By David Wentworth, Brandon Hall Group
Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in January 2023 on the Brandon Hall blog.
Bring Customers On Board at speed with the Right Customer Education Strategy
Organizations spend a lot of time, money, and other resources on their sales pipeline, working diligently to turn leads into prospects and prospects into sales. Once the sale is closed, however, there is a small window of opportunity to ensure that the customers start their new journey on the right path. Trouble getting acclimated or understanding how to use the product can sour the relationship from the very start. This is why companies need to focus more energy on the customer onboarding process and leverage a customer education strategy that gets everyone off on the right foot.
Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Silver Preferred Provider Eurekos understands how critical the customer onboarding process is. They have helped their clients move away from ineffective content management or project management tools that are not designed to provide the kind of user experiences customers should be receiving. Instead, the Eurekos platform links to whatever channels the customers use and delivers world-class training. By linking to multiple channels simultaneously, companies can manage the onboarding education of multiple customer types at once.
This is critical to increasing the speed with which customers are onboarded, or shortening the “Time-to-Value.” The longer it takes, the more likely customers may become dissatisfied and remain so. Even worse, they may stop being customers altogether. With good training, customers are more quickly able to achieve the goals they set out to achieve by buying the product in the first place. Not only does this increase customer satisfaction, but it also reduces the burden on help and support teams.
This onboarding has long-lasting ripples throughout the entire customer relationship. It sets the tone for things to come. When it comes time for upgrades or upsells, customers who have had a rapid, productive onboarding experience are more willing to come back for more.
Organizations cannot rely solely on their sales teams to provide prospects with everything they will need to implement or use the product successfully. Once the sale is closed, customers require a dedicated learning experience that is engaging and focused on specific outcomes. This means L&D working with Sales, Operations, or any other customer-facing function to create and deliver the training. It also means having learning technology that can seamlessly integrate with the systems these functions use to reach customers.
Customer education is the key to customer satisfaction and retention. The onboarding phase is perhaps the most critical time to ensure ongoing customer success, so it will pay huge dividends to start right off the bet with strong customer education.
To learn more, please join Brandon Hall Group and Nick Eriksen, CTO at Eurekos, for our 60-minute webinar, “Mastering the Customer Education Journey, from Awareness to Advocacy,” on February 21, 2023, at 1:00 pm EST. We will share research, insights, and examples to help attendees understand how their organization can leverage effective learning for lead generation, customer acquisition, and post-sale relationships that lead to increased customer retention, loyalty and advocacy.
