How to Create Customer Loyalty: 4 Effective Training Strategies

Prioritize customer experience for confident, independent users

Achieving long-term customer loyalty is a formidable marker for any organization’s future financial health. And with businesses planning to triple their investment in customer education in the next few years, there’s no shortage of competition for customer satisfaction. Gearing your customer education program toward a better overall customer journey—from onboarding and product adoption to customer support and independence—is a worthy goal.

But equipping your customers with the proper knowledge and support to use your products isn’t easy. Not all customers are the same, products are evolving faster and faster, and customer retention seems to hang in the balance, depending on the quality and efficiency of the everyday customer experience.

So, how do organizations cultivate customer loyalty, strengthen brand image, and increase revenue? For customers to become confident, independent users of your product—thereby easing strain on customer success managers and reps—they need personalized training, engaging content, and a comprehensive product knowledge base available 24/7.

In this post, explore the benefits of a customer education program centered around improving the overall customer experience, and learn about the customer education strategies that will build the loyalty you seek.

Customer training benefits for businesses and customers

Whether a new customer training initiative is framed through the lens of increased revenue goals or higher customer satisfaction ratings, a high-quality customer education program benefits both customers and businesses. But when 80% of customers agree that their experience learning about a company’s product is just as important as the product itself, it makes sense to focus on the customer’s journey, knowing the revenue will follow.

For customers, the benefits of an effective customer education program include:

• Increased product adoption. Proper customer training reduces product learning curve, increases time to value, and creates more independent customers.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction. When customers are confident using your product, the benefits they gain from it increase, and customer satisfaction rates soar.
• A better customer experience. Investing in customer training shows your commitment to a better overall experience. When customers trust the company that provides the experience, they’re more likely to enjoy the company’s product.

For businesses, the benefits of a high-quality customer education program include:

• Increased customer loyalty. Customers who know they’re taken care of from product onboarding to product support become customers for life, preserving future business and higher customer retention.
• Lower customer support costs. When customers can confidently use your products from day one, support costs will naturally come down. Your support team’s checklist gets smaller, giving them more time to provide quality, one-on-one support to customers who need it.
• Stronger brand image. The more satisfied customers you have, the more advocates you have in channels you may have never reached before.

4 customer education strategies to maximize engagement

Customer education programs aren’t all created equal. Simply put, having a training program doesn’t mean you have an effective training program. If you hope to achieve the 66 percent higher sales growth that customer-centric organizations enjoy, you must make your customer education programs one thing: engaging. Luckily, there are many ways to do so.

Here are four ways to make your customer training program more engaging:

1. Make it interactive

Customer engagement and interactive training techniques go hand in hand. You can’t have the former without the latter. But what does that look like? Clicking buttons? Watching videos? That would be considered the bare minimum at most. For the real interactive training gold, you’ll have to pan that creek a bit deeper.

While you could settle for an interactive video or digital flashcards, why not go full circle by using immersive 360° images to help your customers learn your product’s features? Customers can get up close and personal with a product in a low-stakes virtual environment, moving around it, just as they would in real life, as features and benefits pop up on screen.

2. Make it personal

Personalized learning pathways have the power to pull your customers out of a distant, impersonal learning environment into one they can truly see themselves in. The phrase “make it personal” may bring to mind volatile but entertaining sports rivalries or combative reality tv reunion episodes that make me want to hide under the couch. When it comes to customer training, it means bringing in relevant personal information to create a calm, enjoyable, and learner-centered experience.

That is, unless you want to ramp up customer engagement to the next level—cue a hardcore guitar riff—and gamify customer training with selectable avatars, competitive leader boards, time constraints, rewards, and narrative storytelling elements. New and existing customers will enjoy having control over their learning journey alongside relatable characters, heroic protagonists, and ample opportunities for organic discovery and exploration.

3. Make it accessible

Accessibility and usability in a customer training program—as it should be in any training program—is a must for engaging customers of all learning levels and abilities in an easy-to-use, intuitive, and efficient experience. While a brightly colored course may enhance the user experience for some, it may not be accessible to those with color vision deficiency. It’s critical to include your entire audience.

Create interactive experiences that all users can engage in, and use this customizable accessible color palette builder to make sure your content is meeting the 4.5:1 color contrast ratio mandated by Section 508 laws.

4. Make room for community feedback

When I need help finding something at Home Depot and someone isn’t within arms reach, I’ll likely just wander until I find what I’m looking for or get hungry and leave without it. Likewise, you won’t know how many of your customers have questions that go unanswered or needs that go unfulfilled until they move on to another company. Creating a clean, easy-to-use, and consistent avenue for feedback within your learning management system helps avoid this entirely.

Encourage your users to join a community of practice where they can access a vast knowledge base, ask troubleshooting questions, and share best practices. Oftentimes, customers are more comfortable connecting with and engaging other customers than with your support team, and that’s okay!

Exceed customer expectations—build advocates from customers

With customer loyalty in mind, effective education initiatives are key to customer retention. To exceed customer expectations rather than simply meet them, trust in training centered on keeping your customers engaged. Interactive, personalized, and accessible learning strategies will strengthen your brand, turning customers into advocates.

In this way, enhancing the overall customer experience benefits both customers and organizations alike, leading to faster product adoption, higher customer satisfaction, and lower customer support costs.

Inspired to learn more about creating a successful customer education program? Discover how Tamr’s shift to customer training through e-learning drives efficient product adoption, allows for flexible learning paths, and increases the value of their product for customers.