The Best Way To Influence Customer Behavior
With most companies shifting gears to focus on customer education and enablement, is there a reliable way to improve your customer retention numbers, while cutting down on your 2021 customer support budget?
In their efforts to reduce churn, most firms have realized the importance of customer training. But in their training, they rarely go beyond explaining the product features to their users. This level of customer engagement is just not enough to avoid customer attrition. After all, 7 in 10 customers defect due to “overselling, poor customer service, or a confusing onboarding process.” And the remaining 30% defect due to quality issues with the actual product itself. So the lesson here is: Ensuring product quality should always remain your top priority, but customer training and outreach should become your second major concern.
Customers often complain about a slow response to their queries and other support delays. Expanding your support team isn’t the answer to dealing with increased support calls, instead focus on making your customers self-sufficient. They should know exactly what they’re buying from you so that they won’t feel cheated or under-informed. Transparency is key. You need to nurture your customer relationships with the objective of reducing customer attrition by increasing their convenience at every step of the customer journey.
That’s why you should retool your customer training initiative by going fully digital with it. Empower your customers with the convenient flexibility offered by modern eLearning courses, tutorial video clips, knowledge management platforms, customer query forums, AI-enabled FAQ chatbots; these are just a few of the many efficient customer product education applications available today. The high level of engagement delivered by a customer-centric Learning Management System (LMS) will persuade more potential leads to turn into active customers. Also, the same LMS can be reused to train vendors, partners, or even new employees of your own firm.
Optimal product adoption isn’t just about getting 5-star user reviews, it’s about delivering the ultimate customer experience.
Streamlining Customer Onboarding
Here are a few actionable insights into the process of streamlining your customer onboarding:
Chart A Customer Experience Roadmap
Start by putting yourself in the shoes of your average user and noting down every aspect of their journey with your product from introduction to sale, training, use, and renewal. Outline everything from KPIs to customer demographics during this audit. Every single potential customer touch-point must be identified and factored in beforehand. You may realize that not every customer’s actual experience is gonna be as ideally straightforward as your roadmap, and that’s the point! Your job is to be their shepherd and guide them to stay on your roadmap throughout their journey with your product. Ask yourself: What are their needs? Why do they use my product? What common queries about my product might they have?
Attract The Right Customer
Even the best-in-class customer training can go to waste on a customer that just isn’t the right fit for your product. So target your user demographic and be clear about your product offerings in your training and marketing material. This will help you sidestep customer frustration with your product (that was never right for them to begin with).
Target Customer Skill Gaps
Address the pain points you outlined in your customer experience roadmap by developing a training curriculum that fills those specified knowledge gaps detailed in your FAQs. Start with the basics, and then cover the more advanced topics explaining the use of your product to a layperson. During customer education, you should always focus on discussing your product’s benefits rather than simply explaining its features.
Digitalize Your Onboarding
Invest in the development of eLearning courses, digital user guides, or intuitive online demos and product tutorials in the form of downloadable “How To” video clips. Harness the latest learning solutions and amplify your training to reach a global base of consumers. If needed, opt for translation and localization to transform your content and make it suitable for customers of any nationality.
Invest In Microlearning Content
Keep in mind that your customers’ learning curve must reflect your ideal product adoption curve. So it’s best to keep it short and quick, with compact-size online training. Shorter content can hold the learner’s attention easily, especially if you jazz it up with videos, games, and interactive fun. Infuse your content with multi-media assets and reinforce knowledge within your customers through online quizzes.
Save Time And Costs
Never lose sight of the main objective, which is to minimalize the friction that comes with product adoption. Going digital saves both training time and costs, plus it enables your customers to train themselves at their own pace. You can even supplement your learning solutions with chatbots that respond to your customers instantly, equipped with helpful answers from your FAQ list. This AI technology has been reported to reduce support calls by 33%!
A White Label LMS
A fully customizable LMS platform will allow you to manage and update your courses, as needed. You can even integrate your LMS with payment gateways for monetization. And ideally, your digital customer training content will double as a marketing tool, advertising the benefits of your product, in the process of training customers in its use. Keep up with software updates and patches by providing new training material updates and additions to your LMS. This could prove invaluable in overcoming the typical customer inertia problems that come with software updates.
Foster A Community Online
Your enterprise-ready LMS platform can act as the main customer touch-point and primary base for most customer interactions regarding your product. Customer feedback forums and online messaging boards help nurture goodwill and build a sense of brand familiarity with your community of users.
Act On Feedback Regularly
Instead of relying on your support team for polls and surveys, rely on automated LMS data metrics. All the best LMS platforms come equipped with AI-enabled learning analytics that churn learner data into comprehensive reports and analyses for your benefit. This data will help you pinpoint the issues you may have overlooked before. Besides such metrics, you can always conduct user feedback surveys and online polls on your LMS to get a clear picture. The customer expects continuous improvement in not just your product, but your service as well.
Conclusion
A well-informed customer is a trusting customer, and a trusting customer is a loyal customer. Leverage the latest trends in cloud-based LMS tech to train your customers and push your product’s potential to its optimal limits in 2021!
