Guide on Handling Customer Service for Online Course Creators

Like any business, building a successful online course requires you to put in substantial effort to create and promote an effective program.

But there is another extremely important component of your job as an online course creator, which is often overlooked or underestimated: customer service.

How you manage client relationships, interact with students and guide them through their learning experience can make a difference in how successful your online course is.

Many online courses (even with thousands of students enrolled), lack the basic interaction and socialization learners need to receive guidance from their instructor.

If you are looking for a dedicated platform, check out this list of Best CRM software.

The Benefits of Customer Service for Online Course Creators

As a creator, you should look at customer questions as opportunities, not burdens! Let's see why keeping in contact with your customers can help your business and help your students benefit from your online course. 

#1. Improves the Learning Experience

Customers who join your online course do it for a reason: to learn whatever it is that you are teaching them.

So it is extremely important that all their doubts and questions are answered. While your content alone should suffice, it is almost inevitable that a customer may need further guidance.

If you fail in answering their questions, students might not achieve the result you promised them after completing your online course, resulting in dissatisfaction and negative reviews. When you answer questions for your students, they will be more likely to reach the result you promised, and more likely to leave you a positive review or testimonial. 

#2. Helps You Get Feedback

When it comes to building a successful online course, customer feedback is invaluable. You should listen carefully to what your students think about your program, as it may provide a chance to improve your content according to their feedback.

Online courses are not like physical products. It is easy to edit content or tweak a lesson to fit your customers' expectations. So take advantage of this and start paying close attention to what your students have to say, especially at the early stages of your launch. When you consistently iterate and improve on your content based on student questions, you'll end up with a course that can better help your students reach the result they are after. 

#3. Creates Community

Any interaction is a step forward to creating a thriving online community around your online course.

If you make it easy for learners to contact you and share their opinion, they will feel grateful, even if you can't offer them the perfect solution to their issue.

Even better, create an online space where students can interact not only with you, but also with each other. This will lead to a feeling of community, where customers can share their ideas, ask questions and get further guidance from you. Your veteran students may even stick around and help guide newer students for you!

Our Tips for Successful Customer Service

Now that you have a better idea about the importance of interacting with your learners, let's see how you can provide customer service as an online course creator.

Create a Dedicated Support Page

The first step about great customer support is to make sure your customers know how to contact you.

Make it easy for them to find your email address or contact form on your website.

Creating a dedicated page with clean instructions on how to contact you and what they should expect from you is important. Depending on how you wish to be contacted, you could add a button to send an email directly, insert a contact form, set up a live chatbot etc...

Add your social media pages as well to increase social proof and provide even more channels of communication. Heights Platform makes it easy to provide support to your students by giving students a dedicated private message button to send you questions, and a customizable support page for you to provide additional details and FAQs to learners. 

Set Up an Online Space for Your Community

Check if your online course platform lets you create a space in your website to host an online community.

If you are a Heights Platform creator, you can use our Discussion Board feature to keep in contact with your learners, share news with them and create a space for them to interact with the community.

Learn all about creating an online community around your business in this article from our blog: Why You Should Build an Online Community of Engaged Customers and How to Do it

Clarify Expectations

If you have hundreds of students enrolling in your online course at once, it can get trickier to keep up with customer service tasks.

While you should try your best to answer every email or message from your customers, it is important to clarify how much time they can expect to wait before receiving an answer from you.

If you let your customers know in advance about response time and your business hours, they will know what to expect and will not be disappointed about the time it takes them to receive a reply.

Provide as Much Information as Possible

Many customer service interactions could be avoided by providing all the information a potential customer needs on your website and online course landing pages.

Are you describing the content of your online course well enough? Do potential clients know what to expect if they purchase your program? Are you clarifying a result? Do they need to purchase any equipment or tools?

Try to think about all the possible questions a potential customer may have before purchasing your online course, and make sure that the answers are clearly described on your landing pages. Never assume something will be clear or inherently understood by your potential customers!

As you are the creator of your online course, you may miss potential improvements that lead to less customer service. Send your website to a friend or someone who sees it for the first time, and ask them to review it or provide any feedback that could help you reduce customer service requests. Pay close attention to those first few questions you get from potential customers and think about why they asked the question they did and how you can improve your content to help future customers understand easier on their own. 

Ask Your Customers

Instead of having to deal with too much customer service, you may have the opposite issue: no customer requests or questions at all.

While interacting with your students is beneficial for them, it can also help you by understanding where your online course can use some improvement.

So if your customers do not contact you or provide any feedback, try asking them instead.

Your students will appreciate if the creator shows interest in their thoughts and feeling, and they will be happy to give you an honest answer.

This tactic can also help you to collect more positive customer reviews. Learn all about collecting students testimonials in this article from our blog: 7 Quick Tips to Collect Reviews Easily and Increase Social Proof in Your Online Course

Conclusion

Providing excellent customer service should be a priority for online course creators.

Any interaction you have with learners is beneficial to you and to your students. Customer service is important to answer your students' questions, improve their learning experience, create a feeling of community and gather feedback about your online course.

The quality of the customer service you provide can also be a differentiating factor between you and your competition! Here at Heights Platform, we pride ourselves on the level of support we provide our creators. And it shows since many creators choose Heights Platform as their online course creation software because of that extra level of support we provide to our course creators.

Make sure that learners know how to contact you and what they should expect in terms of response time. Set up a space to interact with all of your students, to help build an online community for your business, and to increase the level of engagement in your online course.

If you are looking for an online course platform that facilitates students interaction, check out how Heights Platform can help you create an online community.