Discover 5 measurable reasons to invest in customer empowerment
Did empowered customers buy more or less than non-empowered customers?
Organizations have been empowering customers for decades. Buy complex enterprise software and the vendor will offer a three-day training to empower its users. Buy an agricultural machine and the distributor will offer training along the same lines.
However, in recent years, in most segments, customer enablement has been evolving rapidly, moving from classroom enablement to digital enablement, where Learning Management Systems (LMS) are the backbone of this initiative, providing content for e-learning, video tutorials, social learning scenarios and other resources that can be created once and reused over and over again.
The LMS also has something that no other customer enablement method can offer, reporting. Knowing which customers have participated in the training (or not) gives you the power to measure your return on investment.
As? Did empowered customers buy more or less than non-empowered customers? Did they call your customer support organization more or less often? Did they renew their service contracts at a higher or lower rate?
In every industry, smart organizations invest to provide their customers with relevant learning opportunities. If your organization doesn't do this, it's missing out on at least five great opportunities to build your success story on customer enablement:
5 measurable reasons to invest in customer empowerment
1) Increase sales and profit
The easiest and most cost-effective place to get a new sale is with an existing customer, not by winning a new one. Empowered and satisfied customers who realize the value you promised will buy more of the same or related products.
Customers don't want to find new solutions. They just want the solution they've purchased to work as expected, or better. If you can help make that happen through training, they will continue to buy.
In addition, many organizations sell content to the customer as a value-added service. The more complicated your core product or solution, the more opportunities you have to sell training to customers and turn your content into profitable revenue streams.
2) Shorter sales cycles
Customer learning helps organizations accelerate the sales cycle by enabling customers to do most of the sales work. Many companies also cross-sell, involving active customers such as students.
They provide a free library of training content about a purchased product, as well as the training itself as an add-on product. As customers educate themselves, they voluntarily absorb knowledge about other products and services (features, benefits, and unique value propositions) without costly active involvement of the sales force.
3) Lower customer support costs
Every time a customer contacts your support team, via email, phone or WhatsApp, it comes at a cost.
You may not be able to avoid all support calls, however, you can minimize support call volume for basic reasons by providing targeted learning opportunities that give customers all the tools they need to get started with your product or service.
The reduction in the need for customer support calls directly translates into higher profits.
4) Greater customer satisfaction
Even if you have the best Call Center and online support in your industry, by the time customers are looking for support, they've exhausted their other options, and are likely annoyed by the inconvenience. Offering learning opportunities to your customers is a self-service method for them to get answers to using your products and services.
5) Increased brand reach
Even small businesses can have a global presence. However, it is not possible to travel around the world and train clients in person.
Using an LMS, organizations can deliver enablement on mobile devices, with virtual classrooms, game dynamics, real-time social interaction and much more. This gives you more flexibility to engage customers in learning, no matter where they are located or what their preferences are.
You can create communities of interest and encourage participants to develop skills, share their success stories and help answer other people's questions. You can develop contests and prizes around your learning programs to engage and motivate participants.
The possibilities are endless. Ideally, you can build a growing global community of customers who are committed to your brand and help others learn about it too.
Conclusion
Smart companies encourage their customers to learn. When carefully planned and delivered, customer training is measurable, scalable and profitable.
What's more, customers love it. It's really that simple. You shouldn't wait for your competition, and not even your customers to ask!
If you want to know about the possibilities that Werkey offers to train its customers, get to know the Teach at Werkey program. At Werkey you also train different audiences, such as employees, associates, and business partners, through the Werkey for Companies program.
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