9 Best Ideas for Customer Support for Online Courses – In-Depth Guide with Tips & More

According to a study by Forbes, businesses lost $62 billion in 2016 due to poor customer service and that number has only gone up since then. 

Bad customer service almost always leads to low customer retention rates as well as low loyalty rates. 

As an online course creator, these are your bread and butter and it’s essential that you focus your attention on ensuring your audience is satisfied. 

In this post, we’ll go over some easy-to-follow steps you can take to ensure your customers stay satisfied and thus, recommend your course to friends and peers. 

Humanize the Business-Customer Interaction

Let’s be real, your online course website is a business venture at the end of the day and your customers are aware of that. 

That being said, you’ll be surprised to see how much of an impact personalizing your messages when talking to customers can make. 

Here are some ways to strike a bond with your customer: 

1. Address Them by Their Name When Talking to Them

Addressing your customers by their name is a quick and easy way to offer a personalized approach towards a solution. 

It’s an efficient way to make the conversation friendlier without making it feel forced.

Studies have shown that people pay attention and become happy when they hear or read their own names. 

2. Use Personalized Messages as Much as Possible 

As mentioned above, you should personalize your messages as much as you can. 

According to a study, personalized emails have 29% higher open rates and deliver 6 times more transactions from customers. 

There are a number of ways you can make your messages much more authentic and personalized:

• Use the customer’s name 
• Send your message in their native language if they are based in a different country.
• Employ an informal and friendly style of writing. Avoid being authoritative or corporate-sounding. 

3. Thank Your Customers in Old-School Ways

This may seem a little eccentric given today’s digital age. That’s precisely why it works! 

Consider sending your students personalized, hand-written notes. It’ll show them that you appreciate them and it’s definitely something that will stick in their mind. 

Not only that but it could increase your reach as well. How? 

Well, a personalized letter is not something students usually receive from online course creators.

If you send a personalized, hand-written note to all of your students, there’s a chance one of them might post a picture of it on social media for all of their followers to see. 

Provide Quick and Easy Customer Support 

It’s important that you spend time strategizing and ensuring that when your customer encounters a problem, they are able to find a solution to it from you in the quickest way possible. 

There are a number of ways through which you can achieve this: 

4. Provide Customer Support Over Multiple Channels 

People go through online courses on many different devices so, it’s important that you provide support on all channels where they might be active. 

Some examples are: 

• Live chat
• Email 
• Social Media
• Phone 

Be sure to pay extra attention to all the channels you have set up to ensure you don’t miss out on a query. 

Always remember that your job is not done after you’ve made and published your online course. 

Maintaining customer relationships is the key to ensuring your online course stays popular and keeps finding new customers. 

You can also use customer support tools like Zendesk to get in touch with your customers.

5. Don’t Use Generic Auto-Replies

Of course, auto-replies are a good idea to ensure customers know their query has been received but try to add some personality to them. 

For example:
Instead of saying “We’ve received your query. We’ll get back to you in some time.” Say “Hi, Thanks for getting in touch. We’ll get right on it!” 

Also, be sure to include a specific time window in which you will respond to customers with a personalized message. 

For example, if your automated reply says you’ll get back to them in 24 hours, get back to them within 2 – 5 hours. 

6. Develop a Self-Help Section

Gen Z and Millenials tend to avoid conversation with strangers as much as possible. 

Instead, most of them prefer to fix problems on their own if they can. Thus, it can be highly beneficial for you to help them do so. 

On your online course website, be sure to add an FAQs/Self-Help section that details all the common queries that your students may have. 

Furthermore, constantly update this section. You may have written this section on your own when you first came up with the online course but once a group of students has gone through it, you’ll have a whole bunch of questions lined up. 

Be sure to add the most common ones to your FAQs page. 

7. Try to be Available 24/7 

Since you’ll most likely be working solo as an online course creator, we understand that this may not always be possible. 

However, it definitely is in your best interests to respond to customer queries as quickly as possible no matter what day or time it is. 

Fast response times are something that every customer appreciates. 

Our multiple-channel tip that we gave you earlier in this post is definitely something that will help you achieve this. 

8. Offer Compensation for Any Inconvenience Caused 

This may sometimes hurt your business, especially when you’re first starting out but it’s definitely the number one way to turn a dissatisfied customer into a happy one. 

For example:
If a customer has bought your course and it turns out that it was not what they were looking for, you can offer them a full refund. 

Furthermore, if you have some other course that deals with whatever that customer was looking for, you could offer them that course for free. 

9. Customer Feedback is the Name of the Game 

This is actually something that you are going to initiate, not your customers. 

Be proactive about asking your customers for feedback as well as any complaints that they may have. 

You can do this by having a feedback form at the end of your course or even at the end of different modules in your course. 

Gathering feedback and making changes to address it is something that is going to be highly impactful in terms of retaining customers. 

Conclusion 

Many online course creators think that all there is to online course selling is just creating a course and then publishing it. 

That may get you a few customers but your business is never going to grow like that. 

Loyal and happy customers are the ones that are going to recommend your online course to their friends and peers and help it grow. 

And helpful customer support is one of the best ways to achieve satisfied customers. 

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