Organizations all over the world adopt new software solutions all the time. Whether it’s to help their operation run smoother, streamline certain aspects of the business, or create a better customer experience, the software solutions are a pivotal part of running a modern-day business.
Unfortunately, some of these solutions come with a steep learning curve and might not be as user-friendly as their creators might hope.
Fortunately, education and learning management systems can help reduce some of the effort required to learn them and help customers thrive. Today, we’ll explore the need for customer education platforms and a few aspects of them reinforce when you develop one of your own.
The Need For Customer Education
The first question on anyone’s mind is probably, “why bother with customer education in the first place?” The answer is simple; customers who know how to use a product can use it more effectively.
Moreover, they’ll feel a deeper connection to your company. In the case of B2B and SaaS products/services, customer education can mean the difference between having a loyal customer and losing a dissatisfied one.
The idea behind customer training isn’t just to bring customers up to speed on your product. It helps drive adoption, increase retention overall, grow a community, and assign some value to your brand.
There are specialized platforms to accomplish this or a company can develop its own platform in house. Whatever the case, having a robust and comprehensive training program for employees can help them adapt to a new software and learn to love using it every day.
Personalization
For customer education to be truly effective and useful, you should consider personalization. The value of a personalized experience can’t be overstated. The ability to tailor an experience to a specific customer is an invaluable tool to help them get the most out of their process.
Onboarding, or the process of getting someone set up to use your type of software or fill any role in an organization, can be a time when customers choose to stick with the product or not.
The onboarding process offers several unique opportunities to help your customers learn new software and set them up to grow along with it.
Personalization is a significant part of this, paving the way for growth, adoption, and loyalty. Offering a personalized customer education platform is crucial to your success as an organization and can only serve to help your customers grow at their own organizations.
Scale
Scale is another overlooked, yet integral function of customer learning. It enables efficient and consistent education materials, delivered to a large number of customers. This means you can lengthen or shorten the amount of resources you have depending on the scale you need.
A scalable solution can handle growing demand and support businesses with the proper resources they need. It also increases customer satisfaction and retention, because customers who are trained and educated on a product more likely continue using it / recommended.
That makes scaling vital to business growth and helping customers get the most out of their training in the long run.
Curated Experiences
Working in tandem with personalization, curated experiences are key to helping customers get the most out developing their training platforms.
By creating tailored experiences and customizing them, organizations can ensure their customers—and their customer’s teams—will have the most relevant content for their goals. Curated experiences also help guide users through training platforms to make it easier for them to learn.
When used with other techniques like certificates, progress tracking, and gamification, a curated experience can go a long way toward helping customers get the most out of their learning platforms.
Blended Learning
Blended learning, a combination of traditional instruction with online learning, gives Learners more control over how they interact with the material. It encourages extreme engagement and provides a variety of activities/resources.
This can come in the form of social learning such as message boards, communities, and testimonials. It could also be gamification, achievements and certifications occur frequently throughout the learning process.
Giving learners the opportunity to interact with material in different ways, whether it’s independent or collaborative, helps drive engagement while giving them the opportunity to explore topics more deeply. This can ensure they understand the software better and ultimately lead to higher adoption and customer satisfaction.
