How Practical Customer Training Helps the Bottom Line
Customer training can come in a variety of different ways. But if you want to experience the best return and outcome with it for your business, you will need to find the right balance to manage it and keep it practical. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself spending too many resources on a customer training system that may not be completely beneficial to your business’s bottom line.
What does it affect?
We’ll start by taking a look at the customer lifetime value or CLV. This is the most important metric when it comes to seeing the health of your product or service offering and helping to predict your overall future cash flows.
Customer lifetime value is a metric that looks at exactly how much the customer generates revenues for your business. This is even more important when you’re looking to offer up a subscription-based model in the long term. The reasoning is that with most subscription-based models, it can end up being a lower upfront cost, with the returns happening through the monthly subscription fee.
Of course, CLV is important even with a one-time charge upfront or a mixed revenue model, and knowing exactly when you break even with your customer is the next crucial piece. Practical customer training will help you consistently improve your average CLV because your customer is in control of their own education on your platform, as well as understand how best to use it.
What is practical customer training?
At its core, the best type of training is one that actually ends up getting used. That means just as the business took the time to build an intuitive and practical user experience and design for the product itself, it needs to do the same when it comes to customer training.
When the customer discovers the training section, it should feel that they know exactly where to go and how to proceed. Typically customers will first enter this section when they have a question about a feature or trying to simply understand how best to begin using the product from the start.
That means the answer they are looking for should be easy to find, and the training should be the right mix of informative and engaging. Multiple mediums of delivery should be used for the content, whether text-based, image-based, or video-based. These learning devices should be used so the user can select their method of learning and keep everything under their control.
What happens when you get a customer with practical training?
That means you put the customer completely in charge of their onboarding. While tutorials help, along with some initial tips and tricks at the start, you want to have the right practical integrated customer training ready as soon as it appears the customer has hit a wall with their current skill and knowledge of the product.
It should be customer training that adapts to the customer’s needs, both on their specific usage of the product or service and their overall experiences with similar products. Customer training needs to keep the flow of information continuous and not be an added roadblock to what the customer is already facing.
With this control in the hands of the customer and a place to always find immediate help, with no need for chats or calls to customer support, it helps them to continue using the product or service as long as they deem it necessary. This can lead to extremely long usage terms that can last several years easily and even longer if the product continues to be upgraded regularly, as well as the customer training portal in tandem with the upgrades.
Excellent brand imaging
With customer training done properly, there’ll be fewer negative reviews or commentary, which means that the brand only continues to look better and better. With a better image for the brand, it only leads to more customer acquisition, more revenues to invest in continuous improvement, and additional resources to improve the practical customer training system.
You also get customers who spend less time trying to figure out issues and thus have improved productivity in their own roles, which was primarily the reason that they started to use your product or service, to begin with. So anytime you can have a value add of efficiency and increased productivity is great as it becomes one of your key competitive advantages.
