Reap the Benefits of Customer Engagement Training

Why Is Customer Engagement Training Important?

There’s no disputing it: Engaged customers return to your business more often and even become brand advocates. The more a customer trusts your product, the more likely they will purchase more from you or renew their contract. So how can you create more of them? An effective customer engagement training program is key.

Because not all customers are the same, it’s important to customize your training to keep all customers engaged. By creating an on-demand education strategy, you will be able to impact as many customers as possible.

Consider these facts from Gallup about engagement and its link to impact:

• Engaged customers are those who are rationally, emotionally, and psychologically attached to a brand, company, or product.
• Compared to engagement, satisfaction influences some metrics, but it only reaches rational objectives and excludes emotional attachments.
• Companies that strive to increase engagement boost productivity, revenue, customer ratings, and share of wallet three to four times more than those that only focus on satisfaction.
• Gallup’s B2B report shows that only 29% of B2B customers are fully engaged, and 71% are at risk of switching to a competitor.
• Creating an impact on customers is a crucial component of driving engagement.
• Companies with higher customer impact are 72% more likely to have fully engaged customers.

Engaging your customers through training and interaction is core to a successful customer engagement-oriented education strategy. This approach ensures user commitment to your product and increases their satisfaction with it.

What can you do to drive such engagement? When developing customer engagement training, it’s essential to design an education program that will support your entire customer lifecycle. The training resources and support you provide your customers at each stage (time-to-first-value, adoption, renewal, and lifetime value) will teach them how to properly use your products and services while improving their daily tasks and overall efficiency.

Related: Get More From Your Customer Engagement Platform with Customer Education

Customer Education’s Role In Customer Engagement

The success of your business depends on how engaged customers are with your products. Supporting all phases of a customer’s lifecycle with an education program is essential. When you provide training materials and support, you make your products and services accessible for your customers at every stage of their journey.

Providing customer engagement training programs lays the groundwork for a long-term relationship with your customers. To boost customer engagement, you need to design a customer education program that quickly demonstrates the value of your product. Many forward-looking organizations use onboarding training for their customers as part of this educational process.

The customer onboarding process is more than just a welcome call or a few product training sessions. This training needs to be comprehensive and efficient for your team and for your customers. Over time, a strong onboarding program will lead to increased customer engagement and lower churn.

An Effective Onboarding Program is Key

For an effective onboarding program, make sure you know who your customers are. The more you know about them, the better their experience with your product or service. Conducting good research is a great way to gain more insight into your users.

Create a questionnaire or utilize other specialized tools to learn more about your customers’ journey, find the right track to guide them through, and learn what they expect. This research must ask questions relevant to the onboarding team, customer success, marketing, sales, and other areas, so they all understand what represents real value and what should go into the training program.

You also must understand your customer’s problems and the goals they wish to achieve, and based on these, define your onboarding method. Your clients will benefit from designing and delivering customized training plans they can take at their own pace, on-demand and in different formats.

As users progress through your program, you can incorporate small celebrations and recognitions that serve as a marker of your customer’s first time-to-value moment, such as completing a course, for example.

Related: Scale Customer Success with Education

As you examine the results of your customer’s onboarding training program, you will gain a deeper understanding of it. Measuring the success of the program is the best way to achieve this. You can take several metrics into account for each client, such as the number of monthly active users (MAUs) and courses registered for and completed, correlated with how quickly they begin using your offerings, to determine how effective your training is.

Ideally, the program identifies metrics and goals meaningful to both your organization and your customers. It is possible to create benchmarks and track them regularly with the help of technology, which shows results of improvement and the impact on the business. Your business will grow as your numbers grow, and this data will encourage your investment in effective customer education initiatives.

Customer Education Technology at the Service of Customer Engagement

The Technology & Services Industry Associations (TSIA)’s report, The State of Customer Success 2022, highlights: “By the end of Q2 2021, CS organizations recognized the limitations of customer success managers (CSM)-to-customer ratios, and the industry became innovative by leveraging digital technologies to help expand their engagement and coverage models. The next hire for CS organizations was not necessarily more resources; but, instead, it was investment in digital technology to better manage resources and their engagement and alignment to customer adoption, expansion, and retention activities.”

The right customer education technology can help you reap the benefits of automation at different levels of the customer education journey, including onboarding. The benefits include eliminating customer calls to your business’ sales or support teams, accelerating digital transformation, and improving customer retention and (of course) engagement.

Companies can improve customer impact-related results by utilizing an automated, on-demand training platform like Skilljar as part of their customer engagement training program.

Using Skilljar, enterprises find new ways to onboard and engage with their customers. Our customer training software is easy to use, helping customers and partners engage more with your platform. Skilljar offers a comprehensive set of features to help you onboard and retain customers at all stages of the customer journey, boosting engagement and retention now and over time.

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