Customers are the heartbeat of your company. They keep organizations afloat by purchasing products and services, as well as by referring new customers. But customers only continue purchasing from a company and referring new customers if they’re satisfied with their experience. For businesses with complicated products, such as technology companies with SaaS products, it can be difficult to ensure a positive experience.
Customers may be frustrated by trying to learn how to use their product and get value from it, which can decrease their satisfaction and hurt your sales and retention metrics.
By training customers with an extended enterprise learning management system, you can alleviate that frustration, ensuring customers understand what they’ve purchased and are well-equipped to get value from their product. That will, in turn, help increase customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy.
4 Tips for Training Customers with an Extended Enterprise LMS
You may be familiar with the functions of a traditional LMS, but do you know what an extended enterprise LMS training does? While a traditional enterprise learning management system trains internal staff, an extended enterprise LMS trains external learners, such as customers or partners. This can make a significant impact on business KPIs for companies since training external learners can result in a better ROI on products for customers, encouraging repeat sales.¹
Here are a few ways to train your customers using an extended enterprise LMS training system:
1. Create a FAQ eLearning course
What questions do your customers ask most consistently when they start using your products or services? What questions do they come to you with six months in? Taking stock of your customers’ frequent inquiries will help you create a FAQ online training course and deliver it through an extended enterprise LMS.
The course should quickly answer many of your external learners’ most pressing questions. Once customers have completed the course, give them access to user guides and terms-of-service documents in a FAQ eLearning module that will help them find the answers they need on their own, without first turning to the customer support team.
Pro Tip: Customer service professionals and account managers are the best places to start when looking for FAQs because they have the most contact with your customers. If you need additional information, distribute online surveys with your extended enterprise LMS. Then you will have the data you need to create an impactful FAQ course.
2. Deliver product information videos
If your company offers a robust product, changes are there ways customers are not taking full advantage of your products. Creating succinct videos that explain common, underused, or valuable product features and their use in detail can help customers get more value from your solutions. Distribute videos to your external learners via extended enterprise LMS, ensuring customers receive accurate information about your products and services.
“By offering that learning before your customers even go looking for it, you get out ahead of their questions and make sure they're getting the right information from an expert: you,” stated the article The Importance of Training Your Customers.²
Try to keep product demo videos shorter than five minutes to drive knowledge retention and keep learners engaged with training. Short, hyper-relevant and valuable videos are more likely to hold your customers’ attention and help them use your products more effectively.
Related Reading: How Learning Management Systems Improve Customer Relations
3. Inform customers of product changes
Changes to products or services can be disorienting to longtime customers, even if those changes are valuable updates that fix bugs or improve functionality. By using an extended enterprise LMS to inform customers of all product changes, even changes that are in the works, you can ensure they aren’t caught off guard by product updates.
Extended enterprise LMS training system features such as secure email can be used to alert external learners of product changes. After communicating with customer initially, include documentation on changes and how they’ll affect users in your learning management system’s content repository. Customers can easily reference the documentation if they have trouble working with the changes in the future.
4. Provide customer training support
Unlike your employees, your customers may have no experience interacting with eLearning software. Support for customers receiving training optimizes the customer learning experience and make the courses in your extended enterprise LMS more effective.
“It doesn't have to be real-time support either,” stated eLearning Industry.³ “A web-based forum can serve the same role just as well and remain as a permanent record allowing future customers to benefit from already given answers.”
In addition to online forums, support can be provided through an extended enterprise LMS’s teleconferencing integration. Online learning communities and standard email support also work well.
Leverage Customer Loyalty to Grow Your Company
For customers to make repeat purchases and refer others to your company, they need to receive value from your products. They won’t get that if they’re not using those products effectively. Customer training helps your external learners get more value from your products, improving loyalty and retention. You can help to increase loyalty and strengthen your customers’ connection to your company by using an extended enterprise LMS training system to:
- Inform customers of product changes
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Provide updated product education
- Offer customer training support for external learners
As customer loyalty grows and external learners become more informed about your products, customers will naturally be more excited about advocating for your business. A better bottom line and great company reputation can result.
References:
1. Latitude Learning. 5 benefits an extended enterprise LMS can bring to your customers. https://www.latitudelearning.com/blog/5-benefits-an-extended-enterprise-lms-can-bring-to-your-customers.
2. Litmos. The Importance of Training Your Customers. https://www.litmos.com/blog/articles/the-importance-of-training-your-customers.
3. eLearning Industry. 5 steps to creating the perfect customer training program. https://elearningindustry.com/5-steps-create-customer-training.
