Educating your customers leads to several benefits for your organization. You can build trust with your existing and potential customers. If you offer a truly superior product, your customers will be aware of your product’s superiority over others. Customers might be able to handle some issues on their own, reducing customer dissatisfaction and simultaneously reducing workload on your customer service department. Depending on the depth and breadth of your education (which is dependent on your industry), customers might even feel grateful for your service the next time they apply the lessons you taught them.
Different customer bases will respond to different types of learning and educational materials. Below are a few ways to connect with and educate them.
Choose your medium
The first decision to make is your medium of delivery. Will you write blog posts (such as this one) to transfer knowledge? Can you afford to host seminars in major cities, like Google? Or at least host online seminars and teach from your office? Podcasts might be useful, but if your topic is better explained visually, you should certainly be using some kind of visual aid, whether it be a recording or diagrams.
Interactive sessions are great for delivering information and asking questions on complex topics, but an interactive website might be all you need. The former must be scheduled and once it is finished, it can no longer be interacted with. But a website with some interactive features can be accessed at any time with very little overhead to your organization.
If your industry changes regularly, you may want to offer weekly or monthly newsletters to update customers on the state of the industry. On the other hand, periodic updates may also be part of a multi-lesson learning experience, where you teach the recipients a specific topic each week, let them digest that information, then send the next topic.
Choose your content
After you’ve determined how you will deliver, you need to determine what to deliver. Sometimes you might want to give your customer a crash course in the industry, highlighting the pros and cons of each product or competitor. Other times you want to delve deep into a specific topic, giving your customer a thorough understanding of your offerings. If your company offers extremely complex or technical products, this is an excellent way to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Reference material can be invaluable to customers in markets with highly varied products. Even if your customer uses your reference materials when scoping out competitor products, you leave a lasting impression by offering a reliable resource. Whenever a particular customer makes another purchase in the future, they are likely to at least visit your website for the reference materials, and that means you are more likely to capture the sale.
A great example of customer education is the Diamond Size Chart. It acts as a reference that’s always available to them. Curating all this information and making it available in an easy-to-read chart means even if customers purchase elsewhere, they will remember your resource and return to it in the future. Furthermore, customers can feel more confident in purchasing diamonds on your website because they know what to expect from offerings. This has the added benefit of customers helping to police your website, possibly notifying you of potential fraud.
One of the best ways to choose your subject is by surveying customers. Do you often receive questions about a specific aspect of your product? Write a blog post explaining that aspect or post a video with a demonstration. Are your customer service reps always answering the same questions? Include them in an FAQ on your website. You don’t have to guide customers there from customer service (which can seem like you dismiss their problems), but having a resource for self-sufficiency will appeal to many people who prefer to do-it-themselves.
Choose the level
Beyond choosing the topic and breadth/depth of your content, you need to choose the level of difficulty of your educational materials. Starting with lighter material is a good idea until you receive feedback from customers. If people seem to understand your product easily, you can increase the level of complexity. You can also build your customers up by offering a cumulative “course” that teaches various aspects of your product, industry and applications.
Such courses are offered by many tech companies to both showcase their products to customers and also to demonstrate that course attendees are indeed able to implement their products. Oracle and Microsoft certifications are examples of this.
Ideally you show yourself in a positive light, but do not be too self-serving or you risk repelling the listeners/readers. If you seem too self-promotional, your customer might suspect your content to be biased and untrustworthy. A fast way to ruin a relationship is to appear untrustworthy. Not only will customers distrust your claims, they may be subconsciously inclined to shun your products and sales attempts.
Following the example of the Diamond Size Chart, the diamond market is notoriously difficult to navigate for newcomers, and there are plenty of horror stories of fraud. Since customers can purchase the diamond directly and the purchase is generally expensive, they need to understand the terminology and concepts associated with the diamond market. It is not straightforward or common sense, so teaching them is part of the strategy.
Whether your business is well-understood by the public or a highly complex subject only mastered by a few experts, you can be certain that connecting with your customers by educating them helps the customers, your organization, and society in general.
