Train your clients and partners to build brand awareness

How can you improve customer satisfaction? Today, more than ever, redesigning the customer journey is one of the key drivers of a successful customer relationship. While the concept of customer experience first emerged in the IT sector through UX Design, it now influences the business world across all industries, regardless of product or service. 

Whether you’re a product or service provider, it’s essential to ensure long-term customer loyalty. One of the most effective ways to do that? Train your clients and partners.

When we think of training, we often picture internal upskilling. But it’s just as valuable to create external training programs for clients and key partners. Training offers multiple benefits: strengthening employer brand, demonstrating expertise, even increasing average revenue per client. 

Today, the Teach Up team is tackling misconceptions and sharing 5 strong reasons to create external training in your area of expertise.

Contrary to what you might think, training clients doesn’t reduce engagement, it actually strengthens it. By regularly training clients, you help them use your product better and understand your services more clearly. 

Example: Leroy Merlin realized that part of its product range appealed only to expert customers, leading to low sales volume. To solve this, the company launched in-store DIY workshops, training clients on how to use more complex products. 

Sharing expertise ensures your brand stays top of mind. Training also fosters long-term loyalty by positioning your company as the go-to expert. 

When clients clearly see your added value, they can become powerful brand ambassadors. Training also opens doors to re-engagement: encouraging testimonials, co-innovation, or even testing prototypes during product development phases.

If you’re positioned as an expert in your product or service, it’s because you already know more than 90% of the population. This aligns with the 10,000-hour rule, highlighted by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and journalist Malcolm Gladwell: the more time you spend practicing, the more expertise you build. 

By being trained, clients become more aware of the complexity of the subject, or of how simply your product solves their problem. Either way, they’ll recognize the value your company provides.

The good news: there’s room for multiple players in every market. If a company has no competition, it’s probably not addressing a real need. 

No matter who your competitors are, each has clients who choose them for specific reasons. Being close to competitors pushes you to innovate and stay ahead of emerging trends. If competitors learn from you, take it as motivation, and a challenge to stay one step ahead. 

Inspiring competitors is actually positive. It proves you’re doing things your own way, with a positioning that’s unique. And remember: a company’s personality can’t be bought.

What if client training actually allowed you to deliver more relevant support? By educating clients, you make them more autonomous on foundational topics. The result? You can focus your expertise where it truly matters, helping them with high-value, complex issues. 

For example: providing hard skills training through print or digital content. This could include tutorials on product use, explanations of the problems your company solves, or guides showcasing direct benefits. Capitalizing on these resources saves you from repeating the same information and lets you invest in higher-value interactions.

Training your clients doesn’t mean restructuring your entire business around training. To minimize risk, rely on the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). You don’t need heavy production, start with a short training module focused on your core expertise. 

This initial content can then be repurposed into multiple formats: workshops, videos, rapid learning modules, and more. 

Client training should be seen as a mid- to long-term investment that improves KPIs: reducing churn, strengthening partner loyalty, upselling clients on subscriptions, and reducing customer support workload. 

The cost of training development can also be built into your product or service pricing. It’s an effective way to increase average order value while adding immediate value at the start of the customer relationship.

Preparing client training doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time. The time you invest upfront directly improves the client experience and satisfaction, positively impacting your relationship. 

Once created, training can be scaled massively. For example: recording a 5-minute video tutorial on how to use your product or service may take little time, but sending it to 30 clients saves hours of repeated explanations and reduces future customer support tickets.