Author: CXcherry Marketing

5 Key Strategies to Scale Customer Education and Training [Methods & Tools]

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date October 4, 2022
No Comments on 5 Key Strategies to Scale Customer Education and Training [Methods & Tools]

Customer education and training are critical components for success with any product or service. It gives customers the knowledge they need to use your product or service effectively, which in turn helps you to generate more revenue. There are many aspects of customer education and training – creating content, building messaging platforms, deciding on mediums and formats, and providing them with content that will be helpful to them and their team.

Key Strategies That Can Help You to Scale Your Customer Training Effort

Automation: Automating your customer training and education can help you save time and ensure that everyone is getting the same level of information.
Gamification: Gamifying your training and education can help keep people engaged and motivated.
Social Learning: Leveraging social media can help you reach more people and provide a more interactive experience.
Self-Paced Learning: Offering self-paced learning can give customers the freedom to learn at their own pace.
On-Demand Learning: Offering on-demand learning can help customers access information when they need it most.

Blended Learning Approach: This means using a combination of online and offline methods to provide training. For example, you could use online video tutorials, along with in-person training sessions. This would allow you to reach more people with your education and training programs. One is through paid advertising. This can be in the form of online ads, traditional print or television ads, or even sponsoring events. Another way to create customer awareness is through PR and thought leadership. This involves getting your company and its solutions featured in the media and in industry publications. You can also speak at conferences and events to

Create Detailed Manuals and Guides: Create detailed manuals and guides that customers can refer to when they need help. These should be easily accessible and easy to understand. They should also be updated regularly to ensure that they are accurate and up-to-date.

Provide Customer Support Services: Provide customer support services that can help customers with any questions or problems they may have. This could include a phone line, email support, or live chat. By providing these services, you will be able to scale your customer education and training programs more effectively.

Creating Customer Awareness: It is the first step to scaling customer education and training. Once you have created awareness, you can then start working on getting customers interested in your solutions. You’ve just hired a new customer service agent. Great! But now what? How do you make sure they’re getting the right training and education to help your customers?

It can be challenging to scale customer education and training, but it’s essential if you want to provide the best possible experience for your customers. That’s why we’ve put together 5 key strategies to help you get started.

Key Strategies That Will Help You Scale Your Customer Education and Training

Online training
In-person training
Self-paced learning
E-learning modules
Social learning

Once you have a good understanding of who you’re targeting and what you want them to achieve, you can start developing your strategy.

1. Identify Your Audience – Objectives

Let’s start by defining your audience and objectives. Who is your target customer? What do you want them to learn? Be specific in your goals, and make sure they’re measurable. What type of customer are you targeting? What do you want them to know?

Once you have your objectives in place, it’s time to create a plan of action. This is where you’ll decide on the best way to reach your target audience and how you’ll measure success.

There are many different ways to educate and train customers, and the best approach will vary depending on your business, product, and target audience. But here are five key strategies that will help you scale your customer education and training.

2. Create Content Strategy – A Personalized One

You need a content strategy.

What does that mean? It means you need to come up with a plan for how you’re going to deliver your training and education materials.

It’s not enough to just wing it when it comes to customer education and training. You need to have a plan in place, so you can systematically roll out new content and make sure your customers are getting the most up-to-date information.

Which Things Customer Training Strategy Must Include?

A content calendar
A process for creating new content
Guidelines for who creates the content
A process for approvals
A way to track how well the content is performing

A guide for your content writers on what tone and style to use
The types of content you’ll be creating (videos, articles, tutorials, etc)
Who is your target audience?
The channels you’ll use to distribute your content (social media, email, blog, etc)
How often you’ll be publishing new content?

3. Select the Right Technology Platform – Checkout Tips to Find One

You need to select the right technology platform to scale your customer training and education. It needs to be easy to use and navigate, with a user-friendly interface.

With the right tools, you can make it easy for your team to access the resources they need and for customers to find the information they’re looking for. Plus, it needs to be scalable so that you can add more users and courses as needed. And it should be affordable so that you’re not breaking the bank.

Finally, make sure the platform you choose is reliable and has a good track record. That way, you’ll know you can count on it to help you deliver quality customer training and education programs.

When selecting a technology platform, you’ll want to consider factors like ease of use, scalability, and affordability. You also want to make sure that the platform you choose is compatible with your existing systems and that it can grow with your business.

The right technology platform can make a big difference in the success of your customer education and training initiatives. Make sure you select one that meets your needs and that will help you achieve your goals.

4. Implement an Assessment & Certification Program

How to Implement an Assessment and Certification Program?

Define Your Objectives: What do you hope to achieve with your assessment and certification program?
Choose the Right Assessment Tool: There are many different types of assessment tools available, so make sure you select the one that’s best suited for your needs.
Create Your Assessment Questions: The questions you ask in your assessment will help you determine whether or not someone is qualified to be a customer representative.
Assess and Certify Your Employees: Once they’ve successfully completed the assessment, certify them as customer representatives.
Track and Maintain Your Data: Make sure you track the data collected through your assessment and certification program so you can measure its effectiveness over time.

5. Measure Your Success

Are you seeing an increase in customer satisfaction? Are more customers sticking around? Are they buying more products or services? You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why you need to track the success of your customer education and training initiatives.

If you’re unsure where to start, there are a number of tools and resources to measure. Customer retention software, for example, can help you identify which customers are at risk of churning and then provide you with the information you need to coach them back to health.

Measuring your success is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to customer training and education. You need to be able to track how your team is doing, identify areas where they need improvement, and see what’s working well so you can replicate those successes.

There are a number of ways to measure your success. You can look at things like customer satisfaction rates, engagement levels, or the number of support tickets that are resolved. But no matter which metrics you choose, make sure you’re tracking them consistently and using that data to make decisions about your training program.

Conclusion

You’ve come a long way in your customer education and training initiatives. But as your company grows, so too does the need for a scalable solution. Here are five key strategies to help you get there. Automate where possible – Leverage learning management system (LMS) – Sync training across channels – Embed learning into your product – Gamify the learning process.

Until next time, keep improving 🙂

Tags Customer Education, Key Strategies to Scale Customer Education

Blog Customer Onboarding

Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date February 8, 2022
No Comments on Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers

Do You Want to Know the Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers?

Selling your client’s software isn’t enough to ensure their success, especially if they opt for a free trial first. To successfully onboard people in the future, you must ensure that they understand and use your product appropriately. This customer training strategy can help. The success of your client is your success.

The global value of the SaaS business is expected to reach $110 billion in 2020, with a 14.5 percent annual growth rate. By 2022, it is predicted to have grown to $143 billion.

To get you started, we’ll go through 10 strategies for improving customer onboarding program and providing maximum value and delight to your customers. SaaS onboarding best practices, on the other hand, are never too late to implement, and we encourage you to do so as soon as possible.

Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers.

1. Keep In Touch.

When learning to utilize new software or services, everyone will run into some snags or challenges. Follow up with your clients regularly to see how things are doing and if they require any assistance.

This will assist you in creating a trust while also demonstrating that you are a trustworthy service provider. You can schedule regular phone/Skype talks, online meetings, or outdoor gatherings to discuss any difficulties they may have.

2. Instruct Them.

As a service/software provider in your sector, you should be up to date on all current trends, news, and subjects. To improve your clients’ user experience, educate them on industry news, tips, and methods.

This can be accomplished through online schools, articles, and webinars. Share any fresh, relevant articles you write with them and invite them to webinars where you may inform/educate them and address their concerns.

3. Provide Access to a Wide Range of People.

Providing multiple access levels to different team members is a terrific method to get your client’s team acquainted with all of your software/capabilities. Service allows certain persons to receive invitations to explore different portions of the product.

4. Let Others Know About Your Success.

Providing evidence of previous satisfied and successful clients is a very effective technique. It quickly builds trust in your firm and demonstrates to your client that you know what you’re doing. Create excellent instructional case studies based on previous projects, describing the challenge and how you assisted in finding a solution.

5. Produce User Guides.

You can develop a detailed guide or merely an article, depending on the complexity of your software’s usage, to help new users understand the fundamentals of using your product. Your material could be a Q&A paragraph in which you ask the primary questions and then respond.

Screenshots are nearly always helpful in these instances, so don’t forget to provide them. You can send the user manual to their email address or post it on your website for them to read or download.

6. A Quick Tour of the Product.

Be a fantastic tour guide for your newly registered customer. While emphasizing the features and concrete benefits of your product, emphasize the problem it strives to answer as well as the larger vision of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s one thing to pique interest; it’s another to keep it alive.

Unfortunately, most products lose a large percentage of their first-time consumers after the sign-up procedure. While the reasons for churn may differ, a comprehensive onboarding architecture should generate interesting content to entice users to return to the platform. Make sure they realize the value your product can add to their business or service.

7. Improve Feedback & Communication.

It’s possible that some of your software’s features will irritate your clients or that they will want them to work differently. For this reason, encourage client feedback and idea generation.

Your clients are the ones that use your software/app/service daily, and if they have any suggestions for improving it, you should take advantage of them. Discuss their ideas and proposals in-depth to understand better what they want and how to accomplish it.

Never toss out ideas that aren’t feasible. Even if your client requests something unattainable, take the time to explain why and offer alternatives.

This will increase your client’s trust in you, extend their lifetime value, and demonstrate that you are a caring and responsible vendor. When your client’s happiness grows, your chances of a successful onboarding increase.

8. Instead of Selling Features, Sell Results.

It’s critical to consider your app/service from your clients’ perspective once you’ve outlined all of the features to them. After all, knowing all of the features and how they work is excellent, but your clients’ want is for you to succeed.

Knowing and comprehending features does not guarantee that they will achieve their objectives. To optimize the value you provide as a vendor, you must demonstrate and guide your client to success using your service’s capabilities. Your consumers must believe that they would be able to achieve success by using your program, which is why they should continue with you.

9. Indicate Conversions in the Early Stages.

If your clients have begun to utilize your service and are still in the free trial period, they are technically ready to convert. Why not focus on a faster conversion now that your service has piqued their interest enough to sign up for a free trial? You don’t have to wait until the end of the 30-day trial period to convert your consumers.

You have a few days to make a good impression. Clients are generally open to new ideas, discussions, and learning over the first few days. They want to know what your service has to offer, what features it has, and what techniques and tips they can use to attain their objectives faster.

10. Keep Your Tactics Up-to-Date.

Even if you’ve devised the ideal onboarding plan, it’s critical to keep the process going. With each new consumer, you have the opportunity to learn something new, something you didn’t know or hadn’t considered previously.

Concentrate on the facts and come up with fresh approaches to improve the process regularly. This will aid in ongoing innovation and increase client happiness and allow you to stand out from the competition. Develop a reputation as a SaaS company that cares about and listens to its customers. Also developing customer service training programs can help.

We hope that this list of top 10 best practices every SaaS company must follow to onboard customers help you.

Conclusion.

Design out-of-the-box customer onboarding tactics to impress your new user at every touchpoint, in addition to the broad criteria outlined above. Your onboarding techniques should not only teach users how to use your SaaS product, but they should also emphasize the numerous ways in which they can make their lives easier by continuing to use it.

Tags customer onboarding

Blog Customer Onboarding

The Best Definitive Guide for SaaS Customer Onboarding

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date February 2, 2022
No Comments on The Best Definitive Guide for SaaS Customer Onboarding

Closeup of two content adult business men sitting at table, using tablet computer, working with documents and discussing them in cafe

Are you confused while deciding SaaS Customer Onboarding strategies? Do you want a definitive guide for SaaS customer onboarding? Then this is the right place.

When is customer onboarding necessary in SaaS? Do you have a product that is so self-explanatory & simple that your customer would adopt it at ease? When we say onboarding, in-context, we mean how frictionless your product is for new customers.

SaaS Customer Onboarding is the process of helping new customers get started and stay engaged. What is a good or bad or even worse onboarding experience for SaaS customers?

The straightforward answer to this is: Your onboarding practices must stay aligned with that – First Valuable Moment.

You skipped your assessed step – and you might lose the flow, customers might get clueless about what to do. Then bad or worse becomes a clueless consequence in onboarding experiences.

What are the perfect practices for a successful customer onboarding program? There are no perfect templates or steps that you can imply that will work – It is like a continuous improvement process. You follow a plan – stay in touch with your customers – take note of friction points – and improve!

Especially this guide is for SaaS companies to improve their customer experience, identify customer churn, and increase retention rate through the proven customer onboarding methods with tools to personalized SaaS Customer Onboarding.

If you get inspiration or this blog raised any questions regarding your onboarding, here is your free guide for your late whiteboard sessions.

Use the table of content to navigate the guide.

What Is Customer Onboarding?
Why Is Customer Onboarding Important for SaaS?
How To Implement Right Customer Onboarding? (Tools + Methods)
How To Create A Customer Onboarding Process For SaaS?
Conclusion

What is Customer Onboarding?

Customer Onboarding is like a seed, you nurture it with the right amount of water, air, and sunlight & it will flourish. Similarly, you nurture your customers by introducing them to your products & services, making them comfortable in their initial journey.

When any new customer sign-up to use your product, it means -Customers stimulated an idea in their head about how it would be with your product! It could be your technical setup, your product benefits, your features, or even your UX that might have attracted them to join.

But, if customers are clueless to find what they are looking for as a solution, no matter how easy-to-access or attractive dashboard you have, customers will churn off.

So, your entire efforts must stay aligned with manifesting ideas of the customer to become a living experience for them.

E.g.:- Twitter (content consumption app) makes it so smooth sailing for new users by mapping an image of what kind of journey they desire.

Twitter Onboarding Metrics:-

Twitter allows users to choose their path of interest even before the sign-up – this process creates a space for users choice as in how do they want their journey to start using the application:

Follow your interests.
Hear what people are talking about!
Join the Conversation.

Why is Customer Onboarding Important for SaaS Companies?

It is a Sunday morning & you excitedly planned to head out for a coffee. While sitting near the window of the coffee shop, your attention drew towards two men humping with a large acrylic-on-canvas pop art painting across the street for an art exhibition.

As your interest pursued you to visit the fine art- you stepped in & found yourself surrounded by everything related to art. You are clueless about whether to roam around or keep staring around – unless you are an art connoisseur!

Now, the question of the story asks:

How Do You Think Your Software Relates To Customer Perspectives?

Essentially, which stage of your software positions your customer best value? Remember, It is not about mapping each step in detail – It is about staying in close touch with your customers on the macro level.

To initiate any new customers about your products and services – you must use the power of storytelling.

The Power of Storytelling! (SaaS Onboarding Method)

Everyone loves stories! It is like, you visualized all those characters and storylines within yourself for that duration – And after a while, it becomes a personal journey for you at the end. Does it happen to everyone?

But what is so special about a story? The real magic lies in the hook & the promise!

What is a Hook?

It is that heroic character, that struggling situation, that winning story end that explores ideas & imaginations of the witnessing mind – it sets a clear picture of the journey since the start.

What is a Promise?

It is like connecting dots or a puzzle with each character & situation according to the delivered hook.

Similarly, when you think about how your software can relate to customers, you realize you need a story for your product.

How To Create Your Product Story Framework? (Using Hook & Promise Method)

Like stories involve characters and situations, you need a hook and a promise to start with new customers.

What is the Hook for SaaS Companies?

It is the what of your company – What does your software do?

Now, if you happen to notice the topmost publicly traded SaaS companies in Montclair250 & SaaS1000.com list, you will observe the most successful SaaS companies follow a pattern – It is the hook (what do you do?)

The World Most Successful SaaS Companies – Montclair SaaS 250

And the promise (how you do that?) method in each of their onboarding metrics.

For an e.g.

On the homepage of Salesforce, they use the hook & promise method to communicate with new customers & even engage with old ones to explore their features.

And they say it right underneath the hook step – a promise of how to do it. (Features & Benefits)

Once you get into their footing with this approach – it becomes a communicative expectation for your customers – That is why being thoughtful and intentional with the language is a must-thing because customers will be looking for evidence of what you said on the homepage.

“Onboarding was and is the one truly universal problem every piece of software has.”

When customers find a hook in your story, it is time for you to onboard them smoothly so that they do not feel lost after signing up.

How To Create A Smooth Customer Onboarding Process For SaaS?

Customer Onboarding does not have to be the next big marketing project for your company – that you start considering after realizing the importance of customer participation. Onboarding is like a function of your company – the more you feel the friction that customers are getting, the more you improve & grow.

So, to create a personalized customer onboarding framework, you need to establish a customer-centric approach:

Identify Success (Customers).
Map Milestones.
Find the Friction.
Clear the Path.
Measure & Iterate.

1. Identify Success (Customers).

When your customer starts using your product, they expect a visual – their first win. So, delivering specific goals according to unique customer solutions creates an achievable environment.

Let us take an example,

You are a startup owner looking to explore your services through social media – Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest in its trial stage allows a handful of customized features that can take you forward

Access to their SEO tool
Daily rank tracking
Seo training & support
Personalized Seo suggestion

It does two things from the customer’s perspective: solves the daily ongoing SEO problems & shows them the bigger picture to achieve organic growth for their website.

2. Map Milestones.

You don’t need to map the tiny steps of the customer at the very beginning. Keep your focus on the macro-level output & stay in the loop with the customer’s journey while tackling their ongoing friction points.

3. Find the Friction.

Customers using your software for the first time and customers finding their first success, your efforts is to find that point where you are losing them on a macro level – it will give you enough space & time to improve their ongoing journey.

What was the issue?

The hypothesis tested and excluded:

Is the Customer Unhappy? No, they love it! (High NPS)
Is there a cost that causes churn? (No, there’s a free trial!)
Is it too hard to set up? (Actually, it’s pretty easy.)

Real Explaination!

You might have missed out on a big chunk of customers’ churn while testing & evaluating by yourself. Try out some quantitative analysis. Use these available tools to find out the links between customers’ churn.

Effective analytics tools you can use:

4. Clear the Path.

Once you found the friction, now it’s time to find ways to solve it. There are mainly two ways to solve any friction point in SaaS onboarding:

Technology: Enhance the UX, add a new platform, assist 24/7 chatbots. (Basically, ease off the friction points)
Talk to your customers: Whether it’s a one-to-many or one-to-one conversation about what to do, it is a very unscalable process, so pick up the phone – Ask them! Then try to resolve them in a more scalable manner.

5. Measure & Iterate.

Maintain to keep yourself on the customer’s foot, remember – improving customer onboarding isn’t a project. So, when suddenly improving onboarding pops up again, then it’s probably not why you should do it.

It is a function of the company. It is a continuous process of improvement. So, never stop, find the next friction – improve – find the next friction – improve!

How to Implement Right Customer Onboarding?

1. Welcome email.

Your new customers need to feel reassured and confident about their decision to invest in your product – To make them experience instant gratification or a rewarding experience.

A welcome email can provide access to their instant gratifications (bonus, lucky prize, added features, or even free services)

Miro has enhanced its presence in the SaaS industry like a storm with its easy-to-use and interactive whiteboard sessions.

And Miro has a very creative yet simplistic sense of onboarding new customers with emails. It brings out a “Tips & Tricks” mode for customers during their focus whiteboards and also manages the workflow with a not-so-stressful user interface.

The key ingredients to every compelling Email Onboardings:

It is super easy to read.
It went straight into the customer’s inbox.
It includes a helpful video (What to do next? Or even starting bonus)
It came from the real person. (whom a customer can reach out to query!)
It provides a helpful CTA.

2. Product Walk-through.

A welcoming message at the initial stage is a great way to initiate new customers about – how to get along with the product overview. You can attach a small snippet video about ‘how-to’ start off using your product, or you can use different ways to present product tutorials:

Using Video Tutorials
- Demo/Explainer Video
- Mini-Movie Walkthrough
- Lively Instructions for Complex Products
- Friendly Tips for First Use

An in-app learning section or a small product tour.
Tutorial buttons or pop-ups alongside different features.

Canva makes it fun! Your product tutorial can be simple, fun, and guiding. Take an example of Canva – their growth process is simple & proven in work.

You are free to choose your specific design templates:

And then Canva uses animation to guide you through the first design & will remain a guide throughout the process.

While you use or create design templates – Canva assists along the way with welcome pop-ups and infographics to assist you with features and specific areas of application.

The simple, fun, and personalized product tour resulted in a 10% boost inactivation for the company.

3. Messaging (In-App)

In-app messaging is there to introduce your product or services to customers, especially those who had been using your product for the first time. By delivering welcome pop-ups and brief product tours – you engage with your users right from the start.

Like, take this as an example built with Helppier on Salient Demo. In addition to just onboarding email & messages, they included a specific video & resource for first-time customers to go through before getting started.

Now there are chances that your customer is in a hurry and tries to skip every onboarding step – That’s why try to keep your onboarding In-app messaging as simple & beautiful as these top SaaS companies:

Trello – Keeps it Simple & On-point!

Hubspot – Simple, relatable, and actionable!

Slack – Informative, Direct, and Solution-based.

Conclusion:

Customer Onboarding is a function of SaaS companies. Once your customers sign-up, they need you as a guiding buddy on each step of their journey. Because once the customers are lost or feel churn to move ahead with your product without any assistance – they won’t come back!

So, if you want to increase customer retention and LTV, improve your customer onboarding process and reduce customer churn. We hope that this definitive guide for SaaS customer onboarding helps you.

Blog Customer Education

Top 5 Key Tips to Choose the Right Technology for Customer Education

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date June 25, 2021
No Comments on Top 5 Key Tips to Choose the Right Technology for Customer Education

Top 5 Key Tips to Choose the Right Technology for Customer Education

Consumers buying whatever is being sold to them is a thing of the past now. Nowadays, their behavior is immensely influenced and prejudiced by technology and its advancement. There has been a significant shift in consumer behavior.

As a result, most company leaderships face a never-ending challenge to meet the customers’ expectations. One way to mitigate this challenge is to use the technology to develop a customer education strategy.

In recent years, the customer education service has boomed, and most companies are incorporating this strategy. A recent study conducted by Conductor stated that 131% of the consumers are ready to buy the service or the brand immediately after customer education.

Thus, the figure showcases that the customer education market is becoming a critical factor in creating brand awareness and driving the required conversions.

As mentioned earlier, the best way to educate the customer is to leverage technology. But how to choose the right technology for the customer education, since the market is flooded with many.
This article will provide you with five essential tips in choosing the right technology for customer education.

However, before we jump into that, let’s briefly discuss what customer education is. It is important to note that it is not marketing.

What is Customer Education?

It is vital not to mix customer education with marketing. The components of both can tie in with each other, but certainly, they are not the same.

Advertising and marketing aim to persuade the consumer on an emotional level for the product or service, elaborating on its features and benefits. Customer education is catered towards giving the consumer all the needed information about the product/service.

At the core of customer education platform is how to offer customers the knowledge to use the product/service and solve and mitigate problems related to the product/service.

A customer education program can be viewed as arming the customers with the necessary resources and tools to give them the best and hassle-free experience in using the product/service.

Critical Factors in Developing Customer Education

Some of the key features that will dominate 2021 in developing the best customer education program are

Goals: Analysis of your end goal with the customer training program. It will help you in determining what you want to achieve.
Strategy and Implementation: Develop the strategy, and then implementing it is the key to success. But you need to have that scope in the strategy to improve as you progress with the program and change as per customer’s feedback to make it better.
Proactive Program: Instead of waiting for customers to ask you the question, start communicating proactively by addressing common questions and issues.
Content-Type: Your content for the program should be determined by two factors, your product/service and the type of consumers you have to offer the best result.
Marketing: Once the program is created, you need to market it well so the customers are aware of the education program.
Technology: How you want to impart the customer education program using medium and technology is crucial in its success. New technologies are available and can help you to be more effective.

Focusing on all these factors while developing the customer education program is essential. However, today, where technology is becoming the key in every aspect of our lives, it will significantly influence the customer education market.

When you want to achieve the target and be the market leader effectively and efficiently with the customer education program, you have to choose the right technology.

Top 5 Key Tips to Choose the Right Technology for Customer Education

Let’s begin by saying you need to automate your customer education platform unless you want to serve just a handful of users. The simple reason is that the manual effort will overwhelm you soon and hinder your progress even before you are off the ground.

Here are 5 key tips to choose the right technology for customer education, that will help you with the education program.

In the market, there are different types of technologies available to ensure the successful training of the customers.

1. Artificial Intelligence: When you want to streamline and personalize the customer’s experience while giving them the freedom of understanding and adaptability, this can be your answer.

2. Big Data: If you are using a large volume of information, want to track and have insights into the customer and the impact the training is having, Big Data will help you develop the material better.

3. LMS: It is the heart of digital customer training, also known as LMS (Learning Management System). The system enables view alerts, notification on engagement, receiving evidence of customer learning, and communicating with them. The features offered by this software are:

Content authoring tools for creating lessons with graphics texts, videos, audios along with simulations and scoring.
A repository to keep videos, lessons, pdf, and other resources
A hand-on training feature with the embedded ‘virtual lab
Data management to capture user engagement, delivery, and consumption of the training
Management for certification and automated issuing of credentials
E-commerce component to bundle the material to sell them online
Analytics to keep learners informed of their progress

4. Customer Lifecycle: While this focuses on collecting information, managing the leads, and marketing them, they can also help with training. The features it offers are:

Customer relationship management
Marketing automation
Customer success
Customer service

5. Seamless collaboration & Communication: A real-time non-concurrent collaboration and communication are offered via this software. Often the features include:

Meetings for virtual classrooms, conferences, and seminars, led by virtual instructors
Chat windows to get help and training about the product you purchased.
Community software is mainly targeted for the social media platform where customers and the company connect, educate and share additional insight.
Blog software is the place to share the information and regularly update the customers with new case studies and advice.

Depending on what you want to achieve with your customer training program, you can use the right technology for customer education that suits you. Several other tips can help you to select the right technology.

Final Words.

Irrespective of the business or industry you are in, providing customer education is essential to keep an edge over your competitors. By following these tips, you can find the technology that suits you the best in developing and offering the customer education program.

Blog Customer Enablement

Why Customer Training is Key to Successful Customer Enablement?

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date May 8, 2021
No Comments on Why Customer Training is Key to Successful Customer Enablement?

Before going deep into this blog “Why Customer Training is Key to Successful Customer Enablement?”, let’s have a brief knowledge about Customer Training.

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.

What is Customer Training?

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.

Who Must Think of Customer Training as a Priority?

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.

So, if you are a fast-growing SaaS, PaaS, ISV product company, or an established enterprise you must be considering customer training as the essential enabler to increase your product adoption and increase customer retention.

Some of the regular use cases which should act as a trigger for you to think of investing in customer education are:

SaaS companies with complex modules or features.
PaaS companies with multiple workflows.
Products with complex workflows and customized processes.
Complex value SaaS companies.
High value or costly products where the user needs to train before start using the product.
Products that are highly agile and frequently release new features.
Companies focused on customer centricity and want to reduce support ticket volume.

Why Customer Training?

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.

Key Benefits of Customer Training

Customer Training if done correctly and with the right approach can do wonders for your company.

Benefits of Customer Enablement Training

Key benefits of customer training are:

1. Onboard Customer with Excitement.

Initial customer onboarding drives further customer success. Take away the hurdles from your customer journey in the first go.

2. Enhance Product Adoption.

Customized training path created suiting to the needs of your customer reduces the initial hick-ups in understanding your product and boosts user confidence in your product leading to a better adoption.

3. Increase Revenue & Reduce Customer Success Cost.

If customer training is done correctly it helps to reduce the overall training cost by almost 80% and increases the chances of customer retention drastically.

4. Gain Business Insights with Specific Analytics & Data.

Customer training can provide some amazing business analytics that can help you to identify which features your customers are liking and which they are finding difficulty in understanding. This data can be further be consumed by the product team, a customer success team, support team to work on.

5. Reduce Dependency on Your Support Team Or Customer Success Team.

As the customer gets access to any time training, they can go through each section, again and again, reducing their dependency on your team.

6. Reduction in Customer Support Queries.

Statistics indicate that a well-executed customer education program can reduce the customer support queries by almost more than 35% allowing you to free your bandwidth to support more customers with the same bandwidth.

Customer Training Best Practices

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:

1. Find Your “Why”?

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?

2. Set Smart Goals.

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

3. Define Your Content Strategy.

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.

4. Choose the Right Technology.

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.

5. Run A Pilot (MVP).

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

6. Track & Measure the Effectiveness.

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.

Examples of Customer Training

Some of the great examples of customer training are

Salesforce Academy.
Pega.
HubSpot.
UI Path.
ServiceNow.
Automation Anywhere.
Blue prism.
Freshdesk.
Antworks.
Zoho.

Conclusion:

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!!!!