customer education, educational customer experience

How to Provide Educational Customer Experience

Modern customer service is not a simple process of answering customer questions and solving their issues. First of all it is an essential part of any business operations that can make or break a business. Statistics shows that for 86% of consumers good customer service turns one-time clients into long-term brand champions.

Providing a comprehensive customer education with your products or services while assisting your customers can help your company improve your customer service and bring it to the next level. When your customers have enough knowledge, they feel confident and do not bother your team with multiple questions. Thus it is important not only to provide good self service options, but also to train your customer service team to educate your customers while assisting them.

Why you need to care for customer education

Customer education helps to build trust to your brand and improve your customer loyalty. Here is the list of the main reasons why customer education is important:

  • increases customer loyalty
  • helps to proactively avoid common issues
  • makes possible to target a wider audience

Apple is the brand that can inspire in providing customer education. Apple allows its customers to demo all products to see how they work in-store, while other brands will only let you unwrap the item to see how it looks. Moreover, with LearnQuest you can get training with Apple products online. Such approach really inspires, doesn’t it?

Create powerful knowledge base and self service

Good self service options are an essential part of customer education. In fact,  70% of modern customers expect a company’s website to include self service. Why has it become that important today? The following facts will help you answer this question:

  • customers value their time and good self service will help to find answers to most common questions quickly and without involving human customer service or wasting precious time on communication with a customer service bot
  • a comprehensive user manual or convenient in use web self service portal will reduce the load on your customer service team
  • the cost you save on human resources can be invested in your business development

We collected the most useful tips which will help you improve your company’s self service:

  • put the most frequently asked questions at the top and highlight them
  • make sure your content is up to date
  • use video and screenshots for better demonstration
  • keep in mind optimization for mobile devices while working on self service options
  • make search in your self service portal easy to use

Make customer education priority for your customer service team

While teaching your customer service team to assist your customers, you need to make customer education a priority over simple answers and issues fixing. We at Provide Support developed our own strategy to educate our customers when they interact with our customer service team. While detailed and easy to use self service is a great idea and help for users who prefer to find answers by themselves, there are still customers who need to talk or chat with a human.

Our customer service team uses the following techniques to educate customers:

  • send video tutorials and detailed screenshots in chat and explain customers how they can find the needed setting and update it instead of doing this for them
  • provide detailed instructions by phone and then write a follow up email with additional screenshots or videos
  • update frequently asked questions based on questions asked in chat or by phone
  • create predefined responses for agents with video tutorials and screenshots

At the beginning agents feel that it takes too long to educate a customer. But keep in mind that your team does this only once or twice for customers and then they will do everything by themselves. On the other side, if your agents do not stop setting everything up for customers, they will continue contacting your team with queries. Thus it is better to address issues proactively than reactively.

The education you provide to your customers helps to solve problems even before they become problems. That is why it has become a must for modern businesses and should be of the highest priority for your company.

Olga
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