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If your organization is a fast-growing SaaS, PaaS, or ISV product company or an established global enterprise and planning to achieve more than 2X growth in coming years, then understanding the essentials of customer training is one of the key considerations for you. If you’re in charge of customer training, customer success, or customer enablement training within your organization you’ve come to the right place. We have summed up the key essentials for you which you should consider before you begin to strategize your Customer Training program.
Customer Training (also referred to as Customer Education) is a well-structured training program designed keeping in mind your new or existing customers in view. A successful customer training program is an amalgamation of various types of content (videos, eLearning, Pdf, Ppt, HTML, Webinar) delivered in a very pragmatic way via self-paced mode or in-person or virtual mode. For most visionary companies this is one of the most important steps to boost their positioning from customer satisfaction to customer delight.
Any company which is customer-focused and believes in the “Customer Delight” philosophy must think of customer training as one of their key arsenals to be top in the lot. It is a well-rooted myth amongst the young start-ups’ or even with some of the established enterprises that customer training can be thought only once a specific growth is achieved. Contrary to that if you pick up any good start-up which has grown exponentially, you will find “Customer Education” was one of the key differentiators for them distinguishing them from the competition.
Some of the regular use cases which should act as a trigger for you to think of investing in customer education are:
The chances of trained customers becoming advocates of your product are always higher than a non-trained customer. So having the right customer training process makes all the difference. Customer training if done correctly helps to improve customer retention leading to positive business outcomes. With a diversified userbase for your product, it becomes extremely important to address your customer’s pain points related to the usage of your product in the quickest and most efficient manner. And have a well-defined customer education strategy is the key to success to strengthen your brand loyalty.
Customer Training if done correctly and with the right approach can do wonders for your company.
By now you must have understood the how and why of the customer training program. Here are some best practices you can consider while implementing your customer training program:
Try to answer your “Why”. Why do you need to do customer training? The best way to initiate this process is to speak cross-department, try and understand what challenges your customer is sharing with your CS team, sales team, support team. What can make your customer’s life easy?
Once your Why is set, try to set SMART goals. This will ensure setting up the right expectations with each stakeholder and ensure that your training program is on track always
For any program to be successful, having the right content strategy in place is very important. Decide on what type of content your customer is looking for. Once it is fixed decide on the formats in which this content should be made available. Some of the commonly used formats are videos, Pdf, Ppt, HTML, SCORM, recorded webinars, etc. You can also adopt for virtual training strategy using VILT modes.
Chose the right technology to partner with to deliver these training programs. There are many purposes to build SaaS-based customer training software that will allow you to keep your cost low in the initial phase.
Once everything is set, run a small pilot with few chosen customers, seek feedback from key stakeholders and make the necessary amendments (if required) and plan a big rollout. Make sure you make a good communication plan in collaboration with your marketing team to announce this to your customer. Surprise your customers with an amazing customer training program
Once rolled out customer education must be a regular process. Keep tracking and measuring the effectiveness of each program for each customer and keep improving every day. The agile approach will help to achieve supreme customer delight over a period.
Some of the great examples of customer training are
Providing a delightful customer training experience is one of the important steps in delivering an unmatched customer experience. This simple yet powerful initiative can add great value for your customers and ensures that you build lifelong advocates for your product. One happy customer leads to ten new leads and ultimately opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. Your customers will surely appreciate your customer-centricity and enjoy the journey with you.
We at CXchery breathe in, breathe out this daily with our hundreds of customers and we will be happy to extend our passport to aspiring organizations to help them to set up this initiative collaboratively. Don’t hesitate to write back in case if you are looking for some additional information, template guides to set up this initiative. Happy Customer Training!!!!
Customer training strategy in many L&D departments of major companies is a projection of a content asset. Therefore, customers are either cognitively overwhelmed or are unable to find their desired value through provided content.
Establishing the right customer training strategy evolves customer digital learning experience and delivers value according to their expectations, hence, long-term customers.
Avoid addressing individual customer digital learning expectations, a wide range to cover. But instead, device your customer training strategy around these fundamental questions and organize.
Collaborating your intent of customer training strategy with such intensity of customer-centric solutions can impact your overall business strategies.
In this blog, you are taking away how the right customer training strategy can impact your business’s competitive edge. Also, this blog can be a useful future insight, so free to bookmark:
6 Actionable Steps to Implement the Right Customer Strategy.
Customer Training Strategy is what it sounds like, an evolved business e-learning strategy focussed on resolving customer’s complexities towards your brand. Essentially, educating customers as an idea was to draw brand awareness amongst customers.
Pharmaceuticals, Food, and Health-related Industries were some acquisition-based businesses in the market for ages. Now, evolving technology and digital platforms led SaaS and Tech-based Industries to adapt and become an educational delight for their customers.
E-learning space as employee training wrapped many benefits like enhanced performances, faster onboarding, and lower cost in the long-run employment.
Similarly, customer digital learning space featuring practices like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), User Forums, Self-Pace learning, and Real-time metrics are a gateway to a learning ambiance for customers.
1. Mindful Customers: Your Brand Ambassadors.
Customers’ transaction with any brand isn’t limited to funds-based, it’s about the mind! Your learner-centric training strategy must resonate within customers’ knowledge.
Here, mindfulness is an attribute of customers’ awareness about your brand means customers shall know where they’re investing. Therefore, word-of-mouth advertising comes naturally.
Organizing personalized e-learning courses, self-directed learning, and monitoring progress reports creates an acquisition environment for customers. Customers learn, acquire skills, and retain such ambiance in their memory as experience. Hence, they become your brand ambassadors.
Every brand has this longing that their product gets utilized thoroughly by customers. Wherefore, competitive demonstrations of their products’ features, add-ons, and various benefits cloud the customer experience – Confused!
Introducing Micro-learning videos, Discussion Forums, and FAQs about new products before even the launch creates space for clarity for customers. Then, exercise the attained attention to resolve and embed benefits and extra features by Hosting Webinars and On-site Demonstrations.
This process fills in the gaps between the customer’s understanding and experience of your product, Satisfied Customer!
Shaping your customers’ e-learning course by curating generic content into a customer-specific is transparency. Your brand’s definition of transparency can lie in delivering multi-audience content.
But, your learning loop must be scaled and personalized to deliver the blended audience. Meaning, it should tackle any learning challenges and create a culture of learning within your organization.
Letting available learning resources without a streamline is like enabling customers’ thoughts without relevant grounds: Bless your customer support team!
True transparency and monitored learning culture create personal engagers.
Your organization is renowned in the marketing space, develops commerce by probing customers’ struggles, and delivers value to a diverse audience. The crux of the matter, your organization strategy up to the buyer’s journey is impactful.
But, is customers’ journey limited to buying and using stages of your product only? Think again!
Your customers need you after being bought by your business strategies.
Then comes your organizations’ real value. Educating customers empowers them to feel confident about their buying decision. Experientially, your e-learning environment allows them to add their perceived knowledge to use your product and even add on features, hence, loyal customers.
Providing e-learning courses and developing the right customer training strategy as an intent itself is bound to produce high customer engagements. Once customer engagements happen, you can identify and learn your customers’ behavior metric through LMS.
Learning Management System (LMS) as a tool can harness your customer training strategy by its automated performance insights and AI-driven data analytics. It is like a sophisticated absorption of your customer learning insights, allowing you to improve your growth metrics.
Employing LMS and providing recurring customer support upsells and increases the revenue of your brand naturally.
Your Customer Training Strategy needs to exercise and employ SMART goals.
Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. While addressing a diverse range of customers, creating a familiar experience for each segment of customers is a specific goal.
You have managed specificity through flexible plugging of formal or social learning approach through extensions and native integration across your product. Hence, you have configured a multi-audience delivery platform by segmenting according to different customers’ needs.
Now, you can develop measuring metrics through a customers’ data-driven LMS employed by your L&D team. Positioning this measurable learning to the core of your organization will enhance your customer training strategy. And empower your organization to remain relevant to your customers timely.
Your organization’s capabilities to function relevant across the globe require a diverse delivery platform. Your SMART Goal is your need from customer training strategy. Do you need to nurture existing customers’ experiences? Are you proactively addressing diverse audiences while developing training programs? Or are you offering Continuing Education Courses and Social Certifications?
A Learning Management System allows you to map and trace your smart goal efficiently. An LMS offers you AI-driven data, which means intuitive absorption and analysis of customers’ learning progress to further lay out your future business strategies.
Employing such sophisticated and intuitive technology can help you cover both customer’s lifecycle, newly acquired audience, and existing customers needing education about upcoming features, updates, and upgrades of your product.
Your e-learning content should be as easy to read as a student’s cognitive capacity. Or simple terms, keep the content that even a 10-year-old kid can consume and process.
Your customer need not have to be caffeinated to absorb the basic features of your products. More naturally the learning experience, the more customers’ readability interest arises.
Also, be definite about your content that remains relevant to customer queries. Saas and Information Technology Industry products might target the actual engineers. But even a well-educated customer needs a moment of cognitive delight. So as a delight, Gamification options offering badges and progress stars create an enjoyable and engaging experience.
Keep such small measures like this in focus and identify your customer type before implementing a customer training strategy for your organization.
Engage dedicated customer support team, built-in surveys, real-time support, and web-based forums to communicate gaps and troubleshooting issues. Your support team is a reliable thread to your successful customer training program.
LMS can provide resources and insights integrated with support teams CRM, G-Suite, Google analytics, and various critical software. It gives your customer support team the earliest measure to resolve customers’ issues precisely.
Your Customer Training Strategy is productive but still missing the spot? The answer to this lies in promoting your prepared SMART Goals. Now, it is time to employ your marketing team to provide launch support through concise emails, field events, and organizing user conferences.
Nurture your marketing trainees as well through LMS integrated with their marketing automation systems. Consider paid advertisement and promotional events to address a wider audience.
Your e-learning ecosystem value is impacting or not, how to measure it? Knowzies Learning Impact enables you to measure the effectiveness of your customer training program. It provides you the kind of information and insights you need to make data-driven business decisions.
Also, it automatically alerts you when your customer training program is underperforming so that you can settle them before they even become a problem. Presto!
An LMS uses the sophisticated layers to acquire and measure your customer training strategy impact and provide you with insights, which is hands down a win-win situation for your business.
We all agree to the fact that customers in modern days have become informative. Intuitiveness with the right customer training strategy is a leading factor for any customer’s best interest while fulfilling their endeavors.
Educating customers resonates with mindful users, benefits your brand’s perception in customer’s minds. Clarity brings transparency. Therefore, your brand is empowering customers enabling engagement and loyalty.
Every institution is there to educate, but only a few are holding the ace. It’s because learning is an environment. That’s why your customer training strategy must map smart goals which include diverse delivery platforms. Hence, identifying the specific needs of your customer comes into the picture.
These goals will emphasize your core business values to communicate like a dialogue with customers. Lastly, always remember to measure your profound impact and adapt accordingly. To create your personalized customer training strategy, reach out to us.
We are happy to add value! Visit CXcherry to learn more about us.
This article will give you the chance to know more about customer training. At the same time, everyone acknowledges the value and benefits of training the employee and the workforce. This helps to increase production, revenue, and efficiency while cutting back on costs and waste. The training also helps to increase compliance with regulation and less employee and customer churning. But, in the last few years, customer service training programs are becoming a talked about subject.
This article will look into a customer training program, its benefits, how to build the best and successful customer training program, and a couple of associated questions.
As part of creating an effective product strategy, many companies invest in customer education, marketing, and customer support. While providing a customer service training program outlet about the product, it helps you make better customer engagement, it also helps you differentiate between you and your competitor.
Suppose we put it in the simplest terms. In that case, the customer training program is offered to the end-user of your products by adding extra materials to educate and support the development. The purpose is to ensure that the customer can enjoy the product to the fullest.
The customer training best practices program is primarily found in the tech industry, particularly SaaS. The reason customers are given the option to receive training is because of the complex nature of the product. It is typically a branch of eLearning, also known as an extended enterprise.
The customer training program guide is given to external people of the business; primarily the stakeholders, partners, and resellers of the product, at times even the customers.
The training is created in the software company is has been gaining popularity because of the experience it offers the users. Apart from providing an improved experience, there are other benefits of the training too.
Before we jump into the benefits of the customer training program, let’s take a look at some figures.
Userlane has revealed that up-sells and renewals generate SaaS’ 70% to 90% profit.
American Express revealed in a study that 62% of the millennials (they are officially now surpassing Gen X) have openly advocated sticking to their preferred brand.
Research showcased that 68% of trained customers use a product more often. 56% of the respondents have a better understanding of more products than those who did not get the training. 87% of the trained customers are more capable of using the product independently.
These figures become essential in understanding the benefits of the how the customer training strategy program since it offers:
Customer Onboarding: One of the critical places to improve customer onboarding is by providing them training at critical times. A good product’s ability to showcase its efficiency can be easily equated with training and giving it the ability to click with the customer and encouraging them to use it.
Increased engagement with the product: A trained customer can derive more excellent value from the product, thereby clicking with it better. If you use metrics like NPS or CSAT, you can see the direct impact of customer satisfaction from engaging with the product.
Better customer retention: A customer training program allows a business to address the pain points of the customer’s experience and solve them. This often goes beyond mere troubleshooting, thus decreasing customer churning and increasing loyalty.
Reduce support costs: Training a customer will reduce the burden on your support team, who will have the time to address serious issues than just simple troubleshooting.
Increase in customer upgrades: Customers with better experience and training of the software are likely to upgrade to higher plans.
Better brand promotion: With improved customer satisfaction, they are likely to promote your product to their friends and colleagues, for which you don’t even have to pay them.
With all these benefits in place, it’s time to look into the steps that should be incorporated in building a successful customer training program.
Any company that wants to optimize the customer training program can and want to know how to create customer service training program, here are simple 7 steps.
1. Know Your Customer: Understanding your customer needs is the key to developing the training program. It is vital to prioritize your ‘ideal’ customers since they are loyal and recommend you to others. Conduct interviews and surveys to understand the areas that these loyal customers are confused about. Identify the problem areas with their help and what they want to achieve with your product.
2. Identify the Gaps: If you already have training materials or when you start to gather those materials identify the gaps in the materials where training needs to be developed. The best way is to contact the product, marketing sales, and customer care team since they are likely to have their customer help content already. Identify the gaps there that need to be addressed and begin by prioritizing them.
3. A Collaborative Effort: The ideal situation is developing the customer training programs when the product is being developed by sitting with the product development and other teams. Using the agile method is the best way to develop training content at each stage to provide a complete package for the customer.
4. Use A Focus Group: Instead of deploying off the new training material to all your customers, it is better to have a focus group and test the content. Get feedback and work on them to make it better.
5. Use Tracking & Analytics Tool: It is essential that once the customer training program material is put in the market to track closely how and what tracking content is being consumed most. Also, you can use rating tools to get direct
analytical feedback.
6. Continue To Upsell: Though the initial target is to achieve ‘quick wins’ with a training program. But you must keep assisting your customers to continue with the training to meet your and their long-term goals. You will also minimize the customer churn while increasing the upsell.
7. Increase ROI and Growth: When the customer training program is successful, you will have more free-trial users upgrade to paid plans while existing paid ones are likely to upgrade to higher versions. A satisfied training course will also lead to increased referrals, thereby increasing ROI and better business growth.
One of the important ways to know whether your customer training course is a success is not is to measure it. But, you much ask how to do that. There are two ways in which you can measure the success of your customer training course. They are:
Customer training examples need to be crisp and engaging. Hence to ensure that the customer stays focused, it shouldn’t be more than thirty minutes. Also, it should be available just in time as required by the customer.
As a business, to enjoy success, it is vital to keep your customers onboard. The best way to do it is to offer a customer training program that will ensure your products are being used to their fullest.