customer education

Customer education (aka customer learning or customer training) is more than just teaching people about how to use features of a product or service they’ve purchased, it’s also about helping them understand related best practices, demonstrating the product’s value-add, and communicating about why and how it helps them achieve their specific objectives.

Why do organizations invest in customer training initiatives? And what factors should decision makers consider when developing, delivering and measuring the business impact of customer training? Listen to The Talented Learning Show

Offering extended enterprise learning is about helping your corporation (large or small) increase overall sales revenue, improve profit margins and stay ahead of competitors in a challenging global marketplace.

It's still early, but perhaps one of the most interesting opportunities is coming from the association space, where gamification and digital badges are being used to help bridge the skills gap.

Among LMS technology trends to watch, I think there will be more innovation in mobile, social, badges and certification, as well as capabilities that attract new users and facilitate training content commerce.

Consider creating training modules which are, in effect, focus group vehicles. Introduce your customers to the product ideas you are considering through online training, and leverage embedded surveys, quizzes, social media, and mobile enablement technologies to have conversations with your customers.

Integrating training workflows and data with customer and sales-related data elevates training from a cost center to a profit center, because it helps prove the business value of learning.

These organizations have proven that educating their channel provides a measurable return on investment and more importantly a significant competitive advantage, and as a result, these organizations treat channel learning as an ongoing mission-critical initiative.

To deliver and manage this kind of training, it's wise to invest in an extended enterprise LMS -- a learning management system designed specifically for this purpose.

Too often, software companies overpromise and underdeliver - and it shows up in the onboarding process. Here are 6 customer onboarding mistakes successful software companies avoid.