When you run a business, you devote some time to training and educating your employees. But what’s often overlooked is the need to train and educate customers. 

This overlooked element is one of the most effective things you can do to boost customer loyalty and retention.

What is customer training exactly?

Essentially, this is the ongoing process of educating your customers on how to use your products and services most effectively in order to achieve their goals or address their pain points. Speaking more practically, customer training involves providing your end users with educational materials and other information that they can use to truly get the most out of their purchase.

There are three basic goals to customer training:

• Bringing in and retaining customers at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Enhancing the customer experience by showing them how to get the utmost value out of your product or service.
• Maximizing the overall impact of your product or service, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, getting more referrals, etc.

As for what customer training looks like for plumbing and HVAC businesses, there are plenty of examples. Say you have a customer who just bought a new HVAC unit. Customer training might involve creating materials that show them how to keep their unit clean and how to maximize energy efficiency, as well as some guidelines for when to call for preventive or routine maintenance.

There are a few steps to consider as you seek to build your own customer training program:

• Get to know your customers. It’s hard to educate someone when you don’t know much about them. Use surveys or questionnaires to better understand your customers’ pain points, their ultimate goals and values, etc.
• Set learning objectives. Next, think about what exactly you want your customers to learn. For example, you may want customers to learn how to use their garbage disposal more judiciously, extending the longevity of each unit (and thus increasing customer satisfaction). Or you may want to educate customers about when they need to call for water heater service.
• Create training content. What’s the best way to train employees? Maybe you want to make a YouTube video that you can send to customers following particular purchases. Maybe you want to develop informational pamphlets to pair with certain products. Or maybe you simply want to instruct service technicians to provide certain guidance to customers.
• Take questions. Do you find that your customers come to you with a lot of familiar questions? Make sure your sales reps and service technicians take note of common inquiries, as these are the types of things you may wish to address through your customer training initiative.

The bottom line: If customers know how to get the utmost value from their purchase, they’ll probably be happier. And if they’re happy, they’ll be more loyal and more likely to recommend your business to friends. Start thinking through some customer training options today.

About the Author

Amanda E. Clark is the president and editor-in-chief of Grammar Chic, a full-service professional writing company. She is a published ghostwriter and editor, and she's currently under contract with literary agencies in Malibu, California and Dublin. Since founding Grammar Chic in 2008, Clark, along with her team of skilled professional writers, has offered expertise to clients in the creative, business and academic fields. The company accepts a wide range of projects; often engages in content and social media marketing; and drafts resumes, press releases, web content, marketing materials and ghostwritten creative pieces. Contact Clark at www.grammarchic.net.

This article was originally posted April 2022.