Win Loyalty and Reduce Support Costs by Teaching Your Customers

We're all in the business of helping our customers achieve their goals. By providing both tools and skills, we create experts and make customers' lives easier.

Experts do things naturally. Developing expertise requires researching the topic, understanding techniques, practicing the process, and getting feedback to hone the art.

With technology, you can help motivated customers become experts by spoon feeding techniques and monitoring their progress. And with a high touch component, you can provide access to a coach to spur them on and help them overcome challenges.

Take a look at 8fit, headspace and +Babbel for inspiration. These apps teach complex skills—fitness, mindfulness and language—with expertly designed programs delivered through a compelling experience. By spoon-feeding guidance with video and audio, motivating by tracking progress, and personalizing with chat-based coaching, they make learning fun and effective.

These examples are consumer focused—the B2C world is a generation ahead of B2B in personal customer experience. That's a shame—since many people spend all of their workday on their devices, usability is much more important in B2B. Unfortunately, it's not on the top three list of B2B buyer considerations.

Whether you're in the business of helping customers process a ledger or get in shape, building a pleasurable learning experience into your products will yield faster, more lasting results.

Usability drives happier—more loyal—customers with greater expertise in your field. And experts send fewer problems to your support desk.

Teach your customers well

Research your business's customer support logs to discover new expertise that they could benefit from.

Now look at 8fit, headspace and +Babbel to experience how they combine instructional design, progress tracking and coaching support to teach that expertise in a cost effective, scalable manner.

What would your training app look like?

... and if you missed these related articles, go back and take another look:

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