Marketing Tips To Increase Customer Engagement With Online Training

For every hundred consumers who reach out to brands with a support issue, only 86% receive a satisfactory response. This figure is especially low in industries like retail & wholesale where just 82% of consumers receive satisfactory support. One reason why businesses consistently fail in providing stellar service is because customer support is mostly reactive and is rarely ever proactive.

As a marketer, this should be cause for concern. Proactive support can help you tend to issues ailing your customers much before they become a contentious topic. In essence, consistently engaging with your customers can help businesses identify and fix problem areas before they blow up.

There are two ways to consistently engage with your customers. Passive engagement is popular among online consumer-end services where a business caters to thousands or even millions of customers. Periodic engagement in such cases is done through broadcasting channels like email newsletters, YouTube videos and blog posts.

Active engagement on the other hand is critical to offline businesses and those that are business-focused. In such cases, the average value of a customer is significantly high and also, the total number of customers that a business caters to is manageable. Active and one-on-one engagement ensures that your business is available to listen out to customer concerns round the clock and may thus fix them before they break your business.

One of the most effective active engagement strategies is the use of online training modules. Such modules, popularly known as learning management systems, are normally associated with employee onboarding and corporate training. However, the same tools can come in handy for training and engaging with your clients as well. There are different ways such LMS tools can be used to train your clients and thereby engage with them effectively.

Live Video Conferencing: Live video conferencing and webinar applications are popular among B2B businesses. Such tools are used to address a customer base that is spread out geographically. Typically, the time of the webinar is announced well in advance to all customers so that it is possible for marketers to engage with customers in real-time. Clients who fail to make it are often provided with recorded versions of the conferences so that they may stay updated with the latest news and announcements from your business.

Content Management: A sophisticated content management (or knowledge management) system is quintessential to effective customer training. LMS tools can also be used to effect passive engagement through the deployment of knowledge base and tutorial based training programs where customers are at liberty to pick and choose their area of training. Modern AI-based LMS products are equipped with live chat features that make use of these knowledge management systems and machine learning to actively engage customers and answer their questions in real-time.

Discussions: Sometimes, the best way for customers to train themselves on your product is to engage among themselves. This is made possible through bulletin boards that are a part of your LMS. Discussions are considered ‘blended engagement’ since they bring together active and passive engagement under one umbrella. A customer with a question about the product may actively engage with the community to seek answers while other customers with similar queries may access these discussion threads to passively engage in future.

Customer engagement is pivotal in a business transaction and helps marketers improve their relationship with their clients. Online training modules provide businesses with a platform to bring customers up to speed with your product features and makes sure that their concerns are alleviated much before they become contentious issues.