The Best Ways to Train Your Customers on New Devices
Introducing new products and onboarding customers come with similar challenges. Both call for end-user training on any hardware, software or approved third-party product that integrates with your service.
In markets like telecommunications, new devices and applications surface often. With them follow innovative feature groups and settings that need configuring. When distributing such products, your business must anticipate a transition period. How long that period lasts depends on the level of support you provide.
The Importance of End-User Training
How you train customers affects their overall experience. A good training program will help users adopt your services. Doing so prevents loss to competitors and helps customers derive maximum value from your business. Consequently, you will experience fewer service tickets and receive better feedback.
But building a training platform takes time and resources. You must invest in group training so that each employee can handle many customers. Otherwise, your business cannot scale effectively. Thankfully, there are various multimedia tools to help train customers more efficiently.
We’ve prepared a graphic below that suggests a few programs you can adopt to train and support customers. You may find that a blend of resources works best, as not everyone learns in the same manner.
Whatever media you choose, make it accessible. Posting online or to social media (i.e. YouTube) doesn’t give your resources the visibility they need. Without promoting them, your customers will find them only after they’ve encountered an issue. At which point, all aforesaid benefits do not apply.
Here are some ways you can get training resources out to customers:
Post-purchase email sequences that introduce and/or attach key learning materials;
Follow-up phone calls to check in with customers;
Documentation links on your website and product pages.
With your resources, the more value demonstrated, the more likely your customers are to embrace them. This is the chief difference between support and training. Training should encourage users to learn and grow on your platform. Support keeps things running smoothly later in the customer's lifecycle.
Gather Feedback from Your Customers
When creating training resources, gather as much feedback as you can from your customers. Without it, you cannot identify their present and potential pain-points. Some proven methods for gathering feedback include surveys, live chat, entrance/exit interviews and more.
You might not get the training resources right immediately. In fact, there’s always room for optimization. For this reason, you should measure analytics to gauge your content engagement, then evolve it to fill any gaps reflected in the data. Feedback is the single most important factor when developing customer training programs—so don’t forget to ask for it!