Training is often one of the immediate responses to any customer problem. While it can help to resolve issues involving lack of know-how, it can’t fix all customer issues. For this reason, before diving into building a whole lot of training, it is best to start with building training objectives for your customer education program.
Building training objectives involves creating clear, specific, and measurable goals that define what customers or customer success teams should know, understand, or be able to do after completing a training program. These objectives serve as a roadmap for both the training development team, trainers and the learners, ensuring that the training is focused and effective.
In this blog, we will breakdown the process and provide tips on how to develop the objectives for your customer education program.
Is training the right solution?
Training plan sections
Training objectives for customer education
Is training the right solution?
Creating training programs for customers or customer success teams is a significant investment, but it’s not always the right solution. While it can be beneficial, especially for customer onboarding or product usage, it’s only effective when the issue stems from a lack of knowledge or skills. Training cannot resolve deeper challenges like product design flaws, inadequate support systems, or confusing interfaces.
In some cases, improving product usability or providing clear documentation might be a better solution. In one example, a company thought that training was needed to help customers use a new feature more effectively. However, upon closer examination, it was found that the feature’s interface was unintuitive, and no amount of training could resolve that frustration.
In another case, customers weren’t using a premium service because the pricing structure didn’t align with their needs. Changing the pricing model had a much greater impact than additional product training.
Before investing in customer education, companies should carefully analyze the problems that they are trying to solve and determine whether training will resolve the real root cause of the issues (see more about this in sections below).
Training plan sections
Once you have determined that training is the right solution for your problems. It is time to define what it aims to achieve. Here is a checklist of questions that should be answered before you start building or revising any training content:
- General goals: Will the program improve product usage, reduce support calls, increase customer satisfaction, or drive product adoption?
- Audience: Is the program for new customers, long-term users, or a specific demographic?
- Customer stage: Will you be creating content for a specific stage of the customer journey (onboarding, advanced features, troubleshooting)?
- Training topics: What specific pain points, topics or FAQs that need to be addressed?
- Learning formats and delivery: What format will be used? Self-paced (videos, webinars, written guides, interactive tutorials, etc.), instructor-led training or blended learning? Consider also languages.
- Resources: What internal resources (e.g., subject matter experts, budget, time), tools and platforms will be needed to create and deliver the content?
- Success metrics: How will you measure the success of the program (e.g., decreased support tickets, increased product usage, higher customer satisfaction scores)?
By addressing these questions, you’ll be able to build a program that effectively supports your customers, aligns with organizational goals, and delivers measurable results.
Training objectives for customer education
When building training goals for a customer education program, it’s essential to align these goals with broader business objectives. Here are some general goals for a customer training program:
Improve product usage
The goal here is to help customers use the product more efficiently and effectively. Training should focus on teaching customers how to utilize all features so they can maximize the value they get from the product.
Training can be delivered as onboarding, feature-specific and use-case specific training. Onboarding covers basic product features, setup, and initial steps to start using the product. Feature training provides training on how to use specific features while, use-case specific training helps customers understand how to apply one or more features within the product to solve a specific need.
Whether building training for onboarding, feature-specific or use-case specific, think about creating step-by-step guides, video tutorials, live or interactive walkthroughs that allows customers to select when they want take the training and guides them through the product.
Reduce support calls
By proactively educating customers about common procedures, issues, troubleshooting steps, and best practices, a well-designed training program can significantly reduce the number of support calls, time spent on each support ticket and customer frustration.
Training can take many forms like self-service resources like FAQs, knowledge base articles, in-app guidance, help features, webinars, live Q&A sessions and video tutorials. It also can take in the form of proactive troubleshooting training, chatbots and support scripts that focuses on frequent problems and their solutions.
Increase customer satisfaction
A strong customer education program enhances satisfaction by providing customers with the knowledge they need to succeed and the sense that the product is delivering value. When customers frequently use a product and feel confident using it, their overall experience generally improves, leading to higher satisfaction scores and positive reviews.
The most obvious training to consider creating to increase customer satisfaction includes product or service knowledge training. But another approach to increase customer satisfaction is to increase the skills of your customer support and customer success team so they can work effectively with customers.
In addition to product training, customer support and customer success team training should include
- Active listening to allow customer support to understand customer underlying needs.
- Empathy development to help foster compassion and patience.
- Effective communication to enhance verbal and written communication.
- De-escalation techniques to calm upset customers and manage emotional situations with professionalism.
- Problem-solving to quickly resolve issues, turning negative experiences into positive ones.
- Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to handle customer situations more effectively.
- Efficient problem solving to handle multiple customer issues quickly and effectively without compromising service quality.
If increasing customer satisfaction is one of your training objectives of your customer education, consider investing in your customer-facing teams.
Drive product adoption
Training should encourage customers to adopt new or underutilized features. By highlighting the benefits and showing how these features can solve real problems, training can drive greater product adoption, resulting in increased loyalty and higher lifetime value for the customer.
In addition to onboarding feature and use-case specific training, ongoing webinars and workshops that dive deeper into product functionalities will ensure customers are still making the most of the product.to drive product adoption
Designing advanced modules or certification programs for power users or those who want to maximize the full potential of the product will help drive more in-depth knowledge and product adoption.
Finally, creating forums where users can share tips, ask questions, learn from one another, encourages knowledge sharing and collaboration. Adding content moderation will enhance the effectiveness of customer forums.
How LEAi supports training objectives for customer education
LEAi by LearnExperts can support customer education by leveraging AI-powered capabilities to create dynamic, personalized, and scalable training programs that meet various customer education objectives. Here’s how LEAi can contribute to these training goals:
- Faster course development: LEAi automates the creation of training content, enabling rapid deployment of educational materials for customers.
- Customization: LEAi can adapt content to different customer segments and learning modalities.
- Adaptive learning paths: LEAi also enables you to organize your training content into learning paths to create effective learning programs.
- Cost-effective scaling: AI-driven content generation significantly reduces the cost and time of developing customer education programs, making it feasible to provide high-quality training to customers at scale.
- Standardized content: LEAi ensures that all customers receive consistent, up-to-date training materials. This helps in delivering the same high-quality educational experience to every customer, which is essential for maintaining a uniform understanding of the product.
- Centralized updates: When product features change, LEAi can automatically update training content across all courses, ensuring that customers always have the latest information.
In summary, LEAi supports training objectives for customer education by automating content creation, personalizing learning experiences and scaling training programs that help organizations meet their training objectives for customer education.
Contact us to learn more about how to use LEAi to scale your customer education.
