Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Training Completes Effective Customer Support

“...to better train our customer base will drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and reduce long-term support costs.” James Hanley

Training is an important component of an effective online support offering.

1.Enhances Customer Support

  • Educates the customer to answer their own questions before they open a ticket.(“How do I questions…”)
  • Educates the customers with “just-in-time” training on changes and how these changes are implemented and can be used in the applications, avoiding calls.
  • Educates customers on “what’s new” in the application at release time, avoiding calls.

2. Drives Customer Success

  • Customer training enables buyers to effectively utilize BNA Software products. The better a customer understands how to use our products, the higher their level of success and overall satisfaction.
  • Customer training increases customer retention, new training is a reason to stay in contact with customers, and a reason for customers to come back.

3. Increase Sales

  • Customer training enables buyers to deeply understand how to use, apply, and customize products. As they better understand the details of the products, they identify new opportunities to buy more and they become advocates within their organizations.
  • As new product features and models are announced, highly trained customers can more rapidly adopt them

4. Makes Money

  • Customer training is a high-margin business itself. IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Lawson Software, and hundreds of other high-technology companies use their customer training businesses as a profit center. Education offerings are viewed as “products” – some are high value, high priced products; others are given away to enhance customer satisfaction. Every software company can and should promote a premium support offering

5. Reduce Costs

  • Reduce Issue Management Costs – training drives down issue management transactions by educating the customer first before the call is made.
  • Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs – training is a compelling offer to use in promotion campaigns

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