In a market flooded with commodities, zeroing in on one single item of your choice involves an exhausting, nerve wrecking drill. The situation is no less unenviable for people sitting on the other side of the selling counter. They have to deal with people they have hardly ever dealt with, with their varied emotions, idiosyncrasies, and convert them into real, satisfied customers. And, this is where customers’ training and giving them the best onboarding experience comes so critically into play.
Managing people
But managing people and their vaulting emotions is not giving that charismatic smile of yours to them and saying Namestay, and you will think your job is half-done. This task of converting people into real customers is one job organisations would rather assign to someone with skills to train customers. This is to help prospective customers make the ultimate choice and give them an onbording experience unmatched by rival enterprises.
Waiting for ‘first success’
A first-time visitor to your virtual or real retail store may not instantly fall for a product or service on offer. It may be that he just wants to look around and make a mental mapping of products or services first before actually having the ‘first success’ with the product, which may happen today, tomorrow or many months later.
Helping customers decide
The role of the store manager or organisation head is to help customers in the decision making process by ‘offering resources, samples or trials’ which eventually may lead to their first onboarding experience. This will also decide if there will be a repeat purchase. All these entail putting in place a solid onboarding education system spanning horizontal markets and verticals covering products or services.
Going the extra mile
Many organisations prefer to go the extra mile by focusing their attention on addressing what they call customers ‘pain points’ even before their first success with the product purchase. The idea is to mitigate issues as quickly as possible and achieve customers ‘wow’ moments during the product trial phase or onboarding experience at a post purchase implementation phase.
Deeper engagements
Educating customers during customer training and onbording process thus form the key to an enhanced onboarding experience. As the saying goes the ‘FIRST IMPRESSION IS THE LAST IMPRESSION.’ A nice, short and to-the-point welcome note with a broad framework of topics of discussion ahead of the customer training session facilitates deeper customer engagement. As per a study such messages increase the engagements by as much as 15-18 per cent.
Enhancing customers’ experience
Giving customers preliminary lessons on basic characteristics of products or services using a cloud based 3D Computer Aided Design system has proven to be an effective way of enhancing customers’ learning and onbording experiences. It also helps in enunciating the learning pathways for customers.
Learning at multiple levels
· In an eLearning ecosystem customer learning needs to take place on multiple levels of product usages.
· In case of an IT software or digital product customer learning can be more effectively facilitated through the product itself.
· Regular open and virtual product training events for customers help will enhance both product learning and onboarding processes.
Onboarding experience
· The onboarding experience can be further enhanced by providing product users with tailor-made learning pathways.
· Organisations can also arrange for relevant contents for new customers to make use of them at their own convenience and time of choosing.
· Data on customers learning engagements are helpful in measuring the level of engagement of new product users with the product.
To sum up, customer training and onboarding experience are two sides of the same customer learning process with a common goal of customer education, providing enhanced product experience and more business for organisation. It is also an indispensable part of today’s enterprise learning and development ecosystem.