Business Benefits of Training an External Audience, Part 8

Posted by Ann Fuerst, Ph.D., TCC Chief Learning Strategist

This the last post in a multi-part blog series on the business benefits of training an external audience.

Customer Support and Self-Service

Providing high quality customer support is a top priority. Advancing customer or user skill is even more a priority today. Digital consumerism offers maximum control in hands of the user today. A user should be sufficiently educated or trained to solve common issues in the product. Further it is even more effective to focus on advancing the usage skills of the user. As a user advances from being a Level-1 user to a Level-3 user, the frequency of requiring customer support reduces significantly. This not only takes pressure off the support team, but also reduces support costs.

High-impact one-to-one Training Assistance

Apple offers a unique tutoring program to its customers. For $99, the company offers a one-to-one program that allows new customers an in-store tutor who helps customer in setting up their Macs. Beyond the thought of personalized training, this is an excellent marketing device for Apple. This is a unique opportunity to collaborate with the customer and create a training curriculum aligned to customer choices.

For delivering training to external audiences, a company needs to understand its audience and design a program that suits the business model. The most important things are the best ones to start with and then scale as demand increases from end users, distributors or partners.

Bringing it All Together

For many businesses, performance of channel partners and resellers directly impact business outcomes. A unified training ecosystem not only improves partner performance but also maintains a seamless interface for the customers, channel partners, and the company to engage and exchange. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe are excellent examples of how digital ecosystems are leveraged for training channel partners and engaging customers. Loyalty programs and incentive schemes are a great way of promoting partner training and thereby encouraging superior customer services.

In the end, if you learn to plan, prioritize, measure and improve the training and its delivery, the results can add a lot to the bottom line of your business. Interested in moving forward with the plan? Give us a call. We will partner with you all the way from inception to success!

To download the entire paper, please visit our website https://www.e-tcc.com/resources.