Not everything is intuitive. Some products and services must be explained so customers can get the most out of what a business offers. In situations like this, it makes sense to pay attention to the efforts your business is putting into customer education.
Let’s examine what you can do to ensure your customer education is top-notch so that your customers use your construction business products and services to their full potential.
The good news is that several easy-to-follow steps ensure this happens. However, before we explore these steps, let’s start with a definition.
What Is Customer Education?
Firstly, it’s essential to realize that customer education isn’t just customer onboarding. Yes, onboarding is crucial. A consumer fresh to your construction business needs careful handling to feel welcomed and integrated into your customer community. That has to start immediately before any confusion or disorientation can occur.
But beyond this, there should be a path of education that a customer can follow throughout their relationship with your company. This can be specifically related to a particular product or a heterogeneous path that includes the brand as a whole. Or it can be a mix of both: a customer journey to general adherence to a brand can start with just one product adoption.
Why Is Customer Education Important?
Customer education has several benefits. The main three explain why it is so important and are outlined below.
Customer Experience
If a customer has to struggle to find what to do with a product they’ve bought, it is an inconvenience. At worst, this poor customer engagement will lead to the customer deciding that the product is not for them after all and terminating all further interaction.
Enhance customer experience by making all the instructive material they might need available as soon as they need it.
Customer Retention
Providing a poor customer experience increases the likelihood of losing customers. By making it easy for customers to interact with your product and offering them valuable ideas, you can encourage them to stick around. This is the essence of good customer service.
You can’t escape it: customer service is where it’s at. And a big part of that can be customer education.
Customer education is crucial for gaining customer loyalty and success, which can lead to potential referrals. Providing customer satisfaction also brings valuable rewards.
Good Value
What follows may sound counter-intuitive, so bear with us.
The more you invest in ensuring that a current customer is confident and competent to use their new purchase, the more you’ll save. This will cut down on the amount of expensive support time you have to put into assisting your customers with any subsequent queries they may have due to inadequate onboarding.
Steps to Follow to Enhance Customer Education
Let’s discuss how to implement a good customer education program.
Understand Your Customer Base
As with many endeavors that aim to assist audiences, you need a clear idea of who you’re talking to.
In the construction sector, you might be dealing with B2B partners, suppliers, subcontractors, or a wide variety of tradespeople and self-employed building industry professionals.
You may have a product that will appeal across the board, such as an accounting service. Or it might be a far more specific product, such as a cement mixer, which will interest frontline construction workers. You could also explain the features of a particular construction project to customers, stakeholders, or people who live in the neighborhood.
Whoever you’re dealing with, do your best to put yourself in their shoes and adopt their perspective. The data you use to inform this effort will vary, but it might include focus groups, surveys, interviews, or, more effectively, a blend of various techniques.
In this way, you can start your customer education approach with an awareness of what’s needed rather than wastefully applying yourself to content irrelevant to customer requirements. You can then construct well-crafted business goals with your customer education program.
Be Clear about Resource Needs
Effective customer education tools can be resource-hungry, take a lot of time to put together, and be quite expensive.
By allocating sufficient staffing, financial, and educational resources from the outset, you’ll reduce the likelihood of shocks and last-minute changes to the plan to accommodate an unforeseen demand.
Construction often involves avoiding financial pitfalls, and clearly understanding the necessary expenses is crucial. It’s important to note that investing in effective customer education solutions will lead to long-term savings, and customers will appreciate it as well.
Choose delivery type
There has never been such an array of learning materials you can employ in customer education. Common approaches include:
- Written content, such as manuals and guides
- AV content, such as diagrams, infographics, podcasts, and video training programs
- Interactive content, such as web conferencing, quizzes, and simulations
- Instant online support, such as conversational AI customer service
You can take your pick to make sure that your learning style gives learning outcomes that are right for your customer.
For instance, say you’ve decided that a critical customer type will be a frontline construction worker. Suppose they encounter a new power tool they need to get to grips with quickly. In that case, they won’t have many opportunities to sit down in an office and participate in a detailed educational webinar.
A mobile-friendly, brief, and clear video demo will be much better for them. It will show them how to get the most out of the purchase from the start. Further instruction can be delivered through follow-up, such as via a user forum.
Content Construction
This is the fun bit. You know who your customer is and how you’re reaching them. You now need to decide on exactly what you’re telling them, i.e., the educational content.
In many cases like this, what you must produce will be reasonably straightforward. Getting back to that power tool used on a construction site, you want your customer education tools to enable customers to use your product safely and effectively. So, it’s all about being easy to follow and eradicating vagueness from all stages of the program.
Think about the voice you use. Is the product for somebody with a degree of expertise in the area or for a novice? It’s important to judge pre-existing knowledge correctly, or you’ll lose the customer’s attention rapidly.
And know your limitations. You may be an unbelievably good communicator and great in front of a camera, in which case, have at it. Use your talents to produce some knockout material.
However, if you’re not great on-screen but rock in print, lean into that strength. Whatever you don’t feel capable of coming up with, audit your colleagues’ abilities and see if they can step up.
Of course, if you need more skills to produce the customer education content you want, external means are available. So don’t be shy to contract out where necessary. Or look into identifying talent to welcome onto your payroll.
Measure and Improve
Nobody gets things right the first time, every time. So, you will find that it pays to measure the effectiveness of your customer training programs to see where you can make things better.
Look at how people are using your customer education. Certain delivery methods (e.g., mobile short-form videos) are much more popular than manual downloads. You can then choose to try to make the manual download more attractive, especially for those who want to enhance their understanding of a product. For instance, consider making the “manual download” CTA more visible.
Look also at how customers interact with your online education efforts. Is there a common jump-off point? Is this resulting in important aspects being missed?
You could restructure your content so the key takeaways are front and center and digestible right at the start. Customers generally want to get cracking, and attention spans are short.
So, make sure they have all they need before they take the leap and hit the power button on their new product.
Finally, it’s often a good idea to ask customers for their opinions on your customer education efforts. Are they easy to use? Are they enjoyable to use? How could particular aspects, such as the AI customer experience, improve? A customer will give you ideas that might never have occurred, so listen up!
Developing Educated Customers
Customers value companies that show concern for customer care. A huge part of customer care boils down to making sure that customers are happy and able to use a product effectively and rewardingly. Adopt the customer’s perspective when doing this, and use the best skills you have available, and you’ll be in the best position to deliver this.
You can show customers how much you care by putting together a well-thought-out and continuously improving customer education strategy tailored to your audience.
Austin Guanzon is the Tier 1 Support Manager for Dialpad, the leading AI-powered customer intelligence platform. He is a customer retention and technical support expert with experience at some of the largest tech service companies in the US. You can find him on LinkedIn.