The Effectiveness of Customer Education: evaluating synchronous and asynchronous e-learning technologies

This paper considers the role played by customer education in enhancing their engagement by enriching the customer experience. Enrichment may be seen in terms of enhanced customer communication or service co-creation. This is often mediated by the effectiveness of customer education. Consequently, organisations are evolving new ways of educating their customers to carry out their roles as co-producers. Increasingly this process depends on the latest synchronous and asynchronous e-learning technologies, requiring significant resource investments. Whilst it is easy for organisations to become absorbed with the latest technological trends, we suggest a refocussing on how customers actually engage in learning and skills acquisition. A conceptual framework is developed that combines key concepts from IT service delivery with well-established models of learning acquisition

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