Top 5 Key Tips to Choose the Right Technology for Customer Education
Consumers buying whatever is being sold to them is a thing of the past now. Nowadays, their behavior is immensely influenced and prejudiced by technology and its advancement. There has been a significant shift in consumer behavior.
As a result, most company leaderships face a never-ending challenge to meet the customers' expectations. One way to mitigate this challenge is to use the technology to develop a customer education strategy.
In recent years, the customer education service has boomed, and most companies are incorporating this strategy. A recent study conducted by Conductor stated that 131% of the consumers are ready to buy the service or the brand immediately after customer education.
Thus, the figure showcases that the customer education market is becoming a critical factor in creating brand awareness and driving the required conversions.
As mentioned earlier, the best way to educate the customer is to leverage technology. But how to choose the right technology for the customer education, since the market is flooded with many.
This article will provide you with five essential tips in choosing the right technology for customer education.
However, before we jump into that, let's briefly discuss what customer education is. It is important to note that it is not marketing.
What is Customer Education?
It is vital not to mix customer education with marketing. The components of both can tie in with each other, but certainly, they are not the same.
Advertising and marketing aim to persuade the consumer on an emotional level for the product or service, elaborating on its features and benefits. Customer education is catered towards giving the consumer all the needed information about the product/service.
At the core of customer education platform is how to offer customers the knowledge to use the product/service and solve and mitigate problems related to the product/service.
A customer education program can be viewed as arming the customers with the necessary resources and tools to give them the best and hassle-free experience in using the product/service.
Critical Factors in Developing Customer Education
Some of the key features that will dominate 2021 in developing the best customer education program are
- Goals: Analysis of your end goal with the customer training program. It will help you in determining what you want to achieve.
- Strategy and Implementation: Develop the strategy, and then implementing it is the key to success. But you need to have that scope in the strategy to improve as you progress with the program and change as per customer's feedback to make it better.
- Proactive Program: Instead of waiting for customers to ask you the question, start communicating proactively by addressing common questions and issues.
- Content-Type: Your content for the program should be determined by two factors, your product/service and the type of consumers you have to offer the best result.
- Marketing: Once the program is created, you need to market it well so the customers are aware of the education program.
- Technology: How you want to impart the customer education program using medium and technology is crucial in its success. New technologies are available and can help you to be more effective.
Focusing on all these factors while developing the customer education program is essential. However, today, where technology is becoming the key in every aspect of our lives, it will significantly influence the customer education market.
When you want to achieve the target and be the market leader effectively and efficiently with the customer education program, you have to choose the right technology.
Top 5 Key Tips to Choose the Right Technology for Customer Education
Let's begin by saying you need to automate your customer education platform unless you want to serve just a handful of users. The simple reason is that the manual effort will overwhelm you soon and hinder your progress even before you are off the ground.
Here are 5 key tips to choose the right technology for customer education, that will help you with the education program.
In the market, there are different types of technologies available to ensure the successful training of the customers.
1. Artificial Intelligence: When you want to streamline and personalize the customer's experience while giving them the freedom of understanding and adaptability, this can be your answer.
2. Big Data: If you are using a large volume of information, want to track and have insights into the customer and the impact the training is having, Big Data will help you develop the material better.
3. LMS: It is the heart of digital customer training, also known as LMS (Learning Management System). The system enables view alerts, notification on engagement, receiving evidence of customer learning, and communicating with them. The features offered by this software are:
- Content authoring tools for creating lessons with graphics texts, videos, audios along with simulations and scoring.
- A repository to keep videos, lessons, pdf, and other resources
- A hand-on training feature with the embedded 'virtual lab
- Data management to capture user engagement, delivery, and consumption of the training
- Management for certification and automated issuing of credentials
- E-commerce component to bundle the material to sell them online
- Analytics to keep learners informed of their progress
4. Customer Lifecycle: While this focuses on collecting information, managing the leads, and marketing them, they can also help with training. The features it offers are:
- Customer relationship management
- Marketing automation
- Customer success
- Customer service
5. Seamless collaboration & Communication: A real-time non-concurrent collaboration and communication are offered via this software. Often the features include:
- Meetings for virtual classrooms, conferences, and seminars, led by virtual instructors
- Chat windows to get help and training about the product you purchased.
- Community software is mainly targeted for the social media platform where customers and the company connect, educate and share additional insight.
- Blog software is the place to share the information and regularly update the customers with new case studies and advice.
Depending on what you want to achieve with your customer training program, you can use the right technology for customer education that suits you. Several other tips can help you to select the right technology.
Final Words.
Irrespective of the business or industry you are in, providing customer education is essential to keep an edge over your competitors. By following these tips, you can find the technology that suits you the best in developing and offering the customer education program.
