Techniques for Delivering Effective Customer Education

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Delivering effective customer education is a key part of ensuring customers have a good experience with a brand’s products and services.

Too many businesses create products and features with little to no thought into customer onboarding or customer education.

This leaves customers confused, frustrated, and unable to use the product or service fully.

The problem compounds as frustrated users reach out to customer support representatives, leading to longer wait times and higher costs.

To avoid these issues, businesses should invest in friendly and direct customer education.

Doing so in friendly and direct ways helps users understand the product quickly so that they can get the most out of it.

There are several direct and indirect benefits that come with good customer education, we’ll cover what they are and how to apply them practically.

Keep reading to learn more.

Why Brands Should Focus on Customer Education

At the most basic level, customer education can help your audience understand the product or service better, so they can use it correctly.

But several other benefits have a profound impact on a business’s reputation, customer relationships, and even the bottom line.

Here are other reasons why a business should focus on customer education:

  1. Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing educational information; customers are more likely to trust the brand and use its products or services regularly.
  2. Improve customer support by equipping customers with information which leads to fewer support tickets
  3. Improve user experience by incorporating education into the product, whether it’s an app, an online course, a video series, or something else most out of their user experience
  4. Reduce churn by helping customers understand how to get the most out of their product, customers are less likely to churn.
  5. Encourage existing customers to upgrade to higher subscriptions by teaching them how to use the features of the higher product tiers, customers are more likely to upgrade. As a result, your brand will increase its revenue and the lifetime value that you can gain from a customer.

When done right, customer education can help customers understand how to use and benefit from your offerings, as well as create loyalty and brand affinity.

However, delivering successful customer education requires careful planning, tailored content, and an understanding of how to engage learners.

It isn’t easy, but the effort to teach your customers reaps the rewards in the multiples.

8 Techniques for Delivering Effective Customer Education

These techniques will help you engage, inform and educate your customers. Go through them but tweak these tips to create the customer experience you want.

Understand Your Audience

Before you start creating any content for your customer education program, it’s important first to understand who the end users are and what their objectives are.

Take the time to determine their needs and preferences before you begin crafting content so that you can tailor your training accordingly.

Are your customers tech-savvy? Do they prefer visuals over text? Do they need a more comprehensive understanding of the product or just a quick overview? All these questions and more will help you decide what topics to focus on and how to present them.

Take Your Product or Service Into Consideration

Many times your product or service will determine the structure and format of your customer training.

For example, if your product is an app, you may need to provide screencasts or video tutorials that walk customers through the app’s features. You may even build overlays and demos right on the app interface so that users can understand what to do and how right away.

If your product is more complex, you may need to offer different levels of customer education – from basic tutorials that provide an overview of the product or service to more in-depth resources that get into the specifics.

And if you offer a wide variety of services, it may be helpful to create separate tutorials or guides for each. This way, customers can access the information they need quickly and easily.

Build Education Into Your Product

One underestimated factor in product design is customer education. If you build customer education into your product or service, you’ll pre-emptively answer questions that customers may have.

By incorporating help menus, good navigation, instruction manuals, tooltips, and even FAQs into your product or service, customers can get the help they need without ever having to leave your product.

This means that users won’t have to search for answers, meaning fewer support tickets for you. It also means that users will be able to find the answers they need quickly and easily, creating a more effortless experience overall.

Try Gamification

Gamification is one way to make learning fun and interesting while enhancing engagement among participants.

Think through approaches such as leaderboards or points-based rewards systems that incentivize learning activities while providing users with feedback on their progress. Ensure there is an element of competition that will encourage exploration and deeper engagement with the material being taught in the program.

Design Intuitive Content

Think about the layout of your content and ensure it’s easy for customers to navigate. Break down materials into manageable chunks; include relevant visuals; ensure readability by using clear language; and provide users with actionable takeaways at each step along the way. Also consider diversifying your delivery methods by injecting interaction such as polls or surveys throughout the course.

It’s always a good idea to work with a UX designer to design your product experience. They are trained and experienced in making content and designs flow.

And this involves breaking down how people think and interact with design elements. In many ways, UX and learning concepts intersect – making for a great partnership.

Seek Feedback

At various stages of your customers’ experiences with your products, seek participant feedback so you can modify your approach if needed.

This could involve sending out emails asking if they needed help, tracking how active people are when using the product, or giving customers an opportunity to give their feedback through a survey.

Using this data will help you refine your customer training program.

This valuable input will help you evaluate whether people are able to use your products effectively – and this will let you iterate on content, product features, and more to keep your customers happy.

Remember to Use Visuals

One technique that can be used to ensure customer education is effective and engaging is using videos or visualizations.

By providing a visual representation of concepts and processes, it can make it easier for customers to understand what they are learning.

It also makes the material more memorable and helps to keep customers engaged and learning. You can also use visuals to demonstrate complex processes or provide an alternate perspective for ways to tackle problems.

In practice, you can add screenshots to your blog post or tutorials, create an explainer video or series of gifs to break down difficult concepts, and use infographics to represent data clearly.

It’s also a good idea to be active on YouTube and other visual platforms to help spread the word about your product.

By taking these steps, you’ll ensure that your customers have an easier time learning about and using your product.

Focus on ‘Top of the Funnel’ Educational Content

A critical mistake that brands make is offering training and educational material only around their products and features.

They fail to understand the broader and higher needs that customers have outside of the product and don’t offer content that caters to them.

This is especially true for customers who are just starting out with a product and don’t know what problem it solves for them.

In this case, you should focus on ‘top of the funnel’ educational content that is broader and shows customers why they should be using a product in their lives.

For example, if you have a product or service that helps people optimize their ads, then don’t just train people on how to leverage your tool to drive better ad performances.

Go up a level and think conceptually – help small business owners optimize their profiles, take better product pictures, learn how to create effective captions, and so on.

While learning material around these topics may seem irrelevant, they do something important – they create use cases for your product without having to explicitly make the connection.

You also build trust as your audience sees you as a credible source of knowledge and not just an annoying salesperson.

Conclusion

By implementing these strategies, you’ll be able to ensure that customers understand your product and how it can help them.

You’ll also be able to provide engaging educational content that will not only help customers learn but also create trust and loyalty toward your brand.

Customer education is one of the most factors when it comes to choosing between two or more products.

Take the time to craft a customer education strategy that works best for your product, and you’ll be able to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

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