Teach Your Customers

There is a common mistake many software companies make. They forget to explain to their customer how to use their products and why they have to use them. The following article describes how to solve this issue and shares best practices.

General Support

If you have some publicly available products, lots of customers, and no ability to work separately with everyone directly, you should start from the general support.

Let us start with the way of delivering the support. The two best ways are video recordings with explanations and an interactive guide. Videos are great to explain how to use the product, while the interactive guide is the perfect tool to help in real-time. Online chat is another good instrument to solve customers’ issues in real-time. Finally, typical text documentation with screenshots and video recordings can help significantly if a customer knows what he wants.

Now let us check what the customer wants, i.e., the content. It is good to start from the typical scenarios for typical users and explain the whole workflow in detail. The next best thing is the best practices on product features, user experience, and performance. Finally, you may prepare the FAQ and separate chapter for advanced users.

One more general hint — you may notify customers about new features that may substantially help them.

Personal Training

If your product has a limited number of customers, you should consider personal training. Of course, you also have to maintain general support best practices described above.

The first step is discovery. It would help if you understood how exactly your customer is planning to use your product, the scenarios and workflows, and its benefits.

The second step is preparation. You have to cover as many discovered scenarios and workflows as you can in your training and prepare examples for every one of them. Ideally, scenarios have to solve real issues a customer faces every day.

The final step is the training itself. You need to show all the features and possibilities of the products and solve customers’ problems. It is a good idea to record a video of the training and share it with the customer. This way, he can always return to it later on.

Here are the best practices of teaching your customer how to use the product. Of course, these are just the first steps, but they build the foundation for successful work with the customer and open multiple ways to improve it in the future.