Customer Training Best Practices: 7 Practical Tips for Optimal Results

Customer training benefits not only your customers but also your business..Empowering customers to fully utilize your product significantly boosts their loyalty to your brand, positively impacting your business.

If you want to know the secrets to a successful customer education program, read on. In this post, we’ll explore the importance of customer training and share 7 best practices for achieving optimal results!

Why is Customer Training Important?

It’s no coincidence that customer education is gaining more and more attention. Deploying a customer training program helps your business grow in multiple ways:

Prevent early customer churn

Customers who do not find value in your product soon after purchasing it or signing up for a trial are likely to give up on it. Offering customer onboarding that focuses on helping customers get started and realize the value of your product will help you prevent early customer churn.

How:

• Accelerating time to value: Offering customer onboarding will help customers learn and use your product quickly.
• Improving feature/product adoption: Customers who have access to training material and setup guides will discover more product features and capabilities.

Boost customer loyalty

Every business owner understands that converting new customers into repeat clients is the best news for their business. Loyal customers spend more, buy more often, and spread the word about your company.

Customer education can help you not only prevent churn but also boost loyalty and long-term customer retention rates.

How:

• Enhancing the customer experience: The customer experience expands from the first time a prospective client hears about your business through their time as a customer. Providing support for them enhances this experience throughout.
• Increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty: Customers are happy when they feel their money is spent wisely and when they receive the level of service they expect (or better!).
• Maintaining communication with customers: A customer training program offers you several opportunities to communicate with your customers via email, customer support reps, customer success managers, social media, and more. Therefore, you achieve higher customer engagement and build a strong relationship with them.

Strengthen your brand

A customer education program boosts your brand’s presence in the market and keeps it top of mind with your customers. It also reinforces your brand identity by consistently presenting your brand elements throughout the learning experience.

How:

• Showcasing your brand: Using your branding in the learning environment and every point of communication, your brand imprints in your customers’ minds. Also, your brand is mentioned more often on social media and through advertising.
• Increasing the perceived value of your product: Deploying customer training is a big deal, especially if you decide to offer multiple training resources – and customers can realize that. The more you offer in terms of customer education, the more valuable your product becomes.
• Building brand advocates: Brand loyalty is contagious! As we said, happy customers will spread the word about you. By offering them an incentive, they can leave reviews on review sites and social media, helping more people discover your brand and expanding your customer base.

Build a financially robust company

Effective customer training can positively impact your bottom line and help you build a financially robust business. By ensuring customers can fully utilize your product and are happy with your service, you increase satisfaction and foster loyalty.

How:

• Increasing customer lifecycle: Customer training keeps customers happy with your product and prevents churn at any point during the customer lifecycle.
• Increasing customer lifetime value (CLV): Repeat customers spend more because they trust your brand. They’ll prefer to buy more of your products than experiment with another brand.
• Reducing customer support costs: Offering a proper customer onboarding process and training material for new and older customers will eventually reduce customer support costs since customers will have the resources they need to navigate your product and troubleshoot simple issues.

7 Practical Tips to Follow When Building a Customer Training Program

Now that we’ve seen the benefits of customer training, let’s see how you can implement it right to get the most out of it:

1. Plan before you act

The road to success starts with careful planning. Here are a few items to check off your list as you prepare for your custom training program.

✅ Segment your training audience: Start with identifying the different kinds of customers you want to train. This differentiation will come from the type of product and business model. Maybe you have a set of clients per use case, or maybe you have the same product spread across geographies, or different levels of accessibility.
✅ Align with business goals: Customer training should be tied to specific business goals you want to achieve. Focus on measurable, achievable goals using the SMART methodology. These goals can help you set the learning objectives of the course and can also be used later on to measure the effectiveness of the program.
✅ Build customer personas: If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to build customer profiles – their pain points and goals, their knowledge level, how much time they have available and how they will access training, etc.
✅ Decide what type of training you want to offer and who will create it: Very often, the Customer Enablement Manager will oversee the process. There are also different customer onboarding strategies to follow, some including more involvement from human resources and others less. Choose the one that best matches your needs and your available resources.

2. Select a flexible customer training platform

A flexible customer training platform can not only meet customer needs but also yours, facilitating admin tasks as your program grows. What does a flexible training solution look like?

✅ It’s as comprehensive as possible, offering an all-in-one solution that covers your training, admin, branding, and communication needs, so that you use the least amount of tools.
✅ It integrates with tools you already have, like your CRM or customer service software.
✅ It’s customizable so that you can shape it into a product that works for you. Branding capabilities are an additional important consideration.
✅ It’s scalable so that you can deploy training at a large scale in different languages, for different audiences if needed.
✅ It offers rich features, like multiple delivery methods, support for different training content, a report system, and more.

All in all, you should opt for a platform that grows with you. There’s no need to invest in a huge, expensive LMS that takes ages to set up. You should be able to rely on an LMS that allows you to start fast and grows along with your needs

One such solution is a Learning Management System like LearnWorlds, offering the above and additional features like:

• Content authoring tools
• Website Builder
• Custom User Roles and User groups for easier administration and access control
• Clone & Sync for fast school creation and content repurposing
• Multiple schools so you can have a centralized environment where you can manage multiple academies at once
• AI tools for course outline, learning objective, assessment, and feedback generation
• Copyrights protection
• CRM and customer service integrations
• Community for better customer engagement
• API, Webhooks & SSO to connect with the existing tech stack and ensure quick set up and efficiency
• Native, white-label mobile app

3. Offer accessible training resources

It’s important that customers can easily access your training resources and that you’re not limiting them to in-person or real-time support only. This, in fact, is neither feasible nor financially viable. Some ways you can ensure customers receive round-the-clock support are:

• Use an LMS for easy distribution and higher scalability: An LMS provides one centralized location where you can maintain an easy-to-update knowledge base with any type of content you need, offer live or on-demand webinars and training sessions, or launch a training course.
• Launch a mobile app: Learners take it as a given that the course and other material will display well on their mobile devices. Taking it a step further, you can launch your own mobile app to enhance the experience with learning reminders and in-app notifications.
• Offer different resources: Don’t stick to one type of resource or even one location. While an LMS can host most of your material, you can also offer support via chatbots, your customer support/success team, social media chat, and a knowledge base on your website.

Remember that your training should be easily accessible by your customers but at the same time protected from non-authorized sharing. Therefore, choose an LMS with advanced security features.

4. Focus on engagement & effectiveness

Engagement and effectiveness often go hand in hand when it comes to learning. A learner who is distracted or bored is unlikely to retain knowledge. Likewise, a learner who is immersed in the learning experience is more likely to learn better and faster.

• Create microlearning content: Small modules that last only a few minutes are not only more engaging but also more effective in imparting knowledge. Quizzes, infographics, and micro-videos are excellent resources for microlearning courses.
• Offer different content formats: Do so to accommodate different learning styles and learning needs. Interactive video tutorials are very popular for demonstrating simple tasks step by step, while text-heavy manuals and user guides are more suitable if you need to go deep into technical details.
• Create simulations: Simulations help with product knowledge for more complex products or those that require careful handling. Although they’re more common in employee training initiatives, you can create simple simulation assessments as part of an online course.
• Offer a certificate: Adding a certificate at the end of the course is an excellent way to add value to your course and also to motivate learners to go through all the essential material that will help them take full advantage of your product. Tie the certificate to an exam to add credibility.
• Host live sessions and webinars: The ultimate interactive experience, live online sessions will allow customers to interact directly with you and get a better sense of your brand while addressing any questions they have.
• Add quizzes: Quizzes are a great way to reinforce learning through repetition. Combine quizzes with gamification elements, like badges, to make them even more fun and rewarding.

5. Promote your training program properly

Do customers know about all the available resources you’ve built for them? Here are some ways to make sure they do:

• Use email communications, or let your customer support team and customer success managers tell customers that there are on-demand resources available for them.
• Your sales team can also communicate and use your customer training program as an additional selling point.
• Add a section on a prominent spot on your website.
• Link to the resources in the product itself.

6. Brand everything

We discussed how effective customer training can help boost your brand. So, to achieve this, make sure your brand is (discreetly) in the spotlight by using a white-label platform that you can brand and by adding anything that signifies your brand on every touch point.

7. Monitor & improve

Monitoring the impact of your customer training strategy is crucial to determine if it has achieved the desired business results and to gauge customer satisfaction.

This will help you make necessary adjustments and continually improve the training experience.

How:

• Create feedback surveys to gain valuable insights into how learners perceived the training experience firsthand.
• Check business metrics and KPIs to see if your specific needs and goals have been met (but be patient!).
• Monitor LMS reports to know in real-time how learners behave and interact with the training modules.

A Successful Business Starts With Customer Training

Closing a sale is not the end of the customer journey or the hallmark of success for your business. On the contrary, the challenge to retain the customer just begins!

A well-designed customer training program is instrumental in helping customers realize the full value of your product, fostering loyalty, and encouraging repeat business. By investing in customer training, you can enhance user experience and drive long-term success for your business.

Invest in a customer education platform like LearnWorlds to make sure you can streamline this ambitious endeavor and have access to all the tools you need for a successful training program! Try LearnWorlds now with a 30-day free trial.

Androniki Koumadoraki

Androniki is a Content Writer at LearnWorlds sharing Instructional Design and marketing tips. With solid experience in B2B writing and technical translation, she is passionate about learning and spreading knowledge. She is also an aspiring yogi, a book nerd, and a talented transponster.