Educating Your Customers

A recent report about customer education confirmed that 96% of organisations believe that customer training is important. However, only 14% think most of their customers have been adequately educated. 

 

When you have a good programme of education in place for your customers you will give them confidence to use your products or services and encourage them to make more purchases. 

 

Don’t wait until someone is ready to place an order to give them high quality content. Making useful educational materials freely available to everyone is a good way to establish yourself as an expert. 

 

If you’re in a technical sector, you will impress people by making complex information attractive and easy to understand. At this stage you are already beginning to train them to appreciate your product and creating a desire for them to become customers. 

 

You can give people the experience of being a customer before they have spent a penny with you by enlisting the support of your customer service staff. They will already know the questions people ask first and how to answer them. Provide helpful frequently asked questions (FAQs) or videos. Give people information about the problems your products and services solve and potential customers will immediately feel that you understand their needs. 

 

Importantly, you can keep your customers engaged and interested with ongoing training for new products and services or seminars on related subjects. 

 

Your curated content and expertise will build trust. Because it delivers value it will have more impact than many other marketing approaches. 

 

It can also help you to improve your products, services, and support by highlighting knowledge gaps and how well people understand your products. Feedback from your customers is a valuable resource for your business. 

 

You can also streamline the process for further sales by making your customers aware of other products and services that could be of benefit to them. 

 

To successfully educate your customers you will need to understand what ‘success’ will be like for them. There are some helpful questions you can ask yourself: 

 

• What problem do we solve for our customers? 

• How will customers measure results? 

• What other business goals do our customers have? 

• How do our products or services fit with their wider business? 

• Do our customers’ challenges vary across market sectors? 

 

Your customer education programme will depend on your business sector. You might offer short online courses and curated learning experiences that will get them up to speed quickly with minimum effort. 

 

You could offer to ‘train the trainers’, helping your customers to implement use of your products or services quickly. 

 

If your products and services are fast-changing you could offer regular bulletins about the latest upgrades or planned improvements. 

 

To build a sense of community you could also offer online or in-person user forums where you can all exchange case studies and best practices. 

 

Your educational content strategy will involve much more than courses, documents, and webinars. It’s a two-way process to make sure you have a thorough understanding of how you can help your customers to succeed. It will also help you to understand where there are opportunities to fill gaps for your customers and add even more value for them. With so many multi-media options available you can also keep them interested by using multiple online and offline channels to share information. 

 

The Andromeda GAP programme includes analysis of your sales and marketing where we can focus on your approach to customer education. If you would like to know more, please get in touch. 

 

Until next time ...