Offering Options is the Key to Customer Satisfaction

The overall business environment is changing at a much more rapid pace than it used to. What was true last year, last month, or even last week may not be the same as it is today. Staying relevant, profitable, and customer-centric in these fast-moving times has business leaders on their toes.

Customer relationships are certainly less hands-on today. Think about your last trip to the grocery store or your most recent doctor’s appointment. Did you use self-checkout to pay for your groceries? Did you connect with your doctor through a tele-doc app? Although these innovations save time, there are still those moments when talking to a person is easier and more customer-friendly.

While technology, market trends, and product development are rapidly changing, companies maintain, and even bolster, relationships with their clients by offering them options. When you give people choices about where and how to consume what you’re selling, they see your organization as customer-focused.

Listening is the Best Way to Adapt to Customer Needs

Communication continues to present a challenge. The hybrid and remote work schedules of many companies – despite their benefits for employees – can create confusion and a lack of clear feedback between company and customer.

The best way to address this is to offer plenty of options. Take SkillPath, for example. Before 2020, we primarily offered in-person training seminars at one designated place and time. If you needed to learn how to create pivot tables in Microsoft Excel or manage a difficult employee, you would often have to wait weeks or months for a training event to come back to your area.

Today, out of necessity – and our desire to provide the best experience possible – we’ve changed some things. While we are offering in-person training in some areas, we also have:

• Virtual training: Like everyone, we moved our business online in March 2020, and since then, we’ve embraced this offering. Virtual training allows participants to join from anywhere and engage with other learners and trainers located around the world. 
• Interactive training: Our goal is for participants to take the skills they’ve learned in their training program and apply them to their jobs the next day. In a virtual training environment, this can be difficult, so we’ve upskilled our facilitators to become “engagement experts.” This means they’ve mastered virtual tools like polls, annotation and breakout rooms to engage participants and make what they’ve learned stick.
• Self-paced training: Some learners don’t have three or six hours to dedicate to virtual training – or they’d rather do the training on their own. We now have more options for learners to gain new skills on their own time through our self-paced video training and interactive eLearning.
• Bite-sized learning: Sometimes learners need to refresh a skill they’ve learned in a virtual training, or they want to learn one concept or idea quickly. Microlearning means customers only need a few minutes to gain new knowledge. This popular solution continues to be a big focus of ours.

Our solutions are now much more tailored to the customers’ needs. We try to focus on asynchronous learning; there’s no need for a schedule, and it’s all at the learner’s convenience.

Use Soft Skills to Find Success

Leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence are still the keys to finding success, no matter how fast market trends and business needs change. I think that what works for us can be applied elsewhere; certainly for those in content creation.

It’s more important now than maybe ever to create custom solutions for your customers. People’s expectations will change, and we all must be willing to listen and be mindful of the customer experience. By meeting your customers halfway, they’ll reward you with continued business.
 

Ready to learn more? Check out some of SkillPath's live virtual training programs, on-demand video training or get it all with our unlimited eLearning platform.