The more you can build customer proficiency with your products, the more good things will happen. You’ll increase product adoption, a positive indicator for future purchases. And you’ll reduce the need for customers to contact your Support teams, giving you more runway to scale your Support operations.
Companies need to look beyond just helping customers help themselves and consider how they can build customers’ expertise so they can use and apply products more competently. Proficiency will require companies to move beyond a reliance on self-help-focused strategies and invest in building the foundational technical and business skills customers need to use products fully and successfully.
Leverage these 10 strategies to build customer proficiency, speed product adoption, and reduce the need for support assistance:
- Define formal onboarding procedures that can assess customer proficiency and recommend appropriate skills development and training.
- Establish a skills inventory and recommended training plan as part of onboarding and adoption planning.
- Provide access to on-demand self-paced training and skills development.
- Provide access to on-demand live coaching to help customers gain experience and build skills in the context of using a product.
- Provide access to instructor led in-person and virtual training programs.
- Define learning paths to recommend skills development activities and align with available training resources.
- Encourage proficiency development by offering customers incentives to develop product-related skills.
- Provide skills inventory and assessment tools and services to assess customer proficiency on an ongoing basis.
- Define standards of proficiency and offer assessments and skills certification programs.
- Make learning fun for customers and reward proficiency development.
