The customer journey does not stop as soon as a customer makes their first purchase; in fact, there’s a long way left to go. After a customer buys your product, they still have to use it and make a decision about whether or not it lives up to their expectations.
This is a critical period of time that has a huge influence on your organization’s ability to retain customers. It’s great to be able to attract customers and sell to them once, but what’s even better is getting those customers to come back for repeat purchases again and again.
Customer education or customer training is valuable for many reasons, but one of the most prominent reasons is that it builds customer loyalty. Customers need to know how to use your products if you expect them to get any value from them.
No matter how amazing your product is, it won’t mean anything if the customer is not able to utilize the product effectively enough to derive that intended value. Using a customer training LMS, you can provide your customers with product information to help them succeed with your products.
A learning management system (LMS) for customers is a type of customer training software that houses your organization’s learning academy. You can use an LMS to create, deliver and manage product information and other types of customer training from one convenient, central location.
Product Training For Customers
A customer LMS can be used for many different kinds of training. You could even use an LMS for other groups besides customers, like employees, gig workers or partners. However, one of the best ways to use customer education software is for product training.
Product training is the process of teaching customers about your product, including how it can benefit them or solve a problem and how they can use it to get a positive result.
Product training for customers is about more than just teaching customers how to use a product from a technical point of view. It’s true that customers should be given resources to help them operate your product. But, the greatest benefit of product education is in showing customers the value they can be getting from the product.
A customer’s process of realizing how a product can benefit them is called product adoption. When customers have access to product training, product adoption is often accelerated.
Customers may be able to figure out some aspects of your product on their own, but thorough product education can help them get there faster, and might even show them how to use the product in new or more effective ways. This gives the customer a reason to continue using the product again and again, and they’re more likely to purchase from your company repeatedly.
There’s no better customer training example to inspire your product education program than real-world successes from other companies like yours.
Hubspot Academy
Hubspot is one of the best examples of a company with a successful customer education program. The Hubspot Academy is a vast collection of online education courses instructing Hubspot users (and consumers in general) on how to use the Hubspot platform.
If that wasn’t enough, the Hubspot academy also offers a variety of courses designed to further professional development for its users. Learners can take courses on subjects like inbound marketing, digital marketing and designing effective online ad campaigns. Upon completing some courses, learners receive certifications acknowledging their new skill.
Canva Design School
Canva is another great example of a company with an excellent customer education strategy. The Canva design school includes all kinds of courses that teach Canva customers how to use Canva for different purposes and design styles.
Canva also offers a variety of courses that help customers learn the fundamentals of graphic design. Users can take courses like “Branding Your Business,” “Social Media Mastery” and “Graphic Design Basics,” and the skills they learn can help them get more out of Canva (thereby encouraging them to keep using it) — everyone wins.
Ikea Instructional Videos
Ikea is probably not high on the list of companies that come to mind in a conversation about stellar product education. Ikea furniture has long been notorious for being extremely frustrating to assemble. This is mostly because the instructional diagrams that come with the furniture are often unclear. However, Ikea’s customer education strategy is actually a success story that proves the value of listening to feedback from your customers.
After years of customers struggling to use the inefficient paper assembly instructions to construct their Ikea furniture, Ikea responded by adopting a different approach. Now, customers can find instructional videos on Ikea’s YouTube channel that walk customers through how to assemble different furniture pieces step by step.
This is a perfect example of a company using customer feedback to improve their product training. One advantage of using an LMS instead of a platform like YoutTube to manage your customer training content is that it can include built-in feedback analysis tools.
Customer Training Strategy
It’s not easy to create a customer training strategy as effective as the three listed above. However, using a customer training LMS to design and manage your content can make it much easier. Here are some tips for creating an outstanding customer education program using learning management software.
Define Your Goal
You should set out to achieve a clear goal when you start building a customer education program. Think about what business results you want to achieve, like lower customer churn or improved product adoption, and keep your design focused on those targets. This can make it easier to organize your academy in an intentional way that moves your organization closer to desired outcomes.
Prioritize User Experience
While it’s important to keep a concrete business goal in your sights, you should also consider the customer’s experience and what they’re getting out of your learning academy. It’s important to provide customers with an approachable learning environment that’s easy to navigate.
You can use an LMS to build a customer training academy that reflects the look and feel of your brand and provides a seamless learning experience for customers. When the customer experience is prioritized, progress toward business goals often follows naturally.
Embrace All Learning Styles
Your customer base is made up of people with all kinds of different learning styles. Some people might prefer to read articles, some might prefer to watch videos, some might prefer interactive games or quizzes, and so on. Uploading multiple content formats to an LMS is a great way to offer a variety of learning materials that can help all types of learners succeed.
People also learn at different times and in different environments. Optimizing your content for mobile devices can ensure customers who prefer to take courses away from their desks get a quality experience as well.
Measure Progress
As Ikea’s customer education example illustrates, a good customer training strategy often depends on listening to customer feedback. When you launch your customer training program for the first time, that doesn’t mean it’s finished. The next step is to gather feedback from the people taking your courses about what’s working and what could be improved.
By listening to feedback from your users, you can gradually improve your customer training program even if it wasn’t perfect the first time. Some learning management software comes with tools for gathering and analyzing customer feedback.
Plan to scale
Your customer education program needs to be flexible enough to grow along with your user base. A small academy for customer training might be fine for now, but sooner or later, you’ll probably need to add to it. Your customer education program should be designed to support the number of customers you plan to have years from now, not just the number you currently have.
An LMS is one of the best tools for managing growth in customer education. A cloud-based LMS makes it simple to store and update content from a central location that your users (however few or numerous) can then access through a variety of channels.
Best Customer Training Programs
Some of the best customer training programs in the world are powered by learning management systems. An LMS can make it much easier to create and deliver product training content, and it can make finding training courses much easier for customers.
As one of the best LMS for customer training, Gainsight Customer Education gives you access to a variety of features that can help you create and manage a robust customer training academy. Here are some examples of how companies are using those features to power successful customer education programs:
- Shopify needed a way to make their customer training more intuitive for their users. Using Gainsight Customer Education, they were able to create a more engaging customer education experience that increased monthly usage of the Shopify academy by 491%.
- Bonfire was struggling to scale their customer education and drive more engagement. Gainsight Customer Educations provided a way for them to create a scalable customer training academy that has drastically decreased the number of support tickets received by the customer support team. Now, 100% of Bonfire implementations utilize their customer education program.
- Compass was struggling to deliver adequate product education to a very large user base. Gainsight Customer Education helped them create a training academy that makes it simple to access product information, which has led to better product adoption.
A customer training LMS is often the secret behind exemplary customer education programs like these. If you want to create a customer training program or improve the one you have, an LMS like Gainsight Customer Education could be the perfect tool for the job.
Check out our LMS Buying Guide here and learn more about Gainsight Customer Education here.
