How To Leverage Social Learning For Customer Training

Every business is working towards offering a product or a service to their one major asset i.e. a customer. The main aim of a business is to attract and retain as many loyal customers as possible. In order to ensure that this objective is met, every business adopts a cycle of operations that helps them stay on the right path. 

One of the most significant fields of operation for a business is spreading awareness about the brand and expanding its reach. Thus, businesses invest the maximum budget on marketing and advertising. Out of the many forms of marketing, one of the most authentic and fruitful forms is WOM or word-of-mouth marketing.

Turning your customers into brand advocates is perhaps the best way to carry forward word-of-mouth marketing. In layman term, brand advocates are those existing customers who are extremely satisfied with what your business brings to the table and thus, do not shy away from putting your brand, product, or service in positive limelight at all times. 

The more your advocates talk about your brand among their circle, the more reach your brand will achieve. This is one form of marketing that doesn’t require much budget but does require a lot of hard work. In order to turn your customers into your advocates, there are plenty of elements that you, as a brand, should have on your fingertips. 

Offering customers a variety of channels of communication including social media, providing effective customer service, and training your customers to help them use your product quickly and correctly are three of the most common ways that help in building brand advocacy. 

In this article, you can learn about how customer training in a social learning environment can help you in promoting your product or your service at an ease. 

Why is social learning essential for a customer training program 

Customer training supports your customers to meet their objectives in a much more effective and efficient way, thus enabling them to sustain with your brand. A learning management system, which is a cloud-based platform that allows you to deploy training programs, is perhaps the best tool to ensure the utmost comfort of your customers in a social learning environment. 

Take Absorb LMS for an instance. The Absorb LMS reviews talk about how this system makes it easy for the managers to offer training materials and for learners to consume that material. This LMS also offers plenty of features such as video conferencing and means of accessing expert knowledge that allows customers to enjoy social learning. 

A social learning environment for your customer training has its own set of advantages, with the top one being attracting the attention of your learners. In today’s world, the attention span of individuals is narrowing, and thus conducting formal training programs is now turning into a challenge. Businesses are now in search of innovative informal ways that will help your customers stay connected to your training program and also, consumer the information that you offer without any hindrances. 

This is where social learning makes your life easy and enables you to keep your customers motivated and inspired. Social learning helps to enhance the culture of learning and also increase the retention power of learners, thus ensuring the success of your customer training. 

Here’s how you can use social learning in LMS to make your customer training effective

• Plan a valuable training program in advance
  
  For anything to work seamlessly, it is important for it to be planned-well. Similarly, if you plan a valuable training program for your customers well in advance, the chances of turning them into your advocates increase. Take customer onboarding for new software as an example. The first aim would be to define the point where your customers would be considered fully onboarded.
  
  Once you have your end goal ready, you can now work towards directing your training towards it. Commonly, when a customer is well and able to utilize the product up to its full potential and is able to perform several functions while realizing the true potential of the product, this is when businesses consider them onboarded.
  
  After you have a course of action, you can plan about the type of training to be used, selecting the topics that need to be covered, and scouting for barrier points and specifically adding course material for such roadblocks.
  
  You should also plan out the outline of the information that you will offer, the steps you will take, the time it will take for your customer to consume the data, and the social learning elements your training will offer. 

• Create a training program
  
  In order to ensure that you save your time in creating a training program for your customers and at the same time ensure social learning for them, give a learning management system software a try. As discussed before, an LMS helps you execute your training seamlessly.
  
  Once you have all your steps planned, decide on the content that you would want to provide first to your customers. It can be anything from walkthroughs about your product to focusing on the benefits that your product has to offer, depending upon what is best for your business. 
  
  Apart from this, figure out the type of content that you will offer. Will it be a video, images, quizzes, text-guides, or a set presentation that will put forth what you have to express. With an LMS, you can easily offer any content type, including hosting a live webinar for a group of your customers. 
  
  You can also make use of the various gamification features that an LMS has to offer. The tools such as leaderboards, rewards, badges, and points make the training more interesting and informal, thus ensuring that your customers are being trained in a social learning environment. 

• Enroll your learners to the program and schedule training 
  
  The next step is to add and enroll your learners in your training program. With an LMS, you can execute this enrolling process quickly and easily as you can automate this step. This allows you to put minimal effort from your end.
  
  In order to access, you can offer them either clicking on the link you offer and reach their training directly, which is a Single Sign-On option or you can make your customers browse for the courses online and register for the ones that they feel are relevant. You can also integrate new sign-ups to your existing management system. This way they can directly get added to your LMS.
  
  Once all the enrollments are done, schedule the training for your customers. This is when you decide the timeline about when your customers should begin with the training. The best option is to ensure your customer’s convenience by allowing them to log in and access the material as and when they are required.

• Track the performance and revise accordingly
  
  Your training would not be of much use if you continue using the same that doesn’t derive many benefits. Hence, it is essential for you to track, use LMS reports, and the feedback that you get from these customers to rework on the training that you are offering to your customers. You should always ask for feedback from your customer if you wish to find areas of improvement in your training program.
  
  Reworking on your training can allow you to increase the retention level of your learners and thus, consequently increase the return on investment. 

Conclusion 

Customer training is an essential element of word-of-mouth marketing. This training has several benefits with minimum budget and first-hand reviews being the top ones. Whenever you are indulging in customer training, it is best to ensure a social learning environment in order to keep your customers motivated to be a part of your program and your product or service.