Organizations engaged in online learning spend a lot of time building their learning platforms and creating learning content with a certain goal in mind: boost customer engagement and customer success. In our recent webinar, Thought Industries CEO and co-founder Barry Kelly shared education strategies to help keep customers engaged with a product and boost retention.
According to a report by Gallup, customers who are fully engaged with a product represent 23% premium in terms of share of wallet (SOW), profitability, revenue and relationship growth compared with the average customer. Kelly suggests that educating the customer with learning programs is the best way to keep customers “fully engaged.”
Some of Kelly’s suggested customer training and engagement programs include:
- Product features and releases: Organizations should create educational programs for new product releases, features or product variations. These programs can be shipped out to the entire customer base, or customized for specific customer industries or use cases.
- Outcome-based learning: Piggy-backing off of the learning materials above, organizations can create outcome-based learning programs that focus on using their product for specific purposes. Educating the customer in this way might mean that the delivered educational materials vary by industry, company size or other differentiators.
- Micro learning: Customers want information and they want it fast. As part of their customer training and engagement program, organizations can create short form education materials to explain product updates and provide learning on key features. Some of these micro learning engagement programs could take the form of videos, webinars, short how-to documents or quick online courses.
- Extended, deeper dive learning: If micro learning content isn’t enough, organizations might want to take advantage of long format learning to explain more complex use cases or features. Like with micro learning, the learning content could take on many different formats, e.g. a video, webinar, online course, PDF how-to, etc.
- Blended learning and virtual learning programs: Maybe a new product release or feature requires multiple pieces of learning content in order to educate and engage the customer. Organizations can create multidimensional learning opportunities for their customers. A blended learning program could start with a webinar or video introducing a more comprehensive online learning course
Need some inspiration? Check out real world customer training and engagement programs. See how HubSpot, MailChimp, and Roland are educating the customer.
