Turn Your Customers Into Advocates Through Education

As we go through the customer journey, we want to always get as large a percentage as possible to have those customers become advocates. The reasoning is that they help generate brand awareness as well. That’s why it should be imperative that efforts are placed on building out a customer education platform.

Yet where to begin? What will it look like? And most importantly, how is it trackable? There are several paths to take when looking to implement a  customer education platform, and the benefits go beyond just making customers advocates of your product.

Creating A Resource Center

Regardless of how your customers like to interact to get their knowledge, you want to make sure that you have a comprehensive resource center on your site. This starts out with an FAQ that can be gathered from studying the actual questions your customers ask your support teams, and then it can be expanded out. You can do how-to guides, case studies, and even product demos based on each module to help provide as much reference as possible. This is a passive approach and is one part of the leg to building a customer education platform.

Taking A Proactive Approach

Here you’ll work by providing a mix of webinars and workshops for customers who want to be able to learn the system hands-on through actual experts of the system. This in-depth training will have customers using the actual product or services more often and provide a forum to be able to ask questions and a high level of support. Again, you can provide this on your company site or even through social media channels to get the word out about the content.

Continuous Communication

Here you partner up with your marketing efforts through marketing channels such as email marketing to also communicate from an educational and learning standpoint. For example, whenever marketing sends out emails for new products or upgraded services, it’s another touchpoint to reach out to existing customers, offer them a chance to sign up for webinars for those new features, and discover how those new features can benefit them as well.

Interacting Directly With The Customer

Part of working on your customer education platform is talking directly with the customer and receiving feedback. Asking them what they want to learn and focus on and what they may find the most value from will help you save time and resources while you curate your educational focus on the actual demand.

Since these customers are already on their way to becoming advocates, your customer education platform can also include ways to empower them via tools and resources they can share with their close networks of friends and family. You can include everything from referral programs to social media share buttons.

You can even request your top customers for testimonials to provide their feedback publicly. Empowered tools make it much easier for your customers to share information about your products and services with others, helping them become those coveted advocates.

Start From The Beginning

That means focusing on customer onboarding and working to have personalized onboarding. It won’t matter how good your customer education platform is, whether it’s through a hybrid teaching platform or a slew of free webinars, if there aren’t any customers using it. Instead, you want to make sure these customers feel special from the beginning, which will have more customers retained, and eventually, you build out an engaged community that will work on your behalf to push your brand.

Then you’ll be able to have the community grow into new business opportunities and warm leads from customers that can be a better focus for newer and pricier products and services. Or simply have a much stronger potential to push for an upsell with those new customers (as well as the existing customer advocacy).

Make sure to have a customer education platform with different learning opportunities so that customers can learn about the product or service at their own pace and style. Then they’ll feel confident with the product or service and slowly start to convert from a satisfied customer to a fully retained advocate selling your products to others. 

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