You’ve already seen the importance and benefits that come with your customer training platform. The investment is made, and you’ve developed a customer training platform that can help educate and empower your customer base. Yet you feel as if you’re not getting the traction initially expected or that there’s very little traffic headed that way, and your customer service team doesn’t see the expected drop in support requests. So let’s look at ways we can help elevate your overall customer training program.
Make sure people can find it
While you may think simply having it on your corporate site is enough and the user base will find it, in reality, you want to integrate it directly with your product. That means as users interact with your product online, there are easy-to-reach places to look for help.
Even upon initial logins, there can be a pop-up showcasing an onboarding tutorial or a quick start guide that leads the user to the actual customer training platform. If it’s out of sight, it will be assumed that it doesn’t exist.
Focus on engagement
While you’re making sure to market your customer training platform, you want to ensure that when it’s found, it’s also accessible to everyone. That means you want to ensure that all levels of knowledge can navigate and find the information they are looking for. But, again, that comes from the quality of your overall content.
If it’s bland and simply word-based, users will quickly leave the site and directly reach out to the company for their answer. Always ensure the content is engaging and fun for the user to absorb the necessary information. Design the content that makes the most sense for the bulk of the users to be able to locate what they are looking for.
Also, make sure to connect different relevant segments of the training for the customer so that when they are done with one section, the customer training platform recommends the next set of training modules.
Gamification is key
It’s one thing to learn on your customer training platform; it’s another thing to earn an achievement for it. By using gamification through completion rates, earning badges, or unlocking advanced pieces of training, gamification helps well-designed content with that enhanced level of interactivity.
You can also build out end-of-lesson quizzes and scoring mechanisms to test their understanding of the knowledge or simply have them run through test simulations to see if they can properly navigate the systems.
Personalization helps with usage
A key area to elevate your customer training platform is through personalization. While this may require additional resources, designs, and development, it will be well worth it when done correctly. By truly understanding your user base and their different user personas, you can develop a personalized experience that caters to each user and gets them using the system properly faster.
You can start by developing customer training platforms that have their path determined by the level of expertise the user already has. For example, if they have some experience with the type of product offering, they may skip ahead to more advanced features.
In addition, understanding the user persona, such as a ‘finance’ user versus a ‘sales’ user, can help to develop curated paths that directly show the important areas to learn based on the job roles and relevant functionality.
This helps users feel that their time is being respected and well spent as the customer training platform works directly with them to develop the right training regime that gives them the head start they need. This, of course, can come later on with the right levels of data and analysis received from the existing customer training platform. With this information, it will be possible to develop the right paths and even algorithms that shift the user experience based completely on relevancy.
Having a customer training platform requires consistent reviews and updates to ensure that the experience provided to the customers is as effective as possible. If you don’t make these improvements, not only will your approach become stale, but it will reduce the effectiveness of your customer training platform, providing other benefits such as customer retention, improved sales, and reduced operational costs.