Part of the customer experience includes product education, and it’s up to you to provide it. An educated customer is more likely to be a customer in the future. A customer desiring to use knowledge to learn about a product is entirely dependent upon how effectively knowledge is delivered to them by you, yes you.
Barring the rare customer who will dedicate significant time and effort to teaching themselves a product, most customers need guidance to help them gain confidence in using a product. Therefore, the effectiveness of the learning content provided is crucial.
Once you accept the fact that helping people get to know how to use products is a key to sales, it’s easy to see why customer education influences customer experience. Few things or products are so intuitive that they require zero instruction. All customer education efforts must remember four key points to be effective.
Accessibility
Don’t compromise access to learning your product because the content isn’t accessible enough for people without advanced computer skills. When product learning requires lots of effort and skills to access, one deprives scores of people of the ability to learn how to use the product offering. And if they can’t figure out how to use it well, they’ll simply go find another product that does provide the learning they desire.
Engagement
This is the part of the customer education process that will either cause excitement or indifference. Focused, concise bits of content that breaks the learning down into smaller pieces, makes the content much easier to follow so learners are more easily able to engage. This also helps you as you’re equally able to assess what works and what needs improvement in your learning content. People rarely stick around if they’re not engaged in what they’re learning. They’re already interested in your product (why they’re trying to learn), now it’s your responsibility to teach them in a manner that attracts their attention, engages them and delivers useful instruction in an easily digestible manner.
Care
Even with accessibility and engagement, the recipe for customer education isn’t complete. You must also deliver content that is unintimidating. Every bit of care you put into your learning content and customer education is telling your customers how much you care about their success.
Fun
Learning should be fun. Even if the learners are lacking motivation, lessons fused with laughter can be highly effective. Not only are they entertaining, but humor has actually been seen to boost retention significantly! By sandwiching humor between instruction and repetition, one can learn incredibly fast while still having a laugh. You have an obligation to your customers to be a good teacher.
You have an obligation to your own company’s success to be a good teacher. Because it’s not only about putting together a few presentations so people can get the gist of your products. It needs to be your goal to build learning content that works so well that your customers are excited about how good they are at using your products. When people are good at something, they talk about it. That team that buys your products and is excited about how great they are at using it will become product evangelists.
