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Why Build a Customer Onboarding Program?
An investment in customer onboarding ensures a great start in the lifecycle of your product. Customer onboarding through product training can accelerate time-to-value and makes every customer feel prioritized. Customers in the early phase of onboarding are eager to explore the utility of your product. A successful onboarding program positions your company as dedicated to helping your customers derive maximum value from your product.
What are the goals of customer onboarding and product training?
- Increasing revenue generation,
- Recovering cost of production
- Reducing customer churn
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Create upselling opportunities where relevant
There are two essential elements of customer onboarding training:
Product training
Customer training is vital in the onboarding process of any company. Effective onboarding shows the value of your product to the customer. Product information, including features, benefits, and technical data must be communicated to users. Use explainer videos to illustrate the utility and the nuances of your product.
Skills training
Skills training prioritizes improving the time-to-value of your product. Customers want to learn how to generate maximum utility out of your product. For example, a designer using Adobe Illustrator or a similar platform will want to learn the intricacies of the software. Skills training material creates expert users and increases the value of a product, leading to customer happiness. Customers who feel they can make the most of your product or more likely to be loyal and garners improved retention.
What type of training methodology improves customer engagement?
Considering that over two-thirds of a company’s profit depends on customer engagement, it is worth exploring the best training methodologies that lead to improved engagement. Organizations that employ sound customer engagement strategies will foster a customer-centric culture, which boosts customer retention and loyalty.
Let us explore three methodologies for customer training:
In-person Training
Instructor-led training is the gold standard of training programs. By facilitating interaction through conversation and interpersonal engagement, ILT can unlock a superior engagement with the learners. Classroom sessions, however, become impractical when dealing with a globally dispersed audience. It is also not recommended for dealing with users with different levels of competency in product knowledge.
Owing to the logistical demands of getting instructors and learners in the same room, ILT may also be expensive. Arranging travel, accommodation and devising the logistics for a globally dispersed audience is not a feasible solution.
Product Training Webinars
Webinars are well suited for an audience of large groups. Creating engaging webinar content along with an effective speaker can help boost user engagement. Similar to a vILT session, participants can join webinars from just about anywhere on the planet. Webinars that take the form of a virtual-ILT classroom session alleviates any logistical challenges.
A lengthy recorded webinar can be broken down into bite-sized chunks of content. A systematic and linear structure is necessary to ensure the chunks are cohesive. Specific topics of content can be revisited as per the needs of users in the form of microlearning modules.
However, webinars can suffer the same setbacks as ILT when dealing with a diverse set of learners with varying levels of competency.
E-learning Training Programs
E-learning training programs work for any number of audiences. The scope of leveraging effective training methodologies through eLearning is vast. Training modules can be molded to fit the needs of learners and the learning goals. To practice making the right choices, interactive simulations can be employed. This helps learners practice decision making in a safe environment. Gamified eLearning can boost learner engagement by making the learning process fun and exciting.
Digital learning also allows learning managers to manage, track and record the progress, performance and pain points of the users. This data can prove invaluable to the organization. For example, the product development team can identify which aspects of the product users have trouble grasping. Learning managers can also test and improve training content based on assessments and surveys of customers.
The process of developing eLearning content involves a design process where the learning objectives of users and business challenges are key considerations.
This process also takes into account the most viable technologies to deliver the content to a globally dispersed audience. As training can take place from anywhere with a stable internet connection, eLearning can save on costs incurred, considerably.
On-demand Customer Training
Today, adult learners prefer self-paced training. On-demand customer education performs better than instructor-led training because customers have busy lives and want to learn when and where they please. On-demand training does not place any restrictions such as time zone or availability. Self-paced learning becomes especially relevant in product training that caters to an international market audience.
Self-paced learning is invaluable for customers because it does not depend on the availability of instructors. Training material can also be revisited by the learners at any point instead of a one-and-done model.
When creating content for an audience with different levels of competency, uniquely tailored modules can be created for beginner-level and expert-level users. Role-based training can be made available to users operating in different domains, therefore allowing them to learn based exactly on what they want to derive from your product.
On-demand training can be developed in multiple formats depending on the module:
- Recorded tutorials, ex: for providing a product walk-through or that of a user interface
- Interactive scenario-based training: choice-based training that improves user-engagement with the training
- Virtual Labs: Provides a safe environment where users can make mistakes and learn about the product without any risks or danger
- Infographics: A cheat-sheet summarising different parts of training. A user manual for a set of product functions.
- Quizzes & Assessments: Helps users measure their level of competency and indicates their problem points.
Product Training + Customer Enablement = Product Engagement
There exists a direct correlation between customer enablement training and product engagement. Research indicates that companies using omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain, on average, 89% of their customers, this is in stark contrast to 33% for companies with limited omnichannel strategies. The immediate goal of onboarding is to facilitate the customer’s engagement with your product. Customer training fosters a lucrative relationship with your product and allows customers to succeed in achieving the purpose of their purchase.
Companies that fail to spend time and resources nurturing the needs of the customer will often experience high churn. A customer who is unable to make the most of your product will not renew. The long-term growth of your brand is contingent upon successful customers. This means investing in customer training is integral to product success. Product enablement is critical for usage renewals, for example, in the case of software companies.
To find out more about how you can improve the customer onboarding experience for your organization, get in touch with us by emailed info@originlearning.com. For regular updates and more resources, sign up for our monthly newsletter on the sidebar.