Product Education: Transform Your Users Into Experts (Quick Guide)

As an entrepreneur, you’re aware that educating people on the use of your product (be it a tangible product, service, or software) is a tactic that can bring in new leads for your business and create a positive experience for customers.

in fact, product education should be a major part of any corporate training program. If your company is going to be successful, your customers, employees, and any involved stakeholders need to be well informed about the products and services you’re offering.

However, what many entrepreneurs don’t realize is that most training programs are created to model schools and colleges, which teach via content catalogs or at the best via simple real-time webinars; big collections of knowledge dumps but not typically information tailored to the real world.

Customers are also students and product users at the same time. They often come back with fundamental support questions or sometimes they rather choose to stick with another solution instead of yours, especially if it’s worked for them in the past.

Why is this happening?

Learners drop off because they lack motivation. In reality, human beings learn only when they’re ready and motivated to learn.

When it comes to customer education (corporate training or employee training), it is not enough to motivate people on just how to use your product. You need to also give them ways that your product fits into their business needs and why they would want to actually use it as a tool for whatever business goal it serves.

That motivates a learner or user to take an interest in learning how to properly use the said product or service and, of course, skyrockets the customer experience!

Build Motivation

When people learn new things, there are specific thoughts they make inherently:

– Will the new knowledge solve a problem they are having?
– Will the new skills afford them some new opportunities?
– Will this upskilling help them grow professionally or personally?

At every stage of education, people need to get real value. This is much more true for customer education.

Advance Skills through Product Education

Who doesn’t want to feel like they’re becoming better at something throughout the course of their lives? The feeling of getting better can be very inspiring. Besides, customers will get to know the real value of your product only if they start using it!

How do we keep that feeling alive?

Here are four essential questions you must ask to build motivation when designing your online academy:

• What challenges are customers having and how can my product help?
• What problems will they avoid in the near future with my product?
• What will customers be able to accomplish with my product?
• In which ways can my product be used?

If you’re having trouble answering these questions, then you need to spend a little time analyzing your customer insights data, perhaps by building customer case studies, or even performing a primary customer survey to collect proper feedback.

Prioritize the Customer

When you focus on teaching your product, feature by feature, you are restricting learners from making themselves competent at something. You always make sure that you cover all of your features. However, you don’t showcase these features in real-life.

What you have to do is to put the learner first, not the content:

1. Put yourself in the learner’s shoes.
2. Envision yourself as a customer and evaluate the learning experience from their perspective.
3. Would you want to take the online courses you have created? Why?
4. What will the learning and development outcome be for the customers?
5. Make sure that you don’t introduce basic and advanced skills all at once. Keep in mind that people also tend to be more motivated when they feel they are making autonomous decisions and when they learn at their own pace.

The more control customers feel they have with their online learning and the more hands-on experience they gain, then the more likely they are to stay motivated. This is where a user-friendly learning management system (LMS) like LearnWorlds comes into play.

Decide the Specifics

Educating customers is so much more than merely putting information out there. Focusing solely on your product and your product’s features is insufficient to generate customer engagement and retention.

Customer education, and consequently product education, is an entire learning experience that consists of the content, the training format, the course platform you will choose to implement your learning programs, and even the customer support you will provide during and after your training sessions.

Remember also that you should focus on what customers can do with the training courses that you will provide.

You should definitely choose an elearning platform that can offer the right onboarding to your customers and infuse great learning experiences.

Keep in mind that Learnworlds is not only a top course platform to build and provide your training, offering great pricing plans, but it is also the only one providing an entirely white-label experience. With LearnWorlds, you can take your company further and completely brand your training!

Now, when it comes to creating your product’s educational content, make it about your learners:

• Prioritize why a customer would want to use a feature/functionality, not just what the feature/functionality is all about.
• Leave out product features that are not essential to this stage.
• Focus on use cases, case studies, and workflows.
• Include opportunities for learners to reflect, interact, and test their skills (e.g. add quizzes at the end of every learning unit).
• Include discussion and networking opportunities, so that customers can communicate with each other. You can achieve this by building an online community within the course platform you will use for the product training, or leverage the power of social media and create a group on Facebook or LinkedIn, depending on the nature of your business and your audience.

Final Thoughts

Remember, teamwork makes the dream work! There are already people in your company who talk with customers every day. These people know firsthand what the customers’ problems, challenges, and desires are. It would be good to invest some of your time in talking to them about their essential role.

Talk to key players (e.g., your customer support team or your sales representatives) when planning your product education training courses. This level of priority for the company will help you acquire some crucial information in understanding why specific questions are recurring, such as frequent customer questions, or determining what training is most effective when providing answers to these problems.

You can even invest in automation and use your current ERP or CRM system to create a flow of customer information (what they need, what they want, what are their challenges) from your company’s teams and create a database of content for your training courses.

Let this quick guide be your starting point for transforming your products and services into awesome learning experiences for your customers!

Further reading you might find interesting:

• How to Sell Online Courses: The Ultimate Guide for 2022
• How to Start an Online School in 2022 + Infographic
• 27 Best Online Learning Platforms (updated 2022)
• How to Teach Online & Earn Money in 2022: Definitive Guide

Rosemary Georgarakou

Rosemary is LearnWorlds’ Content Marketing Manager. She has over 2 decades of experience in omnichannel marketing and content writing for the IT and SaaS industry. Her expertise lies in crafting effective content marketing strategies that attract, engage, and nurture customers, enabling LearnWorlds to reach its target audiences with precision.