Customer Education: Expanding Revenue and Driving Business Growth

Channel partner education needs to be especially flexible and “digestible.” Get granular. By creating a course through aggregation of learning “chunks,” you can be the company providing the most efficient and flexible training. Flexibility also means going to your customers, rather than just making them come to you. Bob Zeinstra of the University of Toyota notes that the organization has been able to leverage its company’s existing “Dealer Daily” technology platform to launch the University of Toyota Online, a multidimensional learning content management system based on the concept of “quick hits” and just-in-time learning. “Frankly, the value of this kind of training is much higher in the eyes of dealers, because they don’t have to send someone out of the store,” Zeinstra said.

Effective customer support also is important. Avaya University, for example, ensures that live representatives who can assist with technological configuration questions support its extensive business partner education courses, many of which are Web-based. They also can help with anything that might interfere with an optimal learning experience on the part of the company’s partner network. A good help desk also knows how to steer users over to Web-based training or CBT, which ultimately reduces traffic to the more expensive customer service staff.