Customer education is critical to ensuring users know how to effectively get the best out of a product and/or service. But when designed poorly, customer training programs can, unfortunately, turn customers away from your brand.
Why? Customer education is often unengaging and fails to communicate what they really need to know to successfully utilize the product/service. Poor training and support can frustrate customers, which can ultimately lead them to not engage with your brand at all.
However, there’s a solution: virtual learning labs. By facilitating customer training via online learning labs, you can make the experience much more interactive and engaging, ensuring that your training programs are an asset to the business.
What is a Virtual Learning Lab?
A virtual learning lab is a software-based environment where customers can engage in learning exercises, such as quizzes, test, assessments and other tools. Some virtual learning environments (VLEs) also include gamified learning for an engaging experience. Instead of merely reading or listening to information about how a product or service works, virtual learning labs bring customers into an environment that allows them to practice the technology.
VLEs can provide both an asynchronous and synchronous learning program, giving customers the option to learn with a live instructor or at their own pace. The main benefit of VLEs is simple: They make learning more engaging for customers. Engagement is critical in customer training, because it can increase learning retention compared to hearing or reading the content. When customers can digest training material more effectively, they are better positioned to get the most value out of a business’s products and services — and less likely to flood customer support teams with service requests.
Memorable and engaging training can improve customer perception of your business’s brand, too. When you offer customer’s an enjoyable experience, you can cultivate a positive image of your company and stand out from competitors that offer bland customer training options.
Maximizing Impact Of Learning Labs
Choosing to offer virtual labs as a customer education solution is the first step toward improving training outcomes and creating business value. But to get the very most from your learning labs, consider these four best practices.
1. Personalize learning labs.
Every customer’s learning style and preferences are different. To cater to varying needs, consider designing labs such that customers can pick and choose different configurations and workflows.
The option to select from instructor-led or self-paced learning can help, too, because different users will excel under each approach.
2. Provide real-time feedback.
Real-time feedback maximizes the ability of customers to learn as they go. Instead of generating a report after the lab is complete to point out what the learner did well and which opportunities he or she missed, display that information in real time so the customer can react to it while the lab is underway.
3. Enable social learning.
While personalizing learning labs is important, customers should also be able to engage with others in their learner communities. You can do this by, for example, displaying information about which labs or lab components other learners have completed, or which options or features are most popular.
When learners sense that they’re part of a larger community that is learning along with them, they are primed for even higher levels of engagement.
4. Use data to your advantage.
When learning labs are virtual, it’s easy to collect data to track what customers are doing, where they’re falling short and how you can improve the lab.
For example, data might show that customers are routinely misusing a certain product feature or ignoring an option that the company wants to highlight. Using this insight, the business could modify the lab to make the feature or option more prominent.
Other training resources, like video demos, are an important component of customer education. But no approach matches virtual learning labs when it comes to achieving a deep level of engagement and interactivity. If you want customers who actually enjoy learning about your products, consider making virtual labs a core part of your training strategy.
