Improve customer retention

3 min reading time

How to Improve Customer Retention with Training

It’s never easy to lose a customer, even if it is normal. Customer attrition happens for many reasons. They might not be the right fit for your business. They may find it difficult to utilize your product, or to understand the value that your service holds for them.

All businesses want to improve their customer retention rate, and oftentimes customer churn is down to completely preventable factors.

In this post, we share how to identify the pain points in your customers’ journey and how you can implement great training to retain more customers.

What pain points impact your customer retention rate?

Before we get stuck in, let’s explain what pain points are and how they’re hurting your retention rate. Many call them friction or problem points. Here’s an easy to understand definition from QuickSprout:

“Friction is any variable, website quality, or user behavior trend that is slowing down (or entirely halting) the progression of your company’s sales cycle.”

Importantly, these points can happen at any time and for a number of different reasons. However, if you examine your customers’ lifecycle, you’ll find patterns – a number of customers experiencing the same problem at the same point. It’s critical to understand how these points affect your retention rate, so you can work out how to fix them.

Improve customer retention through training

1. Identify where your customers are struggling

Businesses should always keep a watchful eye on how their customers interact with their product or service. Research is key to discovering specific weaknesses or hurdles in your customers’ journey.

Review any records you have of customer behavior in your CRM or other customer management tools, to identify the primary drivers for them choosing to no longer use your product. This information can be used to identify the common themes or reasons that lead them to churn. You should also examine your current customers’ usage patterns within your product and analyze this data to find the features or onboarding stages that you’re losing them at.

2. Investigate what’s happening in the customer journey

Look to the people who know your customers best – your customer-facing teams. Get insight from your Support, Success, Sales, and Marketing teams. They’ll have first-hand knowledge of the customer experience and can provide detailed information on where they’re struggling.

Survey or interview customers that are at risk of churing to get their perspective on  what’s negatively impacting their journey. Some problem points can be complicated, but it’s likely you’ll discover that a lot of the reasons are easily fixable by planning and introducing the right customer training.

Some of the most common complaints are customers not knowing what to do when using your product, or feeling unsupported when learning how to use it. Good customer training can help with resolving these issues.

3. Create a customer university

Understanding how your product or service helps them, is the key to retaining customers. Setting up a customer university is an impactful way to train, and retain, your customers. It enables you to create customer training programs that showcase the key features of your offering. Once set up, you can use these programs to educate your customers’ on the ins and outs of your product or service, increasing their chances of success.

There’s no limit to the types of courses you can create. Take support queries –  to minimize these queries, you can provide an FAQ course that will help reduce the strain on your support team.

You can also add exams and quizzes to test customer knowledge on the topics that have been covered in the training to help with information retention. You can even use Gamification to make the learning process more fun and engaging. If you have a learning management system (LMS), it’s easy to set up a customer university.

This is a strategy that more and more businesses are embracing. We, at LearnUpon, are doing it ourselves. From the moment a new customer signs up, they’re enrolled into LearnUpon University and given the training they need to succeed.

4. Roll out and test your customer training

Once you’ve created your customer training program, all that’s left to do is to roll it out and see how your customers respond. Look at your customer training reports to see the impact training is having on their engagement with your product. Analyze exam and quiz results to identify where there may still be knowledge gaps. You can also continue to survey customers – active and lost – to fully understand where they’re succeeding and failing. Use all of this data and feedback to analyze and refine your training.

Start improving customer retention today

Training is an excellent way to add value for your customers, get them up to speed with your product or service quickly, and ultimately build a stronger relationship with them.

We’d love to hear the tactics you’re using to improve your customer retention rate in the comments below.

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