Customer Training and e-Learning

Internal training is a very important aspect of any organization. Trainings hone the skills of your employees, upskill them and improve their performance. Your organization may be adopting instructor-led training programs or e-learning programs to achieve this. But, have you thought about expanding the training programs to your customers?

What, now, is customer training? How is this training provided and what are its benefits? In this blog, we shall be focusing on all these aspects.

What is Customer Training?

Customer training is an integral part of enterprise activity. Customer training involves supporting your customers by providing required training and information about your product or service to enhance the user experience while their business objectives are met.

Many organizations have dedicated programs that train their customers on their products and services. These trainings could either be self-paced, guided or both. e-Learning can be effectively used to create these customer training courses.

What are the benefits of using e-Learning for customer training?

e-Learning-based learning programs have an edge over the traditional classroom-based programs. One of the bigger benefits of using e-Learning for customer training is that it increases customer engagement.

Some of the other benefits are:

• Time and manpower required for orchestrating e-learning-based customer training programs are lesser when compared to arranging classroom sessions. A single Learning Management System (LMS) platform installation would be sufficient to cater to customers across the world.

• With self-paced e-Learning training program, customers can schedule the training, go through the sections that more than once; all at the convenience of their home or office.
  The customers’ knowledge retention increases when they use an e-learning program packaged with presentations, videos, images and user interaction.

• A good customer training program enhances customer experience and increases customer retention. The chances of a happy customer choosing your services again or renewing the contract are more.

• A well-designed customer training program reduces client support interactions to a great extent.
  e-Learning-based customer training programs, when deployed with the product releases, result in an incident-free roll-out of the product.

Implementing an e-Learning based customer training program

Now that we have seen the benefits of using e-Learning for customer training, let us see how we go about implementing it.
Assess the goals of the training program; understand how your customer will benefit from the training program.
A good learning program must provide enough information about how your product works and how your customer can go about performing specific tasks. Design and create a learning program that increases customer engagement while meeting your customer’s needs. Techniques like micro-learning, scenario-based learning or gamification can be used to achieve this.
Next, deploy your training program on a Learning Management System (LMS) that suits your customers’ needs. If the training is going to be a part of the software, then a separate LMS would not be required.
Deliver the program at the right time, i.e., determine if the training has to be provided before the customer uses your product or if it is going to be an on-demand training. The customer must have easy access to the program irrespective of when the training program is delivered.
After the roll-out of the training program, check if there is a reduction in client-support interactions. Use the analytics embedded in the learning technology and your product to gather metrics on customer activity. These metrics provide insights about the customer interaction and effectiveness of the program.
Customer training, thus, supports customers proactively before they actually need it! It is much more than providing a user document or putting up some help pages on the website. A well designed and implemented e-Learning-based customer training program gives your product an edge over the others in your product market.