Companies spend a great deal of time and money training their employees. But many also dedicate resources to training their customers, as well. A common strategy for this type of training is to use online learning communities for customers, which can include tutorials, videos, instruction manuals, FAQs, and other tools to help customers better understand a company’s products and services. There are several reasons this can be a great investment for companies.
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Customer Engagement
Any time a company gets its customers to interact with it in a positive way, it increases customer engagement. When users of products or services go out of their way to learn more about those offerings on a company learning portal, they get more exposure to the company and become more familiar and comfortable with the organization.
Brand Loyalty
Engagement can also translate into brand loyalty. If Company A offers a useful online learning community but Company B does not, customers are going to prefer working with Customer A, all things being equal. They not only derive a benefit from the relative ease of use of Company A’s offerings but also perceive Company A as caring more about the customer by virtue of providing such resources.
Reduced Customer Service Effort
The companies themselves benefit, as well. It can be extremely expensive to maintain real-life customer service professionals to answer phones and field customer questions. By providing customers with a resource they can turn to in order to help themselves, companies can reduce the need for customer service employees, instead choosing to leverage a more easily scalable learning portal.
Some of the most successful companies are those that build customer engagement and brand loyalty. Developing and maintaining a customer learning community not only does this but also can do so at a fraction of the cost of running a call center full of employees answering phones and fielding questions in real time.