reporting to monitor how your course content is progressing and to ensure that your customers are interacting with the material successfully.

How to Create a Successful eLearning Customer Training Plan

When you follow the proper steps, it’s easy to create and implement customer training evaluations.

1. Pick a Training Delivery Program

The needs of your customer training plan will determine the ideal delivery platform. Consider if you want to issue certifications, localize content for a large audience, or integrate your unique branding into the training courses. Once you have thought through the different aspects, you should be able to make a decision on which training delivery program is best.

2. Adjust Training to Your Customers’ Needs

Once you’ve picked out the ideal training delivery platform, you’ll want to tweak the training material based on your customers’ needs. For example, some products are designed to appeal to a large customer base while others are more niche. Rather than choosing between overwhelming users who need basic information with too much and creating courses that are too general and don’t provide value, instead create different methods for different audiences. This helps ensure everyone gets what they need from your training.

3. Use Different Types of Content

The content should differ based on what you want each course to achieve. Consider providing a tour of the product and some background information through a video. For more in-depth presentations, try hosting a webinar. Microlearning videos and infographics are another easy way to explain certain features of the product. Finally, don’t overdo it in terms of duration; the entire training shouldn’t last longer than 30 minutes.

4. Offer Support

Regardless of how you execute customer education training, your audience will undoubtedly have questions. Don’t forget to establish a discussion forum and hire a dedicated customer support team. Over time, the discussion forum will be filled with beneficial FAQs to help future customers get the most out of your product.

5. Promote Your Training Program

How will your customers know about your training plan if you don’t promote it? Lean on your internal marketing team to help spread the word about your training program, using platforms such as social media to promote it and draw customers in. You can also create email and paid media campaigns to appeal to additional customers and spread the word.

6. Don’t Forget to Measure the Results

The final step in creating a customer engagement training course is to measure the results. Oftentimes, companies deploy built-in surveys or utilize data from the LMS. These reports show how your customers are responding to training and how effective each training is. These metrics also unveil which features are overly complicated and negatively impact the customer’s overall experience.

Implement Your Customer Training Program with Allegro Media Design

Today’s customers have more buying opportunities than ever before. Any chance that you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, you should take it! Our experts at Allegro Media Design can work with you to create a unique customer training program for your business. Get a quote to learn more about how we can help or call us at (614) 271-0161!