Four methodology points governed under three simple steps. At tuto, we help your company transform your users into ‘Power Users’ that are comfortable and efficient with your solution! Our key to this is User Training!
Welcome back to the tuto blog. In our first blog, we mentioned a stream of words that tuto holds close to themselves and their operations. https://tutoit.io/?p=25677#respond
To summarize, the one keyword mentioned was that of User Training or UT. Correspondingly, we mentioned Don Norman and his spiraling of the focus of business towards the user. In addition, we mentioned how “we believe that regardless of whether a company has the best UX/UI, UT is crucial in maintaining low customer churn”. $1.6 trillion USD are lost annually to customer churn and tuto is one of few companies that aim to tackle that figure. With training of the user at the forefront of tuto operations, this blog stands as our way in which we suggest companies train their users. Here are our 7 tips for you to train your users:
Tip 1: Know the system yourself
Although, here at tuto, we preach UT over UX/UI and the building of a good GUI, we do not negate the importance of a simple interface. A customer’s experience with a product or platform’s interface is crucial in its success. Jef Raskin from Macintosh stated that “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product”. tuto has identified that one of the greatest SaaS causation effects is that of poor UX/UI on high levels of churn. Front-end developers need to inculcate within their programs clever design principles. For good customer adoption and excellent user retention, tuto places emphasis on the ability for the end user to understand the given digital product. We at tuto recommend for front-end developers to read these design principles: https://99designs.com/blog/web-digital/ux-design-principles/
The first tip to train your users that we wish to share is that of “Know the System Yourself”. With 15 000 SaaS solutions being birthed in 2020 alone, logical statistical reasoning dictates that a portion of those solutions are destined to fail. A great way that we at tuto recommend implementation of the above mentioned tip is to run User Testing within the company setting. If your employees do not understand how to use your product, chances are that your users will struggle too.
Tip 2: Know your user
We have all heard of the saying that “the customer is always right”. Whether it is publicly acknowledged or not, business owners are social creatures that are also people pleasers. Looking past the profit motive of business, the inner-core of a successful business tackles a problem with people in mind. As Peter Drucker so profoundly stated: “The purpose of business is to create a customer”.
Our second tip on ways to train your users is twofold within its original theming.
Firstly we recommend for companies to create a customer persona for their user based solely on the user goals and needs. Typical customer personas deal with demographics and psychographics but here at tuto, we see a gap in the goals and needs. By understanding the innermost workings of your targeted customer, you can soar with the process of pushing on their pain and pleasure points. We stand firmly in our saying that demographics and psychographics only share the tip of the customer iceberg.
Secondly, as the world moves into a more digitized state, companies need to understand each individual user’s tech orientation. Without knowledge of one’s tech orientation, as SaaS solutions negate potential leads that are either technologically challenged or the population sample which is technologically savvy. At the forefront of User Training is the process of focusing efforts towards helping customers learn and understand the technology. Without understanding tech-proficiency-levels, we lose sight of our customers.
Tip 3: Embed training into your software
tuto’s IPT (Intelligent Product Tutorial) has allowed for a seamless embedding of training into the software of tuto partners. Today’s digital world has seen for the desire of instantaneous results. Think back to your schooling days. You’re sitting in math class discussing the quadratic formula to extrapolate the individual roots of an equation. You’re given a problem as part of a routine class exercise with which you are struggling. What did you do? Chances are most likely that you asked the teacher for help.
Difficulties in navigating software solutions are apparent and as discussed in our first blog, User Training is inevitable. When a user opens a new software, the same psychological process occurs as did in math class. Our previous knowledge of technology is the quadratic equation. These are our tools in our arsenal but without the training to use the formula, our tools can be rendered redundant. tuto has embedded training into the software of tuto partners in a way that the user does not need to explicitly look for the training. With tuto, a hiccup in your understanding is as simple as raising your hand in class.
Our market validations have driven us to conclude that when users need to explicitly search for training on a platform, customer churn is at risk. When training is embedded into your software and your users can sub-consciously seek their training just as we all raised our hands in math class, customer retention, user proficiency levels and product fit are destined to thrive.
Tip 4: Trust
Gaining the trust of users is an undeniable challenge for any company. Especially when a training solution is embedded within a platform or product, we at tuto urge companies to remain transparent and accountable for all activity on a platform. Recent social media scandals have caused huge amounts of anxiety within digital platforms. At tuto, we take a strong stand against data sharing and thus have high levels of customer trust. We ask all companies to do the same. The building of trust is crucial in order for companies to train their users.
Tip 5: Ensure the correct training format
Within the tuto four step methodology of Video to Simplicity to Data to Intelligence lies a three step process. Our final three tips mimic those steps. Tip 5 is to ensure the correct training format. You need to find the correct training medium for your users. The chosen medium for tuto is through video.
“Video as a form of communication is key in understanding customer needs and ways in which tuto provides value to its users.”
Ohad Ronen – tuto CEO
With tuto, companies can create IPT’s in the form of video which map the product knowledge. As with the previous math class example, the training method there was frontal discussion. Covid-19 has spiraled the world into a digital bubble in which the digital medium reigns supreme above anything else. Our customer research has shown that the utilization of video is the most simple and effective manner in which companies can use to understand their users and henceforth train.
Tip 6: Gather as much training data as possible
The second step within the tuto methodology is related to data. Our cynics have been arguing that User Training is highly subjective and qualitative in its implementation. Our development team have found a way to gather as much user data from the training medium of videos. Through tuto IPT’s, we give our companies an opportunity to visually map the given user knowledge and segment each user based on their individual proficiency levels.
How is all of this done? Data! Through the gathering of large data samples, tuto can predict and provide clarity to our companies about their users!
tuto has masterfully created a platform that gathers user data and processes it for the company into tangible results. This leads to our final tip of future road mapping.
Tip 7: Future road mapping
We have given over six tips to you as our tuto family which you can use to train your users. Our final step is perhaps the most intuitive and leads directly to a mantra that I, as the tuto blogger, live by. That mantra is Stephen Covey’s – “Begin with end in mind!”. Without a future roadmap and a plan forward all the training tips mentioned are useless. The above training tips are theoretical and ultimately require a tool to plan forward.
Each user is different with different needs and hence each requires different training. The end goal of any company should be that of providing for their users a training program. tuto provides the companies a product map for each user type. Based on the segmentation and mapping from the above tips, tuto is a powerful tool for companies to solve their customer proficiency gaps. Schedule a demo at: https://tutoit.io
The team and I at tuto wish you all happy training!
Till next time,
The tuto blogger
