Good education is good business

Judging from the title of this post you might think that I’m correlating a relationship between having a good business with a prerequisite of having a good education. That’s partially true, but that’s not what we’re going to discuss today; today I want to expand on the idea of educating your customers and clients on your products and services. I believe that it should be a requirement for all business and organizations [or ones that want to achieve success] to make training and education a mandatory process when selling their products or services. You may be thinking,.. “but Vann, why is that necessary?, what does my customer care if I educate them or not?”. Here’s some reasons why:

• If you sell a service, it’s advantageous that you keep your customers as sharp as they can be when they utilize it, it keeps your services valuable.
• Even if you’re selling something trivial, maybe tea or coffee or even gum, if you take the time to educate your customer on the process and the ingredients that it takes to make it, there’s a good chance they’ll appreciate it and come back for more, I know I would.
• The ability to empower your customers is sometimes more important than the product/service itself.

Not the craftsman that I'm talking about

I believe that if you don’t educate your customers with your products, the results can be disastrous. I know this based on previous experiences with poorly designed educational material in products. When I first bought my home, I had to buy a lawnmower, so I went to the nearest Home Depot and picked up a cheap Craftsman lawnmower. I took it home, un-boxed, assembled it, and put fuel in it. It wasn’t long after I just completed the first lap of mowing the lawn when it completely shut off on me, I was perplexed, I couldn’t believe it, a brand new lawnmower just died and I still have 90% of the yard to do! I attempted to fire it up again,… and again… no luck. It wouldn’t even spin. It was just clicking. I frantically ran back to the packaging to see what the warranty and return policies were and ended up re-reading the manual again. Assemble this, assemble that, OK I did everything it asked me to! I flipped back to the index of the manual in frustration and threw it back in the box, upon closing the lid to the box I discovered a picture of a old school oil can with a slash through it, kinda like a no smoking sign only this one had an oil can instead of a cigarette there were no words, no description, just a picture. It was like Craftsman hired the IKEA manual designer to do just that one part, and not just any part, the most important step of all, ADD OIL BEFORE YOU START UP THE LAWNMOWER! I attempted to return it, but Home Depot blamed it on user error and could not take it, so I was out a couple hundred dollars and feeling especially bitter. Needless to say, that was the first and last Craftsman product I buy, that to me is what the power of good education in your products or in this case poorly executed education in a product can do.

So next time you’re developing a product or service, think to yourself,.. “what would I want to know if someone was to introduce or sell me on this product?” With all the technology we are overwhelmed with now, it’s more important than ever to educate your customers on how to use what they receive from you.