Customers are demanding product and skills training. If you aren’t offering training you’re missing out on a big possibility to help your visitors. In this article, Steve Penfold shares five explanations why you should spend money on customer training.

why customer training important

You’ve got an excellent product or service and you have a PDF user guide on your website in order to customers how to utilize it. Job done, right?

Maybe that was true once, but not anymore. Increasingly, vendors are providing complex customer training programs to augment their products, services or brand.
But why would vendors go to the trouble? Surely if a person has bought into something, they’re pleased with it, right? Again, this may be a dangerous assumption. Here are five explanations why providing training to your visitors is important.

1. Training teaches customers how to employ a product

Just because you understand your product inside and out, and its nuances and logic make sense for you, it’s unwise to assume this will be the case for your visitors. Along with the more sophisticated or complex something is, the less intuitive chances are to be.

I’m willing to wager you’ve used software and at some point you’ve hit a dead end. You’d obviously done something wrong (or the program let you take a wrong turn), and a cryptic error message popped up asking you to repair the mistake.

Maybe you were able to figure it out, or maybe you contacted a support representative who explained where you went wrong. In acute cases, perhaps you switched software vendors! Regardless, it wasted your time and effort and probably had you cursing the merchandise.

Providing training can minimize this type of frustration and time wastage.

2. Training shows customers getting added value from a product

Even if your visitors are not running into problems when using your product, are they getting the most from it?

Perhaps there are features customers might use that could make their lives easier. Perhaps showing customers an alternative solution way to use the features they know would open new opportunities to them.

Having untapped potential in your product does no healthy or your visitors. A lot more empowered your customers are, the much more likely it is the fact other prospective customers will hear about your product and want it, too.
Providing training is a means for customers to extract the maximum value from your offering.

3. Training stops potentially unhappy customers from leaving (reduces churn)

Churn, or churn rate, is marketing-speak for the amount of customers who leave a vendor, in accordance with the number who join. If you’ve changed insurer or cellular phone carrier because of dissatisfaction or because a much better deal has lured you away, you’re part of those companies’ churn statistics.

Customers leaving you is bad. It’s generally accepted that it’s less costly to keep existing customers than it is to win new ones.

Losing a person is a double whammy; you’ll lose ongoing revenue from that customer, and it’s unlikely they’ll be directing clients to you.

Relevant training that excites and gives customers the tools and knowledge to do their jobs (or hobbies) better will keep them from churning.

4. Training delights customers and creates advocates

If customers who churn are at one end of the spectrum (the bad end), customers who are delighted are at the other end (the nice end).

And much like dissatisfied customers who offer you a double whammy, delighted customers can provide you a double win! Not merely will you continue to get earnings from a satisfied customer, but there’s every chance that customer will actively push other prospects your way.

Providing training can help delight customers and drive additional customers for you. Let your existing customers be your best marketing tool!

5. Training provides an possibility to gain valuable comments from customers to boost product and customer experience

Training can provide you invaluable insight into how your customers use your products and services.

Suppose you have a library of how-to videos for several top features of your software product. You see that certain video specifically has been viewed 60 percent more than every other. What does this let you know? Perhaps that software feature is confusing and could be improved.

Perhaps one of the other videos hasn’t been viewed at all. This may be because the feature has already been perfectly clear, but maybe it’s because customers don’t know the feature exists.

The ways customers interact with training may not always give definitive insights into what they’re thinking, but it’s an avenue of intelligence to prompt one to ask more questions and transform your life offering.

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In conclusion

These five known reasons for providing training on your products and services show that we now have benefits for both you and your customers.

In the event these haven’t convinced you, here’s one final thought. Think about how your customers would respond if your competition started offering useful customer training as a value-add. Could that take some of your market share? If you believe it could, then you should leverage the info in blogs such as this to see how to start to build your training curriculum – because it’s only a matter of the time before your opponents will, if indeed they haven’t already.