According to 3 in 4 employees, continuous training is a major factor in their willingness to remain in their current jobs. Industry leaders recognize the importance of deploying a system that continuously trains and upskills employees, but deploying a similar system for customer training has proven more difficult despite its potential to yield similar benefits to retention and engagement.
Customer training systems have a proven track record of increasing profits by improving customer loyalty through engagement. Industry leaders know that even a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25-95% due to higher retention and lower marketing costs. To deploy an employee training program that is both effective and scalable, industry leaders turn to e-learning programs offered by learning management systems (LMS).
These centralized customer training resources allow them to adapt to changing customer expectations with modular training programs that provide the flexibility they need to attract and retain loyal customers in 2024 and beyond. In this guide, we explore the new definition of customer training and how businesses of all sizes can use a modern LMS to adapt to the changing expectations of tech-savvy customers.
What is Centralized Customer Training in 2024?
“Customer training” refers to any resources used to help customers access or use a business’s services more easily. Brick-and-mortar stores often use customer training practices such as “product tutorials” to increase engagement and onboard new customers. Call centers may demonstrate the benefits of services in direct customer calls. In a digital market, customer training now encompasses a much wider range of potential e-learning applications that can be used to target key demographics and retain loyal customers more effectively.
As modern businesses use an LMS to offer employees training resources, complete with reporting tools, mobile access features, and individualized training groups, an LMS can also provide the customer equivalents of these resources. The goal of modern customer training is to ensure that target consumers know how to use a company’s products, have clear opportunities to give feedback, and always know how to access their learning resources. This not only makes them more likely to remain loyal but also extends the feedback loop to their peers as they gain a greater ability to understand and demonstrate the business’s services to others.
As a result of effective training, customers will be more likely to use the product, use more features of the product, and use the product more independently. The specific content of your company’s learning resources will depend on your target demographic, learning goals, and LMS features. Regardless of your business’s personalized learning preferences, a centralized hub that organizes, distributes, and monitors customer education content helps to create targeted learning resources that achieve the desired benefits.
The Benefits of Centralized Customer Training
Centralizing customer training provides numerous benefits to businesses, which is why using e-learning strategies for customer training has become a prominent topic among top-performing businesses in consumer industries. These are the main benefits that businesses strive to achieve when deploying customer training workflows in 2024:
Reduce Training Time and Costs
Achieving a more economized customer training workflow requires a system that can centralize resources and communication to a single hub. One of the biggest obstacles in digital training workflows is a disorganized learning management system, which often delivers repetitive and redundant training materials to customers with different learning needs.
A centralized customer training LMS reduces training time by attracting customers with strategies targeted to their skill level, goals, and demographics. By focusing on engaging existing customers, businesses also save on unnecessary customer outreach costs.
Many businesses fail to realize that retaining an existing customer often costs five times less than attracting a new one. The success rate of selling to an existing customer is similarly greater than selling to a new one. Knowing that profits are driven by customer loyalty, many businesses are turning to customer training resources. The goal is to cut costs by converting existing customer bases into more loyal users by entrenching them in engaging learning ecosystems.
Unify Training Practices
Without a centralized learning system, your managers may create conflicting, misinterpreted, or ambiguous training resources for your customers. A consistent standard of customer training entails an accurate translation of your business’s objective to each customer demographic.
Using an LMS for customer education provides a customizable learning management method for whatever interface your company intends to use. In addition to providing branded colors and logos, modern LMS software can create personalized learning paths that take your customers through your ideal learning sequence.
Additionally, unified training practices offer continuous user feedback systems to help businesses improve their learning content and remain flexible in their strategies. As the customer management industry changes due to changing expectations and evolving technology, accurate feedback collection and organization will become vital to incrementally improving customer training resources over time.
Increase Accessibility
Providing accessible learning resources requires a centralized learning management system that accounts for diverse types of learners and their preferred devices. In 2024, customers seek brands that provide multichannel access to their materials with 24/7 support. While providing this through conventional training channels can be a burden on HR departments, a centralized LMS can provide easy access to learning resources on any device.
This increased accessibility leads to better feedback collection systems. Managers can view readouts of the most frequently used learning resources to understand how their customers prefer to engage with the material. A centralized LMS makes it simple to identify issues with the material and refine the curriculum to address the needs of the target users.
The feedback channel can also be expanded to include direct feedback from customers. This feedback can be collected about any aspect of the learning platform, consolidated in the platform, and delivered to the relevant personnel. In today’s market of tech-savvy consumers, feedback is a vital resource to improve strategies in real time based on the target user’s changing needs. There’s a reason why according to Deloitte Digital, 89% of company call centers now prioritize the accessibility of the customer experience.
Boost Engagement
Research has proven in the past that training drives greater engagement and product adoption, with some studies demonstrating that 68% of customers who were trained in a product reported using it more, and 87% of customers reported that they were able to use it more independently. Any long-term customer journey is driven by engagement, which makes learning implementation an even greater asset in the era of automated chatbots and 24/7 learning materials.
As companies who invest in structured customer learning discover, most modern consumers want to learn more about their products to use them more independently. On-demand structured learning through company resources creates a bridge between the consumer’s desired experience and the company’s goals. This leads to increased loyalty and revenue as consumers increasingly feel that the business they support is actively invested in their experience. According to workforce performance studies, this investment in CX is important to 97% of consumers when deciding which businesses they support.
To that end, customer education through a centralized LMS boosts engagement in six key ways:
- Managing the product’s reputation at launch
- Increasing awareness of the product
- Encouraging diverse uses of the product
- Committing to an optimized use of the product
- Encouraging recommendations of the product
- Providing input about the product
From product launch to customer feedback, an LMS allows businesses to boost engagement using real-time learning resources, data collection methods, and customer-directed training programs.
Increase Organizational Growth
To successfully scale their operations in 2024 and beyond, organizations must continuously monitor consumer expectations and track technology changes to adjust their training strategies accordingly. A centralized customer training system allows businesses to collect and analyze feedback in real time and address the concerns of their most valuable customers without the restraints of conventional consumer feedback.
With centralized learning resources, businesses no longer lose their target demographics under their radar as their multichannel data becomes increasingly cluttered. As your organization grows, you may wish to partner with third-party resources to enhance your data analysis strategies and scale your security solutions to match your data infrastructure. A centralized LMS offers opportunities for organizational growth by helping businesses coordinate their learning platform with their future goals.
The Challenges of Centralized Customer Training
Despite these advantages, centralized customer training systems present three key challenges to businesses as they modernize their learning platforms and scale their operations:
Allocating Sufficient Resources
Deploying a centralized customer training program requires substantial financial and labor resources. With an LMS, companies can deploy and scale a customer training process with less strain on certain departments. However, adapting an LMS to an existing technology infrastructure presents its own resource challenges, including training personnel in the software’s usage and maintaining a secure system.
Engaging Diverse Learning Styles
A comprehensive training program must cater to diverse learning styles to prevent target customers from being left behind or becoming disinterested. When scaling a training system, many companies struggle to maintain balanced training resources that account for customers with different backgrounds, devices, and learning preferences.
Maintaining Consistency
For businesses with multiple locations or a wide range of customer demographics, maintaining consistent learning practices is a key pain point. A centralized LMS helps maintain consistent core materials across regions and demographics to mitigate the issue, but businesses must remain proactive about the changing expectations of their target consumers to maintain a training process that is both effective and engaging.
A centralized LMS helps managers across different departments and branches correct errors in the material, standardize training practices, clarify ambiguous lessons, and maintain a consistent training objective across the board.
How to Implement a Customer Training Program
To implement a successful customer training program, businesses must be critical of their process and ask vital questions along the way. Customer expectations and needs are constantly changing. The industry leaders in customer training initiatives will be those who can communicate a convincing goal using modular training methods. These four key steps should provide a starting point for businesses of any size to follow this example:
Establish Training Initiatives and Goals
This means both establishing a goal consistent with your company’s objective as well as deploying the training process consistently between locations. A consistent customer training program accomplishes several key goals:
- Targets a specific key demographic
- Reveals what that demographic needs to know about your services
- Evaluates whether your training initiatives are working
- Collects data on the broader training structure, such as by module or section
- Prioritizes training goals based on customer preference and performance
When one of these goals has not been accomplished, companies need to re-evaluate their training program to consider how a more centralized system can lead to more consistent goal-setting.
Choose a Learning Management System
Choosing the right learning management system can be difficult in a saturated market. When comparing choices, businesses should ask themselves key questions about their functionality, such as:
- Will our target customers be able to easily use this system?
- Will our employees be able to maintain it?
- Will the system be flexible and scalable?
- Will it provide enough customization and control?
- Will it encourage collaboration between team members?
- Will the content be easy to publish and manage?
- Will it be localizable to other regions?
- Will it provide analytic data?
- Will it be mobile-friendly?
These sample questions should provide a framework for businesses to use while shopping for prospective learning management systems. They focus on how its features can be customized, diversified, and scaled to your business’s unique needs and the usage preferences of your target users.
Create Engaging Learning Resources
The success of customer training platforms is driven by how well the learning resources engage the target demographic. To put it another way, if customers believe that your training program is useful, they will engage with it to increase the value proposition of their brand loyalty.
This underscores the importance of creating custom learning content that evokes your brand, maintains professionalism, and engages customers with an accessible UI. Many businesses use LMS software to embrace customer learning trends such as microlearning, which delivers learning in bite-sized sections. “Scenario learning” is another such trend, which refers to framing learning in the context of real situations instead of abstract knowledge.
These trends and more (mobile learning, gamification, etc.), give businesses the tools they need to engage their target demographics in competitive product spaces. According to the sunk cost fallacy, customers are more likely to continue supporting a product after they invest money and effort into it. However, they must be engaged by the system first to make that initial investment.
Monitor Learning Performance
Training resources also need to be delivered at the right time, which in most cases is before the customer uses the product or service. This requires a system to “pull” customers to the materials, which in an LMS can be deployed using embedded training resources that notify them about new support features, deliver tips or videos, or generate buzz through the customer portal.
This system needs to be monitored for performance to track and improve your target customers’ learning analytics. A modern LMS has analytics embedded in the software to tell businesses how customers are performing, the spots that are tripping them up, the features they favor when navigating the platform, and more. A centralized system can reroute support requests, compare them to the customer’s training history, measure satisfaction, and procure feedback to help businesses monitor their training resources and maximize their ROI.
Centralize Your Employee Training Resources with Qbic
In a rapidly changing regulatory environment, top-performing businesses seek new ways to streamline their compliance training workflows. Modern employees express their desire for personalized, collaborative learning resources while managers continue to report the critical role that compliance training plays in their retention and productivity rates.
A customer training LMS comes with versatile training features, including industry-specific courses, customizable learning paths, and real-time analytics. An LMS equipped with a digital storefront allows businesses to buy, sell, and track new courses to engage and retain their customers and increase their ROI in key marketing sectors. The Q Store offers options for businesses to find the perfect L&D solutions for their customers without paying upfront for the system. Contact our team today to learn how even a free plan with a versatile LMS can take your customer training and development workflows into the modern age.
