The need for Product Training

Product Training can aid a variety of business goals. A Brandon Hall Group Extended Enterprise survey from 2017 indicates that 41% of businesses have maximized their client retention through product training. However, product knowledge is relevant for sales staff and the extended enterprise as well. Let us explore the benefits drawn from Product Training.

Traditionally, user manuals provided a passive and inconvenient form of product knowledge. Today, eLearning has enabled companies to effectively deliver training to intended users.

Product Knowledge Training for Employees

The objective of Product training is to educate a learner about the product, its features, and how it adds value to the target market. When developed and delivered to your employees, product training offers knowledge of your product’s intended use and its utility to a potential user. When sales staff are educated about the product, it enables them to see more clearly how it can be sold to customers.

Product Training for sales personnel can:

• Improve product knowledge and subject matter expertise
• Builds sales confidence
• Increases opportunities for upselling
• Improve customer experience with the sales staff

Product Training for Customers

Customer training helps users engage more readily with your product. Improving the learning curve for users can shorten the time-to-value of your product. When creating novel solutions, it becomes vital to provide the necessary training infrastructure for your customers. Research from the report Gauging Value: Answering the Training/Adoption Question finds that:

• 68% of trained customers use products more often
• 56% of trained customers use more product features
• 87% of trained customers use products more independently

Product Training for customers can:

• Improve the Onboarding Experience

Onboarding is an essential part of welcoming new customers. Poor customer onboarding has been shown to cause up to 53% of customer churn. It is a foundational milestone in the customer’s journey with your brand. The onboarding journey of customers begins with the purchase of your product. New customers may require plenty of assistance to get started with your product. However, it should not be treated as a one-time event. Product training is integral to effective customer onboarding. It provides knowledge of the product and familiarises the users with its features and benefits. Accessibility is key, ensure that the courses necessary for customers are readily available to them so they can begin using the product without delay. The ideal LXP ensures the information sought by users is easy to find and accessible anytime, anywhere.

• Increases Product Engagement

Users equipped with product knowledge can more readily engage with the product. Ensure the flow of information is consistent with what benefit and value users may derive from your product. Innovative training strategies can be employed to increase product engagement. The learning paths feature of an LXP improves engagement by ensuring that users with varying levels of knowledge and access modules that best fit their levels of competency.

• Reduces Customer Support Costs

Create training material that provides customers with the solutions they may require. If learning materials are easily accessible to users when they need them, it may reduce the interaction between customers and customer support.

The benefits described above will ultimately lead to a better customer experience with your brand and product. Customer education can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and higher retention rates.

Simplify Product Training using an LXP

The key to effective product training for your customers and partners is a seamless learning experience. An LXP that can effectively manage product training will provide the following features:

• Easy access to product knowledge

A learning experience platform is highly accessible to users. LXP prioritizes the user experience and should support on-the-go learning. The learner journey in an LXP can also be customized based on preferences or job roles. An LXP should employ a mobile-first approach and support multiple forms of content.

• Push notifications/Nudges

A learning experience platform can be configured to send notifications to users in the advent of events such as product updates. New features can also be added along with modules of training content. Nudges can increase motivation to take up courses and ensure busy sales staff keep up to date with the latest developments in the product, such as feature releases.

• Content Discoverability

Easy content discoverability greatly aids the learning journey. Learners should be able to discover, or “unlock”, modules when they are ready for them. Microlearning chunks modules into bite-sized morsels of relevant information that can be provided to learners as per their requirements. For instance, user groups help manage the content library to cater to different types of users — based on relevance, competency, designation.

• Assessments and Surveys: 

Activity reporting is invaluable to any user-centric organization. The in-build reporting functionality of LXPs can collate insights based on assessments and surveys of users. It can also reveal the pain points of the product faced by users. This feedback loop can aid the product development team as modules can be created to address specific topics. Assessments help users gain competence through advancing their product knowledge and retain learning better.

• Gamification

Games can be addictive. Combining elements of games with learning can make the process of learning more compelling. Learning experience platforms with mechanisms such as points, badges, and leaderboards can boost engagement with the training content.

• Virtual Labs

An LXP can host advanced simulation-based training that provides a safe environment for practice. The hands-on training capability of an LXP is highly beneficial for risk-free training. Perhaps most importantly, virtual training labs allow learners to learn by doing. Research indicates learners can achieve higher knowledge retention rates using this active learning strategy.

The portability of an LXP makes it suitable for training on-the-go. Learning material can be safely accessed offline and remotely, outside of a corporate firewall. When deciding on a learning experience platform, look for one that can be used to train your channel partners as well as customers.

Origin Fractal is an award-winning Learning Experience Platform that works as a full-fledged learning experience platform (LXP) that can be used for product training, employee upskilling, extended enterprise learning, mobile app-based learning, and much more.

To find out more about Fractal LXP and how it can help deliver product training to your employees, customers, and the extended enterprise, write to us at lxp@originlearning.com. You can also watch this short video about some key features of Fractal LXP here: