How Customer Training Enables Business Growth

Customer training is an essential part of the retention equation. Companies can improve customer relationships, build trust, and establish ongoing opportunities for upselling by building a training program that adds value. Clear, effective, and interactive training programs can lead to rapid growth and a more engaged customer base.

Customer training programs can take a variety of forms, from detailed how-to tutorials for product usage to broader bonus content that helps customers optimize the tool or service fit for their specific needs. Companies can also provide certification courses, management courses, or even strategy courses, which all come together to support the customer and build trust.

Customer training gives businesses a competitive advantage. People lean towards a product or service more if they understand how it works and what it can add to their lives. Just like employee learning and development, customer L&D ensures the products live up to their expectations without post-purchase regrets. Businesses also receive major benefits as well.

The key to enabling business growth through customer training is to craft compelling digital experiences in the learning environment. This means that companies must equip their customers with training that is tailored to their business needs, answers their top questions, and connects them with your brand. Learning technology is the thread that will connect training to an improved customer experience. The ExpertusONE LMS software can connect learning to sales, provide in-depth data reports about customer learning experiences, and personalize learning offerings for each customer as they engage with training.

Training must be a positive experience to improve customer engagement.

Investing in customers’ understanding of your company’s products by offering ongoing training opportunities helps build a relationship with them and establishes trust, loyalty, and, ultimately, profitability. For this training to be valuable both for the customer and for the company, leaders must invest in learning technology to support the initiative.

Digital training must be accessible and available for customers to use anytime, anywhere. This is why the ExpertusONE enterprise LMS platform was built to offer both desktop and mobile functionality. Learners can train whenever and wherever they need to, and this flexibility improves the rate of engagement. In a similar vein, training should be accessible offline so that learners can download courses even when they are not able to access the internet—like during a work-related flight or when the internet connection is unstable.

The ExpertusONE LMS platform was designed using heuristic design principles, which are the standard for digital experiences across the tech sector. Heuristic designs allow users to discover and learn independently instead of requiring multiple tutorials or continual feedback from managers. Though this is an overarching design principle, it’s an important part of the user experience because it ensures that learners (in this case, your customers) don’t struggle to use the system.

Extensible apps reduce barriers to training and provide flexibility.

Extensible apps are another key component of the digital experience because they provide a seamless connection between the learner’s everyday workflows and the training program. The ExpertusONE LMS offers apps for Slack LMS, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams, so that learners can easily access training resources, notifications, and information from within the apps that they already use for other workplace tasks. This is critically important in the customer training space because customers may not be as familiar with your company’s LMS. Instead of requiring customers to learn and adapt to a new system (which takes time and energy), they can quickly jump into training in a system that they already understand.

Gamification incentivizes learning.

The ExpertusONE LMS offers the opportunity to use gamification in the learning process. Customers can earn rewards, such as points, badges, and trophies, as recognition for their progress. LMS gamification features to increase engagement and allows customers to share their progress and certifications with others, which can improve training outcomes and incentivize the learning experience.

Training data reveals opportunities for business development.

One way the LMS platform can enable customer training to drive business growth is by connecting training data to business-critical sales processes. The ExpertusONE LMS has a Salesforce LMS integration that allows users to sync customer and partner data with their training history. The platform can help gauge the impact of customer training on key business outcomes and provide clear opportunities for growth, improvement, or additional investment. Companies can identify which types of content their customers are interested in and use those insights to upsell related products or accessories. Additionally, if a particular feature of one product or service gets considerable customer attention, companies can consider whether this same or similar feature should be added to future products and services. After publishing training resources, it’s important to closely track what training content customers are consuming, including how often they complete training, hit milestones, and even how long they watch training videos.

Related Reading: The Best LMS Features for Customer Training

However, leaders should also pay attention to the content customers don’t engage with. By monitoring where engagement is lacking, companies can adjust their strategy, rework courses, or address the quality of content so that time isn’t spent on ineffective courses. With these advanced insights and reporting capabilities, companies can monitor their customer training strategy’s direct impact on business objectives and customer experiences and make any necessary adjustments or improvements.

The ExpertusONE LMS eCommerce function allows businesses to drive training revenue.

Customer training and sales can also work together to drive business growth and improve training revenue. Providing access to educational resources for your products and services from the initial stage encourages customers to keep coming back. Once there is proof, the sales team can more effectively defend why an extension is a good idea or identify why the customer may benefit from additional products. This can all be done from an LMS platform.

The ExpertusONE LMS can optimize business partnerships with secure eCommerce capabilities for meaningful insights into orders, payment methods, applied discounts, tax amounts, purchaser information, and more. Learners can search for training, add one or multiple courses to their cart and continue browsing. Managers and admin can save time by placing bulk orders like one specific course for multiple learners or training programs.

The ExpertusONE LMS covers every nuance that drives business success, like managing taxes or discount codes. Since the ExpertusONE platform supports multiple currencies and payment methods, the system can accurately calculate taxes and refunds. Discounts and promotions can also be applied within the LMS, offering seamless transactions for domestic and global commerce needs.

Customer training creates an ongoing interaction between businesses and customers. It proves that your business is committed to the people that it serves. By treating customer training as an essential business function, you can create value for your customers and earn their loyalty. Robust, engaging, personalized customer training experiences can differentiate a company from its competitors because it shows that the brand will go the extra mile to make sure that customers are served with the information, resources, and communication that they need.

If you’re interested to see how customer training can improve your business, contact us for a free demo.