Customer Support is Teaching: Customer Education as a Priority for the Customer Support Team — Part 1

Believe it or not, your clients don’t know nearly as much as you do. That’s why it’s essential to bring them up to speed if you want them to understand the full impact your product could have on them.

Client education is the process of providing the skills and knowledge your customers need to get the most they can out of your product or service.

It is common to confuse customer education with a marketing strategy. Marketing strategies can include customer education as one of their goals, but the two concepts should not be confused with each other. While marketing strategies generally have sales increasing as the main goal, customer education is not just about boosting sales, it is mainly about building loyalty and trust.

Customer education is all about teaching prospects the following:

a) Why they need your product

b) How they can use your product

Before customers decide to buy or recommend your product to others, they need access to all the information they can get relating to these two aspects.

Through purposeful training, a company builds trust and instills trust in its target audience. It therefore becomes highly essential that customer support agents are fully armed with every needed knowledge about company products or services and are ever ready to deliver that knowledge to customers at every point of interaction.

A client does not necessarily need to ask a direct question to be given the tips and extra information they need on handling a product, a complaint is enough. Think about it this way — every complaint is a new opportunity to educate a customer. Tell them what they don’t know and what they need to know while also doing it politely with the most basic language possible.

The most common benefits of customer education include:

• increasing customer loyalty
• * helping to proactively avoid common issues
• * makes possible to target a wider audience

One way to great customer education is the self service technique where customers can find through comprehensive user manuals or web service portals can find answers to their questions without needing human interaction. While detailed and easy to use self service is a great idea and help for users who prefer to find answers by themselves, there are still customers who need to talk or chat with a human.

Educating a customer at the point of customer service should be strategic and detailed, every complaint, question or request should have a defined set of knowledge base resources that would help the customer with everything that they need. It is important that these resources are offered by the support agent so also as to save the customers time. Some useful techniques for doing this may include;

• send video tutorials and detailed screenshots in chat and explain customers how they can find the needed setting and update it instead of doing this for them
• provide detailed instructions by phone and then write a follow up email with additional screenshots or videos
• update frequently asked questions based on questions asked in chat or by phone
• create predefined responses for agents with video tutorials and screenshots

In the beginning, agents may feel it takes too much time to educate customers but on the brighter side a team needs to only do this once or twice for customers after which they would be able to everything themselves.