Categories
E-Book

Ultimate Guide to Right Customer Training Strategy

Categories
Tools & Templates

The Definitive Guide for SaaS & PaaS Companies to Set Up Product Academy

Categories
E-Book

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding [#7 Best Training Practices]

Categories
Blog Customer Training

5 Productive Ways to Leverage on Customer Training LMS

This blog will help you to know 5 productive ways to leverage on customer training LMS

“Customer Training helps to teach mission and vision but employees must put the training into action for it to have a meaning”-Shep Hyken

Online training in the corporate sector is often considered to be for employee development. Internal training is essential, mainly when it comes to onboarding product training, closing the skill gaps, and leadership development. In recent years, organizations are using the online customer training strategy extensively for external groups like vendors, partners, resellers, and customers.

Many companies, from Microsoft to CISCO, the forward-thinking ones, are developing customer training guides to build a loyal brand following and retain their competitive edge. It has become a secret for growing the business successfully.

So, what is customer service training, and how can it be implemented cost-effectively to increase customer onboarding.

What is a Customer Training Program?

In simple terms, customer service training programs content designed to engage, onboard, and retain existing and new customers. This content is delivered either through on-demand channels or in person pragmatically. The main aim of developing the course and also offering customer education is to ensure that they find value and understand the service or product you are offering to the maximum.

Often customer training examples can be found in organizations or companies come with:

  • A product that needs a customer to change their existing workflow, process, and behavior for the service
  • A product that is complex; hence customers need training before using it.
  • A product that has a diverse user base and caters to different needs and roles
  • Products that regularly upgrades with new functionalities and features
  • Products or services that need extensive support
  • Any suit of services or products that requires cross and up-selling

If you are planning on providing the best customer training program, you need to consider the customer service training program outlets.

The training can be delivered in several formats based on the target audience, the complexity of the product/service, the company’s goal, and the level of knowledge of your customers. Some of them are:

  • Recorded screen-captures
  • Recorded webinars
  • Infographics
  • Slideshows
  • Quizzes
  • On-demand training
  • Schedule classes

The next question that is often asked is what are the benefits of providing a customer training program.

Benefits of Customer Training Program.

It has already been well-established the benefits that customer training best practices offer. Some of them are:

  • Faster onboarding of customers.
  • Reduction in churn while increasing the value.
  • Increase in customer adoption and engagement.
  • Enhanced flexibility and availability of knowledge for the product/service.
  • Lowers the overall training cost.
  • Reduction in support tickets, thus freeing customer care service providers to engage with more pressing issues.
  • Increased ROI.
  • Improve in retention, renewal, and expansion of business.

With these benefits in place, the next pressing question for any company that wishes to develop a customer training program is how to create a customer service training program? In the next section, we will look into it along with why LMS is essential in customer training.

Why LMS is Required for Customer Training?

Before you start launching a customer training program, it is vital to layout the training strategy along with the key objectives. Many companies are now using Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver the customer education process and streamlining the onboarding.

LMS is a software platform that enables the company to build, deliver, and track the training process of the partners, employees, and customers on a global scale. The Customer Experience (CX) professionals and the marketers can build a customized customer education portal that is intuitive too. It can deliver learning content that is engaging and offers a personalized learning journey with detailed analytics for the company.

With LMS in place, customers can have a central knowledge platform to find all the required training materials, which can be accessed on-demand and in a bite-size support tool. The other added advantage of LMS is, you can update and deliver the materials quickly. With LMS in place, you can roll out service changes; update the UI about the new products in no time.

5 Ways To Leverage on Your Customer Training LMS to Increase Customer Training Success

The onboarding program hence needs to prioritize and map out the obstacles they need to address during the customers’ journey. With LMS, there are five ways that businesses can leverage customer training.

1. Formal & Informal Training.

A company can offer content delivery with LMS on diverse media, platforms, and styles. The LMS’s social and structured learning feature allows the customers to engage with other users and share insider tips and knowledge. The feature thus enhances the positive experience where the customer service team can interact with the consumers directly.

2. Automated Onboarding.

LMS offers a range of options when it comes to automated learning. A customer can click on the link given on the marketing material, product landing page, or your company’s social media pages, which will direct the user to the appropriate training material. A user can also self-register, use interactive notifications, single sign-on SSO to get the training.

3. Self-Paced Learning.

With different people having different learning styles, other priorities in life, and personal preferences, scheduled learning can be a detractor. Thus self-paced learning offers onboard or prospective customers to learn your product with flexibility. As a result, customers can get the training and information about the product when they need it. Also, fit the learning within their schedules as they want it.

4. Track the Success.

One of the best benefits of the latest learning technology is its ability to offer metrics on the learner’s activity. The tracking of the learner’s success allows the organization to gain insight into the learning program. Find the gaps to ensure they can be improved. As a result, it warrants customer success.

5. Motivate & Reward.

One way to ensure your customers stay engaged with the training process is to motivate them. LMS can help you with the process by creating leader boards, badges, and certifications. Mainly certifications often prove to be confidence builders where at the core is your product and its competencies.

There are several LMS in the market to leverage the technology for your business, so start creating interactive training programs with the learning technology for your business.

Wrapping It.

It has been noticed that a carefully crafted customer training program with online support and knowledge base along with a library can help you to create actionable insights for your business. Content consumption can help you to fine-tune your marketing strategy and increase customer onboarding, thus enhanced ROI.

right customer training

 

Categories
Blog Customer Onboarding

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding

In this blog, you will learn how to retain and delight customers by creating a successful customer onboarding program for your organization and also about a quick guide to successful customer onboarding.

Also, the factors about how crucial onboarding strategy is to your goals & customer overall experience.

Have a Look at Some Customer Training Best Practices in Brief

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding [#7 Best Training Practices]

Use the table of content to navigate the guide.

Tip 1: What is Customer Onboarding?

Customer Onboarding is creating an intuitive space to enhance your post-purchase customers’ experience & support their aligned goals for your product use.

Your customers are clueless about the extensive use of your product. They might be addressing minor issues via random YouTube product demonstration videos or raising queries to your customer support team.

And even after such aids are there, they still churn it out to tackling major issues.

In short, customer’s situation is like they are already trekking hill while using the basic features, and the marketing team is wondering why products’ advanced features are less in use.

Customer Onboarding Tactics

  • Allow User-friendly Progress
  • Employ Content Value
  • Design Specific Goals (Customer-Centric)
  • Acknowledge Desired Team

Customer Onboarding Tactics

 

Customer boarding is the anchor to hold (retain) your ship (existing & new customers) to the port (product-use) until that ship propels in the direction of the wind (customer expectations), then bon voyage!

Tip 2: Importance of Customer Onboarding Process

There was a time when buying any product if people face complexities or trouble to grip the guidebook instructions, they’d figure it out by their little tricks & twists.

Because people had time and patience back then compared to our modern generation, time is a limited window & choices are available excessively! In such a condition, expecting customers to know your product’s value is demanding.

To understand why your organization needs a customer onboarding program, here are a few stats and reports that addressed this major buyer’s persona shift.

 

Why Your Organization needs Customer Onboarding?

Why Your Organization needs Customer Onboarding

  • Getting new customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining the existing ones. (Invespcro)
  • Customers with a high engagement rate buy 90% more frequently. (GrooveHQ)
  • Your website is likely to have 74% more revisits if your platform is user-friendly. (Think with Google)
  • 66% of adults think valuing their time is vital that a company can offer as a customer experience. (Forrester)
  • Organizations with an initiative to improve their customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average. (McKinsey & Company)

Tip 3: Create a Successful Customer Onboarding Strategy.

Positive Customer-Onboarding confirms that your customer is likely to be a loyal one. There are major two setbacks that increase churns of the customers:

  • If they don’t find a higher scope of product use.
  • If they don’t see any value.

In both cases, customers are likely to drive over to competitions. To minimize churn of customer experience and provide value according to their expectations.

You need onboarding training to improve customer onboarding that’s transparent & responsive. Moreover, a strategy that focuses – set, create, manage, employ, measure, and respond your training program according to customer needs.

How To Create an Onboarding Strategy that Retains & Delight More Customers?

 

1. Set Your Goals.

Firstly, setting smart goals for your customer onboarding will allow you some working space where you can easily monitor individual customers’ progress & provide specific value to their needs from content.

Secondly, the learning space evolves dramatically in terms of customer experience & employee ease.

2. Points To Remember While Setting Your Goals.

 

 

  • Your platform must communicate & collaborate with customers.
  • Include user-friendly training tools.
  • Address to diverse but be content-specific.
  • Your program is to simplify the customer experience.
  • Employ technology for intuitiveness.

Keep these points in your sticky notes while your L&D team and the project manager are setting onboarding program goals.

3. Gather Your Team.

Saas (software as a service) must employ a customer success manager (CSM) who bridges the gap between the sales and support teams.

In contrast to this gap, CSM doesn’t necessarily get into the depth of day-to-day product usage but instead optimizes towards the customer goal attainment by focusing on strategic conversation.

More customer-centric team, more frictionless the onboarding program will run. Moreover, having a CSM along with a project manager will allow your onboarding strategy to drift smoothly even if your program needs changes during the initial stages.

You might be steering responsibilities yourself as well, making sure the flow is maintained. You can address such matter into Subject Matter Expert (SME) like your product selling champ.

4. Time for Whiteboard Strategy.

Align Instructional designers with project managers and SMEs to sketch a customer onboarding journey. From the sign-up stage to the learning progress, segment stages into milestones.

It becomes easy to deploy valuable resources & tools while each customer’s progress to their set of milestones, and you can update their progress consistently.

5. Preparing Your Content.

Once done with the strategy, it is time to designate a content designer (graphics designer preferable).

Convert your learning course into graphics (quizzes, challenges, and other content authoring tools).

6. Right LMS Is A Must.

Invest in the right LMS that can upload & support your e-learning courses. Your e-learning courses might contain content in different mediums like video, image, and text.

So, better invest in LMS that integrates with your learning content.

7. Ready For Testing?

Your testing is your way to validate the efforts you have implied in your onboarding program. Use your beta testers such as top customers or create a community and aware of your new training program. Aware customers are likely to engage as it beeps their mind that it is a known ground.

8. Launch It Live.

Bon Voyage! Use your awareness of pre-launch before making your onboarding program live. Bring a seamless onboarding experience amidst existing ones and acquire feedback from trusted users.

Tip 4: Few Examples of Successful Customer Onboarding

Until now, it’s crystal clear that if you don’t steer your onboarding training consistently, it can flow in any direction. So let’s understand through few successful customer onboarding best practices examples:

1. Canva

Canva provides users a freemium feel for designing & sharing where ever they want. Canva is known for its user-friendly dashboard & personalized brand kit. It offers a library of 2 Million photos, images, icons, and different templates.

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding [#7 Best Training Practices]

2. Duolingo

Duolingo allows every new customer to get aware of their platform through their animated walk-through. They even introduced step-by-step guidance for new users to avoid fussy initially.

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding [#7 Best Training Practices]

3. DropBox

DropBox has an intuitive-based welcoming tool where a set of questions are there for new users to understand & plan their personalization according. It also helps them create a more user-friendly & adaptable platform.

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding [#7 Best Training Practices]

Tip 5: Effective Use of Technology for Customer Onboarding.

Before your customer success manager or team, your customer expects ready-to-assist onboarding support available to them.

It is your time to put technology to work! Deploy multi-channel automated support (AI chatbots and supports suits)

Tip 6: 7 Best Practices to Customer Onboarding

 

7 Best Practices to Customer Onboarding

 

1. Read Your Customer’s Mind

Avoid analyzing through scalable metrics! First, address their behavior, situations, challenges, and personal goals. Customers have to feel successful with their product use.

Over-analysis demands customer participation to provide data that increase customer churn. Be gentle in understanding their needs & set your future strategies accordingly.

2. Show A Clear Picture Of What They Get.

Don’t over-deliver your product value. Customer’s expectations must set as a strategically planned picture. When customers are aware of their end goal with your product, they stay calm witnessing the daily progress & even rely on the advanced features to pace up.

3. Provide Value.

Design your content according to what requires on the customer’s dish. Each customer is having a different outlook of your product. Providing solutions through specifically generated content is valuable.

4. Set Customer-Friendly Goals.

Your Customer Onboarding Strategies must align with progressing customers. Data imports help create an adaptable program ready to re-create, edit and provide customer-centric goals a free hand.

5. Communication Is Your Modern Key.

Use training tools, user-friendly KPI dashboards, and email communication templates to help reduce customer’s churn during onboarding and enable direct communication with your customer
success manager.

6. Fix Setbacks Instantly.

During the initial stage of customer onboarding, there might be various setbacks in communication, the learning process, and even a basic understanding of product use. Train your dedicated support team ready to improvise & enable their system intuitive technology so that they address the issue beforehand.

7. Measure Metrics.

Your saas onboarding best practices is the key benefit to your business goals too. Identify pain points and KPI’s through tracking metrics:

  • Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
  • Churn Rate
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Engagement Rate (CER)

Tip 7: Measure the Impact of Customer Onboarding training!

The moment you exercise these customer training best practices in your onboarding program, you will realize how crucial it gets to measure the impact of detailing you mapped to improve your customer experience.

In the initial stage, in the context of two crucial milestones to measure:

  • The moment the new customer signs up for your product.
  • And the moment they attain their first success with your product.

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding [#7 Best Training Practices]

This analysis will help your onboarding training program to boost customers’ retention rate. And through a time-to-time update on customer engagement levels.

Conclusion:

Onboarding is a success when you employ customer-centric tools & a seamless onboarding experience for customers.

Friction is likely to happen in every training program. Setbacks are a predictable reality, but re-creating through proper customer-involved strategy will evolve your whole business module.

To address your SMART training goals and help create an intuitive program, we act as a tool to hammer & shape your business strategies. Employ the pioneering in learning technology to retain & delight your customers now.

guide to customer onboarding

Categories
Blog Customer Training

How to Engage & Retain Customers with Effective Customer Training Program?

Let’s Know How to Engage & Retain Customers with Effective Customer Training Program?

A range of elements goes into establishing a successful business. At the center stage of it, all is customer service training programs. Any interaction a company or its employee has with a customer affects the business. Hence, in the business world, what separates the chaff from the wheat is the one that offers a succinct customer training program.

As seen in most cases, it is often the customer services that help a company to thrive. It is hence imperative that businesses need to invest in creating the best customer training programs.

Offering excellent and comprehensive customer service training to the employees, stakeholders, and even customers will add value to your product and customers. It will also drive sales and give you an edge over your competitors.

Getting your customers to understand your product and service is vital. By creating a successful customer training strategy, you are putting the business ahead of others.
So if you are still finding this article important and want to acquaint yourself better with the customer training guide and want to know more about it, let’s continue.

We will explain customer training, why it is essential, and how it can help your business.

In businesses, most often, the addressed audience is the internal employees when it comes to eLearning. But in the last few years, there has been a constant surge in expanding the customer service training program outlet. With this service, the target audience is the non-employees, including the stakeholders, distributors, and customers.

The space given with this training allows the customers to enjoy the centralized space to get the answer to their queries and get faster results for their issues.

What is a Customer Training Program?

 

What Is A Customer Training Program

If we look into a customer training guide, it needs to have materials and information about the services or products that are part of your business’s objective. These learning materials can be categorized into three ways:

 

What Is A Customer Training Program

  • Guided learning.
  • Self-paced learning.
  • Combination of guided and self-paced learning.

The kind of category you want to offer depends on your business and also what your customer base prefers and responds to.

A good customer training example is guided onboarding. This can be essential in helping your customers with the launch of new software or products. With this strategy, you can see the result of your product soon.

Along with this, it is also essential to offer customers materials on the product to empower the self-paced learners. They need to have the information they seek at the point of need. One example that we can offer is the on-demand training material or offering a knowledge base.

Why Does the Customer Need to Be Trained?

There are several benefits to creating customer training best practices. This includes a dynamic approach to reaching out to new customers—the opportunity to increase loyalty among the existing customer base.

The simple reason that customer training program work for your benefit is that, like your employees, they also need the knowledge about your products to get the full utility of it. However, without a proper training program in place, mainly an eLearning platform, your customers don’t have access to that knowledge.

Since customers don’t always know where to find the information, often which are hidden in FAQs, Terms of the Service, and Users Guide, providing them with a separate learning module is much more beneficial.

It has often been recorded that most of the information hidden in these formats goes unnoticed while presenting them in a course format does wonder for retaining the information.

Benefits that a Business Can Achieve From Implementing a Customer Training Program Are:

 

Benefits That A Business Can Achieve From Implementing A Customer Training Program

  • Building customer loyalty.
  • Customers will get to know the best way to use your products or services. Also, enjoy the maximum benefit out of it.
  • Ongoing training of the customers also is part of your ongoing marketing strategy.
  • Educating the customers helps with increasing the conversion rate and eventually the ROI of your business.
  • You can engage your customer service team for critical issues instead of mundane know-hows.
  • If you don’t want your customers reading about how to hack into your products, or see unauthorized YouTube tutorials, training them with proper material is essential. They should get the information from the expert, and that is YOU.

How Effective Customer Training Program Helps in Engaging & Retaining a Customer?

How To Engage And Retain Customers With Effective Customer Training Program

 

 

If you want to know how to create an effective customer training program, the simple reason you need to bear in mind is to create a module that will help engage your customers and retain them.

Often when businesses do not engage with their customers, it leaves them unhappy and leads to churning. So if you want to reduce the churn rate, you need to keep them engaging. Relevant training will give them the excitement to know something new. It will give the customers the knowledge and tools to do their work better with your products.

So while you keep the existing customers happy by engaging them, you are also opening up opportunities to get new customers from the references done by the existing pool.

There is also the option of offering an on-demand customer training program, where your customers can access the learning materials directly from your eLearning platform. This method allows you to introduce new products, train them on how to use them in real-time.

The method ensures standardized training for customers while delivering consistent material irrespective of the location.

By creating engaging content, you allow customers to understand your product, the solution, thus enhancing customer loyalty. The process also engages them in a way that support tickets are unable to do with customer services.

Nowadays, many organizations use a learning management system (LMS) to offer online effective customer training programs. LMS helps you measure and track your training material’s success in real-time and see the customer engagement. This ensures valuable insight into the training tools that you offer. You can tie this to the KPIs to analyze the impact it has on your business.

Final Thoughts

If you want to build customer loyalty, keep them engaged and allow them to get the best from your products or services, you must start an effective customer training program. If you are not yet convinced, just think about how your customers will react to the value-added service your competitors will provide with the training program.

Al Enabled Customer Training