"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for life".

I was going through my files and came across a blog post by Calvin Sun about ways to help the customer become more self sufficient.  

Give the customer an answer with no background, he will have to call again later for more help. Teach a customer how to work with your product and you have a loyal customer who can help himself.

A couple of Calvin's tips read:

• Let the customer "drive"
• Encourage customers to teach their coworkers.

 These suggest a training method I use called:

See one. Do one. Teach one.

 See one

This step is more suited to in-person training on a new task tool. People feel much more comfortable if they see how it's supposed to work before they try. The act of watching gives them clues to what will happen and what the result will look like. Then they are much more confident when it is their turn to try.

In customer support, it is unlikely you will be standing right next to a customer for an individual training session, but in situations like software troubleshooting the "see one" can occur while you take control of their computer. Instead of zipping through all the steps without explaining what you are doing, slow down a little and talk through your steps. In other situations, using pages from the manual or images on a screen can help with the "show".

Do one

Now it is the customer's turn. This is where you "Let them drive". If you think about it, how easy is it for you to learn something just from watching? What happens when the trainer is gone?I don't know about you, but more than once I thought I understood how to do something only to stumble badly when I tried to do it myself with no back-up.

Stay available while observing the customer do it. Correct when needed but otherwise, stay out of it so the customer can get a feel for what is supposed to happen. This increases the liklihood that the process will stick with him when he has to repeat it later.

Teach one

At this point both you and the customer may feel like the lesson has sunk in and no more help is needed. But the real test of how well you know something is if you can then teach someone else to do it. Teaching makes you slow down and be very conscious of the stages of the process; not just what occurs but how and why.

This brings one more of Calvin's tips into play:

• Give the principle along with the answer.

Knowing "why" is the glue that makes learning something new stick with us. It gives us more confidence than if we were just told an answer without any background because we won't know how to adapt that answer to other circumstances or know what questions may need to be asked. Or even that there are questions to be asked.

This fits into customer support very neatly because, at its heart, customer support is about teaching. Many customer inquiries are about how to do something with your product rather than a call to say the product is malfunctioning. Some of those break/fix calls will turn out to be a needed training session when the malfunction turned out to be operator error.

You are building a relationship; creating a partnership. That customer will feel like you care because you took the time to teach.