How to Educate Your Customers Into Advocates

Have you heard of the myth; the product will sell itself? The outrageous myth that's been busted every time a new product enters the market. The truth is, your customers are not purchasing a product unless they understand what it is and the value it offers. When your product is highly innovative and even disruptive, there is one rule that always applies. Educate the customers on your product and why it exists.Most technology companies educate their customers by offering a variety of product training or tutorial resources. Usually, they can be in the format of online documentation or video tutorials. Some product companies will go the extra mile and offer instructor-led customer training.

New Way of Learning

A few years ago, a few IT engineers and architect consultants asked themselves a question that led to a potentially disruptive idea for the product adoption market.The Question: most of the traditional methods of learning fall short for driving product adoption, how can it be better?Why this question? At that time, they had the opportunity to help a technology company introduce a few new products and features at a technology event.The Answer: creating passive video demos or tutorials for technology products is not effective. Let's use gamification concepts to develop challenges to encourage the attendees to experience the product and learn more about it by doing.And voila! This idea proved to be a great hit and now is an interactive, hands-on learning platform called Instruqt. Since the great success at the first technology event, Instruqt is used by highly innovative and disruptive products. Companies like Google Cloud, Hashicorp, and XebiaLabs. Their main goal is to introduce their new products and features in a way that is both effective and intuitive to their target audience; IT engineers, architects, and developers.

Educate With Individual Learning Environments

So, how can Instruqt improve the way you educate your customers? As an IT learning platform used for learning how to use and master new tools, we found the majority of product companies having the same frustrations. The biggest frustration being customer training. The routine of running customer training for customers leads to many technical limitations.One of them is the difficulty of setting up a controlled and self-contained environment to help demonstrate the features and use cases. To do this successfully, you need to provide some context, but meanwhile, you don't want to pollute the live applications.Here are six ways you can ramp up your customer training and boost product adoption to transform your customers into fans.

Deliver Training on Real Technology and Real Infrastructure

Instruqt can spin up any container, VM, or cloud resource in seconds. With just a few clicks and inputs, you can set up a personal sandbox environment that replicates your product. Once it's all set up, you can create scenarios at ease, prepare some data for training, or interactive product demos.Why is this important?Without a platform like Instruqt, you will end up using your existing environment, which will make your engineers very unhappy. Why? Because the training or demo will pollute or destroy the data in your live environment. Ultimately you are stealing away time and costs from your team.

Simplify Training and Product Demos

Let's go back to the pain point we discussed earlier, delivering technical training to customers. Without the virtual capabilities offered by a platform like Instruqt, you will need to ask your customers to download the software or applications.Due to restrictions on corporate laptops, you will often experience wasted time and frustrated customers. Instruqt browser-based terminal enables your trainers and customer success teams to reduce training set-up time to zero and increase customer satisfaction by 100%. Since Instruqt runs on the cloud, there's no need to worry about short-term performance issues at peak loads. When you grow, we grow!See how you can build a value-driven lead engine in 5 minutes

Use Problem Solving To Turn Customers into Evangelists

If you are selling multiple tech target audiences, including IT engineers and architects, you may have already realized that they are problem solvers. Based on Instruqt's experience working with many tech companies, interactive, hands-on learning is the most effective way to engage with IT professionals.Starting from Day 1, Instruqt manages to leverage gamification fundamentals to inspire critical thinking and problem-solving skills. This method has proven to be the most engaging for IT engineers, architects, and developers. Quoted in the first Hashicorp event, "the attendees came to learn one product, and they ended up learning all the new products."

Mix in “Learning By Doing”

There are four different types of learners:1. Visual LearnersLike to learn by seeing and observing things, including pictures, diagrams, written directions, etc.2. Auditory LearnersLike to learn by listening to a lecture rather than reading written notes, they often use their own voice to reinforce new concepts and ideas.3. Reading/Writing LearnersLike to learn by the written word. This could be through a book, article, dictionary, or any other written format. At times this way of learning overlaps with visual learners.4. Kinesthetic LearnersLike to learn by getting their hands dirty and by actually doing a task to understand concepts.As a rule of thumb, as humans, we forget about 80% of what we have learned after one day, whether we learn through visuals, audio, or written words. However, research has shown that learning by doing combat our tendency to forget. You can read more about it in a study made by Ebbinghaus.

Give Your Customers a Safe Play Zone

Did your customer make a huge mistake that led to breaking an essential part of their infrastructure? No Problem. Personalized sandbox environments allow customers to experiment and learn from their mistakes in a safe environment. Fitting well with each individual's unique skill levels and needs.With the Instruqt Platform, your customers will experience feedback on their actions with the immediate feedback loop feature. Allowing your customers to learn from their mistakes and move forwards. Help your customers learn, master, and love your product.

Predict Possible Road Blockers to Adoption

While your customers are working with your tools, it would be helpful to know their progress in learning your product and where they could be having trouble. Right? Use a platform that will give you insights into your customers' usage and where they are getting stuck. Have the data you need to communicate with the development team for needed user experience improvements clearly.

Things Are Changing, Are You?

In the past months, we have experienced much change with the unforeseen pandemic. One of the most significant changes happened around the areas of sales, education, and communication. It is now clear that face-to-face training isn't coming back soon and may never come back.In the meantime, it's time to raise the bar with online learning. To remain competitive today and achieve the business results of boosting product adoption and engagement, you need to rethink how you educate customers and make sales.Find a more effective approach.It's time to give your customer training the oomph it needs with challenge-driven learning. Start supporting your complex training needs with a better solution.