The 3 Cs of a better customer learning experience

It’s hard out here for a manufacturer.

Customers expect more from you than ever before; delivering a high-quality product isn’t enough. Great products must be accompanied by top-tier customer service that feels personalized, on-demand, and empowering.

At the same time, manufacturing organizations face unprecedented external factors – ongoing supply chain challenges, increasing inflation, a massive talent shortage – that further put pressure on your ability to deliver a consistently high-quality customer experience.

Even with these headwinds, it’s possible to retain customers and even improve your customer satisfaction and renewal rates - without additional effort. We’ll explore how the right extended enterprise learning solution can help you meet your customers where they are, improve product adoption and usage, and turn customers into brand evangelists.

Your extended enterprise is the ecosystem of constituencies and stakeholders who use and sell your products that aren’t direct employees. Think channel partners, resellers, and – you guessed it – customers. Extended enterprise learning is any training you provide to these non-employee groups to help them improve the way they understand and interact with your products.

If your organization hasn’t fully invested in extended enterprise learning yet, you’re in good company. Only 56% of organizations currently provide training to non-employees according to the Brandon Hall Group. Even those training their extended enterprise aren’t investing heavily in this area yet, with most spending less than 25% of their total L&D budget on these audiences. There is still plenty of room to deploy a strong extended enterprise learning program that can set your organization apart in the minds of your customers.

Here are three things to keep in mind as you think about implementing an extended enterprise learning solution.

Your customers are all at different stages of their journey with your products – and they each learn in their own way. This places a huge demand to create learning content for every learning style that addresses the entire customer journey, from adoption through renewal/repurchase.

When it comes to learning content, explore the quality and quantity of content available that can augment training you’ve already produced in-house. Ensure content adheres to compliance standards for your industry. Look for providers that deliver on-demand, view anywhere multimedia content to appeal to visual and audio learners. And find out how frequently new content becomes available that will help you build out your existing library.

Your customer learning experiences should feel like they come from your organization, not some third party. Learning is an important extension of your brand.

As you explore extended enterprise learning solutions to engage your customers, dig in to see how easy it is to tailor the solution to be a true representation of your brand. We don’t mean customizing in a you’ll-need-a-full-time-developer-to-do-it sort of way. Seek out platforms that are easily configurable, responsive for desktop and mobile, and can be easily branded by anyone in your organization. Your customer learning should feel like all your other brand touchpoints, as if it were built in-house.

“Education and training isn’t a destination. Education and training is lifelong now” This new reality was recently shared by Carolyn Lee, executive director of the Manufacturing Institute.

We couldn’t agree more. And even if your customers aren’t yet saying so, they likely agree too.

Your customers can always learn more about how to get the most from your products and, in turn, how to self-serve when they need to troubleshoot. Create certifications customers can attain through continuous learning. Develop content that shares tips and tricks of the trade that make your customers feel like they have insider-level knowledge. And even explore ways to create monetizable learning content that not only keeps customers coming back but also creates a new revenue stream for your organization.