Author: Vinay Londhe

A professional blogger on customer education,customer training,customer strategy.

How to Build Customer Training Academy Using an LMS [Checklist + Tools]

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date December 20, 2022
No Comments on How to Build Customer Training Academy Using an LMS [Checklist + Tools]

Grab any of your 2-min Maggie Packet and look on its label back, there’s always a recipe for your delicious dish. They don’t just sell you a product but teach you how to make use of it.

This is the purpose of your customer training academy — teaching customers about how to make the most out of your product. This educational process simplifies the complexity (too technical sounded) around your product & services & helps to advance leads further down to dedicated customer onboarding even creating a lubricative sales funnel.

It’s high time! Surface the value of your product by educating your customers and letting them become experts in what they’re using. Because an expert product user is hooked to become your brand advocate.

So, shall we start by understanding why you need a customer-training portal for all this education and how to build customer training academy using an LMS?

Why Do You Need a Customer Training Portal?

Essentially, you aim to create an academy for your customer to make them aware of your product, but, then why do need a customer training portal for that? Is it worth your investment?

Every customer needs something more or less when they’re buying anything online, so it all drips down to the amount of information they have, supporting them in their buying decisions. In simple terms, you need an advanced approach to identify your user’s expectations, goals, nature of work, requirements at their job, etc to create a personalized learning experience.

And hell no, you’re using excel sheets & data segmentation tools to accomplish that process, you need an intuitive portal. You need an AI-tech-driven portal that accommodates a few factors:

Provides a personalized customer experience through Intuitive Onboarding
Reduces churn by providing value-driven solutions
Upsells your sales funnel
Enables your users to become Brand Advocates.
Increases Lifetime value (LTV) & customer retention rate.

An expert user is like a loyal addition – they will see the value earlier in your sales cycles. Even if they’ll consider activating or up-gradation your higher-end services as your academy serves as a gainful experience, they will stick for longer.

To upscale your educational bar, consider offering high-quality industry-related education. It will establish your organization as a though-leader or leader in your industry. Furthermore, it improves your position as a strong brand, attracting more and more leads & easy conversions.

How Companies are Using LMS for Customer Training?

High chance that you already have customer onboarding in place through various means — resource sections (blogs, ebooks, case studies, etc), an auto-responder email sequence, live webinar sessions, or even a live demo about your product use. Considering the time factor, these are time-consuming mechanisms to achieve any desired sales goals.

You need to keep a constant tap on your customer’s life cycle and regulate your training process to enable an environment of self-paced learning. A dedicated customer training portal helps to tap such aspects by personalizing the right content mix to teach the use of your product until the customer reaches their “Aha!” moment.

Segment the courses from basics to expert-level of your product. That’s exactly what Hubspot Academy does with its education academy. They created courses on how to use every tiniest feature of their product, resulting in users buying their premium features to explore more.

How Do You Build a Customer Academy Using LMS?

Let’s take the example of Articulate 360 academy to understand the need for a dedicated training portal. Now, you don’t have to align your goals based on these current academies, just a tap of how successful an academy can be for inclusive lead generation.

This portal was built using Rise 360, a top-rated online course platform (application) and LMS. Rise 360 is a white-label solution with full-customizable features to educate the customer and train the employees or provide courses to a wide audience.

Tips for an Effective Training Portal

When we talk about tools that any organization can employ to create an effective academy – there is a wide variety to implement a training portal. Depending on your S.M.A.R.T goal set in to channel the purpose of your academy. E.g:- You can use tools to establish a knowledge hub. They have an integrated system, providing a range of features to achieve your academy goals.

The Following are Effective Training Portal Features

Lesson-segmenting capabilities

Course-access restriction
Interactive E-books
Interactive Video Content
Media Solutions (Visuals, Audio, Exercises, Quizzes, and Text-format)

These features help enable a unique learning experience for your users and encourage them to upskill enjoyably.

Quick Checklist to Build Customer Training Academy (Using an LMS)

A self-hosted LMS can cost expensive range to set up, but a cloud-based LMS setup might cost somewhere lesser, comparatively. Even though purchasing a learning management system is essential for enhancing your training programs, if you’re hesitant to spend the time setting up your platform properly — your training initiatives may not succeed.

We’re going to assist you in properly setting up your LMS today by guiding you through the checklist of an LMS setup, are you ready? (Sip up a coffee, you might need these pointers for later whiteboard sessions)

Schedule a launch date

Prioritize the first steps

Define your KPIs

Familiarize yourself with LMS

Set up Integration

Establish User Roles

Set up Customer Portals

Upload Relevant Content

Customize Email Notifications

White Labelling & Branding

Finalize Courses & Platforms

Onboard & Enroll Users

1. Schedule a Launch Date

Choose a day/date when your platform will be ready to accept users. This is the first implementation step. So, let’s start from scratch.

Yes, we are aware that the launch of your LMS is less significant than the launch of Elon Musk’s rockets into space, but setting a deadline will help ease the planning stage for a successful training program launch. All we want to suggest is to keep working with your team to choose a day on the calendar so that your business and the stakeholders are trained enough to keep their necks up.

2. Prioritize the First Steps

Prioritize to work on essentials (features, integrations, and learning resources) before launching your LMS. In other words, there may be some features, functionalities, and other course suggestions that might need a detailed inspection eye, not necessarily for the first launch of your training programs.

3. Build an implementation team

Some businesses will take up considerably more time than others, depending on several factors;

Learning resources you need

The size of your business
The level of training delivered

Another thing to consider is that, if your company is getting started (startups), there are chances of hiring any full-time eLearning and training managers or specialized training managers that may get out of budget. For that situation, you can train your employees to implement the program. Start by sketching the picture through questions you need answers for, e.g.:-

Question to Ask to Form the Customer Training Program Implementation Team

Who will upload the content and who will produce it?
Who will consult with and employ specialists to aid in the LMS’s setup?
Who will write customized code for the LMS (if permitted)?

Who is in charge of marketing the new training system to your stakeholders—customers, staff, etc.?

We recognize that your company might have specific demands, so even if these are generalized questions to ask when assembling an implementation team, don’t be hesitant to add additional ones and make them more goal-oriented.

4. Define your KPIs (Measuring Learner Performance)

This step will make sure that as soon as your LMS is operational, your team will be able to assess learner performance right away. Moreover, your company and its trainers can quickly monitor learner progress by using analytics & reports in your LMS.

5. Familiarize Yourself With the LMS

In this phase, you’ve set a date when your LMS will be operational for registered users to access courses, and you’ve organized an implementation team.

The exciting phase is about to begin, Sit tight!

Entering the LMS. Depending on the size of your business, only a few members of your implementation team should be operating the LMS rather than the entire team.

6. Set Up Your Integrations

Integrations are one of the reasons LMSs are such in-demand training solutions for hybrid training of consumers, employees, and other audiences. Through integrations, your company can link external 3rd party programs with your LMS, so that they can support your training requirements.

Whether you utilize default features included in the LMS, it’s always worth checking with your provider to see if it can be connected while you’re setting up the integrations.

Common Integrations in an LMS

Google analytics
Facebook pixel
Hubspot
Salesforce

Other webinar solutions include Zoom, GoToTraining, and GoToWebinar.
Accredited single sign-on (SSO) (for storing CEU and certifications)

7. Establish User Roles

Your LMS needs a systematic approach that clearly defines the access permissions and responsibilities that your trainers and admins have for learners. Just like in universities, when students take tests that are graded by professors.

8. Set Up a Customer Portal

Customers Portals acts as an exclusive training ground for various user demographics you are educating. Therefore, you can skip to the next step if you’re utilizing the LMS for internal training and are not interested in segmenting training by the department.

But, in the case of B2B training, your team must create portals for each of your clients. While creating a portal, you should designate an administrator to run the training sessions for the group of learners being trained.

9. Upload Relevant Content

You have so far started building your training programs in the LMS and uploaded some learning resources, but you haven’t fully developed a course that is prepared for users to enroll in. If you faithfully adhere to this LMS implementation plan, your courses are currently in the form of outlines or drafts rather than finished products (training courses) that are prepared for distribution through internal and external channels.

It’s now time to complete your training programs in the LMS to get everything ready for launch.

10. Customize Email Notifications

If you’re using a cloud-based LMS, you might already have an email notification system built into your platform, depending on your LMS provider. What are these LMS notifications for?

4 Reasons Why to Use LMS Email Notifications

Sending out notifications to users to tap their learning progress.
Updating your learning about new resources or relevant courses.
Enhancing learner’s involvement in a course.
Promoting new training and courses.

The LMS can help you keep your learners more engaged and on schedule in completing their training programs. So, you must try to customize your email notifications according to your course requirements.

For example, a trainee who enrolls in a course using your LMS ought to get an email including their account and password. The ones who need to reset their LMS passwords also require an email.

11. White-Labeling & Branding

Since many LMSs are white-label platforms, you may replace any vendor ties by attaching your logo and brand assets to the platform. Your user may feel more at ease when your training LMS is visually customized representing your brand (colors, graphics, and unique pages & URLs).

Advantages of White Labeling:

Enables a Learning Environment (customizable branded features)
Hide vendor ties
Provide personalized instructions

Since each LMS is unique, find out what your provider has to offer in terms of white-labeling before starting to customize.

12. Finalize Courses and Platform

In this step, many of you are ready to click “Publish” and onboard your users. But since there are many factors responsible for the training to be successful — invest as much time as you need to detail your road map.

After that, you can access templates to evaluate your training programs here, check that everything is functioning as it should, and polish all of your courses and learning materials.

13. Onboard and Enroll Users

The team manager feature sells online staff training courses in bulk directly to businesses’ LMS eLearning platforms.

Put your LMS to the test right now. Get your team managers to send out bulk direct mails to businesses “LMS e-learning platforms” and onboard them into the LMS system. Easily said than done, we understand, that’s why you might need a customer training onboarding guide to keep your process in flow.

Aye, high time to launch your customer portals as well if you’re conducting external training. Make sure you implement the best practices you can go about onboarding users into the system if you haven’t already.

Challenges for Making a Customer Training Academy

Traditional customer training methods in different learning environments (Hybrid Workforce)
Course promotion and Increased competition

Lack of time or resources to finish objectives
Failing to make a good first impression
Using old training manuals
Burning out your customer training team

Conclusion

Educating customers is a continuous process. You might face friction points while establishing your seamless training program, but setbacks are meant to let you restructure your entire process & re-create using tools & strategy to evolve your entire organization dynamics.

So, to ensure your customer training academy is helping your customers to understand your products & services better – Start with a Free LMS Demo to have a peek at how it shapes your training strategy in a personalized manner.

Tags Customer Training, Customer Training Academy, Customer Training LMS, Customer Training Software

Blog Customer Education

How to Use Customer Education As a Marketing Tool [Tips & Checklist]

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date July 26, 2022
No Comments on How to Use Customer Education As a Marketing Tool [Tips & Checklist]

Customer education, in the simplest term, is a marketing strategy. This doesn’t mean other strategies are an unreliable fit to upscale your ROI. But with global disruption and customer thought-process shift — actively “pulling” information to support their purchasing decisions, you need a more inclusive marketing strategy.

Customer education solely depends on your objectives. Whether you want to increase product adoption, generate demand for your product, increase conversion rate (free to paid users), or even prioritize having a talent pool of qualified people that uses your product. If your priorities are amongst any of above mentioned, your education must report to marketing & sales reps. So, shall we start to know about how to use customer education as a marketing tool [tips & checklist].

Importance of Customer Education

In the digital-savvy and information-driven culture, customer education is a valuable asset for any marketing team. Gone are the days when worn-out sales pitches fueled the ROI of any organization. Because, nowadays, customers are putting their necks out to educate their buying decisions. So, it all drips down to how aware are the customers of your product and services.

Recent research by New Century Media suggests that companies who invest in customer educational assets foster consumers 29 times, who are likely to buy. The best example of this is Hubspot Academy, the people who take their courses or even read their blogs are more likely to buy their offerings. So, it is not rocket science.

It is a question of consumer thought-process shift — actively “pulling” information to support their purchasing decisions. This shift in the digital culture has created a context in which consumers feel the need to engage with your products, and your services, through a deeper & meaningful, bite-size education.

Furthermore, Forbes former contributor, Steve Olenski, articulated in his Education-based Marketing blog that;

“Today’s consumers won’t do business with people they don’t trust.”

As consumers expect immediate gratification, it gets harder for them to buy unless it’s on their terms and timetable. Hard fact, but true! So, for them to trust you, they need to feel assured that they are dealing with the right company that has their best interest in mind.

How to Implement Customer Education as a Marketing Tool?

1. Align Your Goals

To launch any successful customer education program, you need to understand the dynamics of the business impact it has. And to figure that out, you need to align your goals on every level of your company functions.

So, what are your priorities? To generate demand for your product? Increase your product use? Increase conversion rate (Free to paid users)? Or do you want to create a talent pool of qualified people to use your product?

After establishing above mentioned priorities for your organization — align your set goals within every hierarchy level of your organization.

Business Goals: Conduct a whiteboard session with top leaders & decision-makers of your company to discuss traction metrics such as customer acquisition, lifetime value (LTV), and other metrics. Without the top-bottom sync, the customer education program won’t get very far.
Departmental Goals: The impact of customer education is felt across different degrees in different departments of your company, be it, sales, marketing, and customer success team. To acquire proven results, you need re-assure what they are using as proxies for customer success, currently. Therefore, customer education will become a helpful user-level metric for them as well.
Team Goals: Team goals are all about your sync impact. To create a win-win situation while implementing customer education, you need to convey synchronous efforts — think user-level metrics. Aligning a singular set focus & consistency will bring a great impact on your engagement rates & course completion.

2. Allocate Resources

The bluntness about customer education is you’re not going to reach your dream state, right away. Optimizing your customer education program for your unique set goals & message will take time. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the first step. To create a solid foundation and reach an educational state like the academy, you might face hurdles like lack of resources & unsatisfied response gaps.

But focus on gains, not gaps. Avoid fixing your eye on global-class academies like Hubspot when you are just starting. Focus on your gains. Be it the smallest effort today, your needle should be moving in the right direction. Because, if you’re constantly peeking out on others’ examples, you’ll struggle on your grounds. That being said, it’s cool to have an idea of what’s going around about features and resources, it’ll help you to keep the tap on current trends.

Creating your academy doesn’t necessarily mean that the resources and tools required must come from your repository and budget. Allocate resources by borrowing useful material from other departments, that might have expandable resources, you can use. For example, for any subject matter topic, you can use your specialists to shoot a quick 5-min explanatory video session.

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Never underestimate the power of words. Have round-table sessions (virtual works too) with your teams weekly or monthly to discuss the progress. Host theme-based events to bring & connect different departments on the same page. Yeah, you can use event fliers & memes, and paste them around the wall to let the message roll. Eventually, the intent is to bring visibility to create momentum.

3. Create & Deliver

Now you already know what kind of goals sets and business outcomes you’re aiming to drive, so the question comes, what sort of objectives will help your customer achieve through your educational assets — that’ll eventually lead to your business outcome that you’ve identified?

In technical terms, this is called “Learning Objectives”. After you have nailed down your learning objectives, you can start laying out the entire journey that your customer will have to accomplish their objectives. Most importantly, when you are in this stage, consider the following:

Subject Matter: Subject Matter is perhaps the most significant decision in your customer education program, it means what you are going to educate your consumers about. As the simplest example, let’s say you wish to educate your customers about your products. But, don’t you think that’s a broad topic.

So, work with your subject matter experts to narrow down your content scope, at the start, and find priorities. Them be it in a specific feature or even a function you feel helpful.

Content Mix: In this process, you need to conduct white sessions with your instructional designer to decide the type of content (or platform) you are going to produce. Most learners don’t respond to a heap of words, including videos, infographics, and slideshows to foster the fast-learning cognitive capacity of your consumers. The purpose is to create a dynamic learning environment, so the more creatively exciting mix it gets, the more easily it is absorbed.
Content-Length: The concept of your perfect content mix works this far. The reality of consumers nowadays is that most of them don’t have time to sit back and invest hours at end to learn. This is why you need to find a short & snappy way to get into a 5-10mins window. Creating 7 short video sessions is way better than 1 long webinar session.
Delivery Process: Once you align your goals, find ways to get the resources, and create the right mix & length of your content, and its delivery time. Delivery is about enabling a system that supports scaling your mapped-out customer education program. To make use of this, you need a tech stack integration to operate your education program while deploying the resources that you’ve developed earlier. Don’t forget to engage with your customer in their learning stages while you reach the last step to measure their progress.

4. Measure

Feedback time. Gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback to improve your customer education program. Your efforts here are to know what your customers think about your program, so keep your doors open for any kind of suggestions or feedback. You can embed survey forms at the end of each course completion section or even mail them up.

Keep on assessing your customer education progress at deeper levels, by looking into learning proficiency, operational impact, relationship growth, and even ticket cost.

5 Tips to Strategize Your Education-Based Marketing

1. Use Omnichannel Strategy to Spread Your Brand Message

To drive diverse audience interest, you need to have an omnichannel marketing strategy in place, to provide a myriad of multiple mediums (social media, website, direct mail, review websites, publicity, and even phone calls). Establish a meaningful and close connection with your consumers by reaching them where they are, mostly. An easy way is to fetch a Social Media Marketing (SMM) buyers persona in place, that will help you to segment your audience (gender, educational background, age, industry, goals, challenges, etc)

2. Ask for Reviews & Feedback from Your Learners

You got to encourage your consumers to leave feedback or review that will help to revamp your education program strategies & progress effectively. Remember to make it a fun activity by employing gamification instead of forcing their experience with your program.

3. Create an Engaging Content Mix (Blogs, Videos, Infographics, etc)

Your customer education program is simply to transform/create a perceptive about how you do business. So, don’t rely on heaps of information instead make it an exciting & engaging mix of content. (Employ Social Media Strategies aligning your content mix)

1. Have a mobile-friendly website interface (Optimize accordingly)

For any website interface to be mobile-friendly, you need to have a session with your UI/UX experts or try with your developers to fill out the gaps. Your consumer is expecting an easy-to-access & guided navigational journey, so remember to optimize your page loading time & navigable elements to be mobile-friendly.

2. Invest in building Education Applications

Applications are the safest way to produce proficient learners. It offers a sense of convenience in the learner’s journey. Creating an education-based app can help you maximize your ROI while building a community of talent – ready to use your product.

Customer Education Process

The customer Education program can take up many forms. As it’s evolving with time — your approach should be unique like your product and services. As different companies have different objectives, customer education varies timely. Let’s say as we discussed your objective is to create a talent pool of proficient people that uses your product. So, options like instructional content, infographics, guidebooks, interactive weekly sessions, case studies, and product tours are super scalable educational resources to accomplish the above-mentioned objective.

Fundamentally, the question about the customer education process lies in both the educational & learning objectives. So, there is no such thing as the right format or process. Once you think about the user’s journey, your customer education must shape that perceptive of understanding the stages that consumer goes through when they are using your product.

After you have decided “why” you want to educate your customers, it’s time to understand “how” you’ll educate them. In this segment, you’ll need to consider different consumer journeys. If your ultimate goal is brand loyalty, there are likely various ways to get there.

All you need to create digitally-savvy and engaging educational resources and deploy them using the right technology.

Customer Education Process Checklist to Get Started

Set SMART goals
Create relevant content (Mix to engage)
Strategize before launch
Keep on Measuring
Employ the right technology
Evolve & Progress

Why to Use Customer Education Software in SaaS Companies?

When you streamline your educational resources, you need a suitable technology that supports your academic foundation. Getting the right technology doesn’t mean the absolute “right” but it boils down to your right or suitable tech needs.

Artificial Intelligence: Every consumer has a broad sense of understanding of different products & services they want to use/buy. So, to narrow down such a broad sense, you need an intuitive system to analyze your audience (wherever they are) & simulate your message without human error.
LMS (Learning Management System): Customer education is not any lesser than conducting training sessions. Without a proper dynamic system in place, information is just like words with no purpose. So, from streamlining your content and segmenting your audience (learning goals, progress meter, gamification, and objectives) to deploying your educational program (insights, content authoring tools, simulations, and big data repository) — Learning Management System becomes a necessity for any success to happen.

Depending on the objectives you want to accomplish with your customer educational program, you can employ the right technology that suits your needs.

How Does Customer Education Impact on ROI?

Customer education has the potential to impact any organization’s ROI with consistent efforts & strategies in place. In the recent studies, it was found that on average companies reported a 6.2% increase in revenue whereas a 7.4% increase in customer retention led to a 6.1% decrease in customer support costs.

While customer education is observed to boost marketing & sales results, it’s just a matter of strategic effort that high-success companies leverage such educational strategies to outperform the average and low-scale companies in every category, by the whopping rate of 30%, in over a year or so.

Customer Education can have an impact in different degrees, not limited to sales, but resulting in brand advocacy and an increase in LTV.

So, after such compelling evidence, a customer-first approach is needed to boost to a 16X higher increase in customer retention/satisfaction rate.

Conclusion

Regardless of the nature of your business, or your industry, customer education is the competitive edge & need of the hour for every company to adapt to the global disruption. In this blog, if you have any queries regarding the right technology to get you started with your customer education program, do let us know, we’d love to give you a free demo.

Customer Education

4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education for SaaS Companies

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date June 23, 2022
No Comments on 4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education for SaaS Companies

A majority of individuals stop consuming a product or service not because they do not find it useful or because it is not capable of solving their issues. Rather, they stop consumption because they find it challenging to get habituated to it.

People look for products and services that are easy and capable of solving complex issues. And, as a SaaS company, you must cater to their needs. Regrettably, few such businesses have come to the realization and have been able to successfully implement it.

According to a recent study,

“About 40% to 60% of consumers who sign up for an unpaid trial are likely to utilize a company’s products and services and never return.”

It is just 2.7% percent of those who continue to stick to these services after the trial. So if a user abandons your company, either they have not used your product enough to like it or they didn’t like it at all. So in the cases where the problem is in your hands, you must try to address them.

When customers sign up for a service or a product, they do so only when they are sure about its capability of solving their problems. Thus, among the several reasons for users leaving, poor onboarding is one of them.

SaaS businesses tend to make several such mistakes while providing customer education, which overall decreases their ROI and reduces the value of their products among customers.

So, to prevent you from taking any steps that hinder the growth of your venture, we are here to share some of the key mistakes that you must avoid.

In this article, we will take you through the entire process of customer education and share some of the essential aspects associated with the same.

So, without any further delay, let’s dive in to know 4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education For SaaS Companies.

What is Customer Education?

Customer education refers to the content that is created for onboarding, engaging, as well as retaining existing and novel customers. This content is delivered through on-demand and in-person channels, based on the requirement of the consumers.

Also called customer training, it aids the users to get a better comprehension of the services and products of a SaaS business and find reasonable value in the same.

Based on the level of knowledge of users, the complexity of products, target audiences, and the business’s goals, a company may provide customer training in varied formats.

Customer Training Formats

1. Knowledge Checks, like Quizzes

Knowledge checks help the company and the consumers both since they aid in measuring the consumers’ level of comprehension. Also, the scores can further motivate the users to remain engaged with the content for a longer period.

2. Slideshows

By uploading previously used content during in-person training, businesses can indulge the users greatly.

3. Infographics

To recycle current marketing content, infographics in the form of PDFs are helpful for companies and customers. Businesses can simply provide fast facts and overviews related to their products and services.

4. Recorded Screenshots

One of the best ways to train customers is by providing them with step-by-step instructions for complex processes and configurations.

5. Recorded Webinars

The most engaging content in customer training is through webinars. Customers can get an overview of the interface of a product.

By producing engaging content in varied formats based on the needs of users, companies can get many benefits, which are highly advantageous for their growth.

Importance of Customer Education in the SaaS Industry

While several businesses may not realize it, customer education can be highly profitable for their overall growth due to its positive influence on essential metrics from support contact rate, to the adoption of products and services, to marketing leads.

A more detailed illustration of the reasons for its importance is provided below.

1. Improved Customer Satisfaction

Higher customer satisfaction implies customer loyalty, which further indicates higher profitability. So by training customers, a company teaches them how to use their products and services, which increases the overall probability of satisfaction among customers.

2. Increased Customer Engagement and Adoption

A business’s customer training program directly impacts the following:

Customer satisfaction
Customer independence
Product usage rate

When the customers master the products and services of a company, the overall level of engagement and adoption augments.

3. Enhanced Expansion, Renewal, and Retention Rates

Several factors like competition and poor onboarding can result in customer churn. However, when a business invests in customer education, the customers get access to tricks and tips that offer them higher value.

Educated customers are more likely to expand and renew, thus, increasing retention rates.

4. Enhanced Product Development

When users raise support tickets, their questions will be of higher relevance to the kind of implementations and improvements that the product needs. Thus, their feedback will aid in product development.

5. Decreased Support Tickets

Investing in customer training can help businesses save on customer support tickets. The most common questions that are asked by customers can be provided to them in the form of help articles.

6. Higher ROI

Customer education results in customer retention since they value the products and find them useful once they understand their importance. So, when you spend lesser on gaining new customers through marketing and are rather focused on customer retention, your company’s return on investments or ROI is simply higher. Also, a satisfied customer is likely to make the business more profitable in the long run.

7. Quicker Customer Onboarding

By being able to provide a smooth onboarding process to your customers, you will:

Build the customer’s trust
Gain higher reputation
Educate several customers
Make sure that all users begin with the same information
Create a consistent understanding

How to Start With Your Customer Education Process?

Based on the extent to which customer education is important for a SaaS business, you might now be willing to know how you can start with the process. Well, given below is a basic step-by-step guide to provide you with an idea.

Step 1: Define Goals

By setting up the goals you wish to achieve through the training program, you will be able to define your objectives and measure the program’s progress.

Step 2: Situation Analysis

Based on your goals, perform an audit of your present learning material in case you have an ongoing customer education program. You must conduct an audit of your customer’s experience after purchasing as well.

Step 3: Check Resource Availability

Apart from your existing learning material, you will require several other resources. Allocate the budget and decide time boundaries as well.

Step 4: Consider Learning Styles of Users

Based on the kind of audience you have, think about the learning styles and spaces that will be the most suitable for them. Consider the amount of time they will spend, the tone of voice for content, and the requirement for visual elements.

Step 5: Decide Your Medium

Once you have understood the learning styles of your consumers, you are ready to decide on your medium of training. There is a wide variety of choices. For instance, it can be a YouTube video or an in-store demonstration.

Step 6: Regular Checks on Program

Set quarterly or annual checks on your training program to measure the progress that the customers are making. The metrics will help the program evolve based on the feedback and overall review.

Why use Customer Education Software in SaaS Companies?

When a SaaS company decides to use customer education software, it is opting for several benefits, which include the following:

1. Improved Security

If you want your business to keep growing, you cannot risk the personal information of your consumers and allow any kind of data theft or breaches. So when you use software for customer training through an authorized vendor, you get higher security.

2. Monetization

If your team of trainers possesses important knowledge associated with your products and services, you can sell it in the form of a course and thus, earn money.

3. Enhanced Reporting

The software will provide you with information regarding users’ progress, the content accessed by them, data visualization, the impact of training on users, and much more.

4. Choices for Offline Learning

Some vendors provide software that allows users to download and access content in offline mode as well.

5. Mobile-Friendliness

With a majority of the world’s population using smartphones to perform daily activities, the software training program must be mobile-friendly. By opting for such software, you will augment the users’ activity and indulgence.

6. Dynamic Education

Similar to the recommendation of videos on YouTube based on previous activity, training software suggests content to customers based on their learning. Also, the customers can define their learning paths, which cater to their necessities. This enhances retention and adoption of knowledge in the longer term.

Top Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Education for SaaS Companies

To make sure that your customers get the best learning experience and also begin to value your products and services like you want them to, these are the top mistakes that you must avoid.

1. Poor Relation Between Educational and Business Goals

Based on the goals of your business, you must set the goals for your customer education program. For instance, if the aim is to decrease the number of support tickets raised, you must make an FAQ section on your company’s website addressing the commonly asked questions.

2. Poor Customer Training Strategy

If your strategy is not clear and goal-oriented, it will be short-lived. Thus, to avoid this, you must form a step-by-step plan based on your goals and define the metrics that the company will utilize for measuring progress.

3. Disregarding KPIs and Metrics

When you disregard KPIs and metrics, you will never know the areas of customer education that need improvement. So, measure the engagement rate, net promoter score, customer lifetime value, and customer churn.

4. Poor Choice of Customer Education Medium

A poor choice of medium for customer education implies a waste of time and money. To avoid this, you must consider the type of audience, their educational needs, and your educational goals.

Quick Checklist to Educate Customers in SaaS Companies

Before beginning your customer education program, you must ensure that all the crucial aspects have been taken into consideration. For your ease, we have made a checklist for the same:

What kind of customers do you have?
What are the business goals?
What are the goals of the customer education program?
Who is responsible for ensuring the smooth functioning of customer education?
What are the required resources?
Which mediums will be used for educating customers?
On what basis will the success of the program be evaluated?
On what basis will the software be chosen?
How will the Learning Management System be managed and implemented?
How will the customers be informed of the LMS?
Which teams are involved in educating customers?

Once you have answers to all these questions, you are ready to start educating your customers about the products of your company.

How Does Customer Education Impact ROI?

By educating customers, companies get loyal and satisfied customers. For these reasons, the rate of retention is high and so is the return on investments. Customer education impacts ROI in various ways, which are as follows:

1. Higher Rates of Customer Retention

Acquiring a new customer is five times more costlier than retaining an existing customer. By educating customers about the use of your products, you enhance value, which leads to customer retention.

2. Higher Customer Satisfaction

When customers have a proper understanding of the utilization of your products, they are likely to be more satisfied. And higher customer satisfaction means renewal of services, which leads to a higher ROI.

3. Word-of-Mouth Publicity

Happy customers are likely to recommend the company’s products and services to their friends and family. This method of advertising is highly beneficial for businesses since it does not require investments and the possibility of customer acquisition is high.

Conclusion

Customer education is a crucial part of SaaS businesses since it makes the users understand the proper use of products and services and makes them comprehend their value. However, the extent to which companies make mistakes while running a program of customer training makes it unworthy of time and money.

In this article, we discussed some of the most prominent mistakes that you must avoid to have a successful training program. By choosing the right software, and the most suitable mediums, valuing metrics and KPIs, and relating your business goals with educational ones, you can get great ROIs through customer education.

Tags 4 Major Mistakes to Avoid During Customer Education For SaaS Companies, Customer Education

Blog Customer Training LMS

List of Top 10 LMS for Customer Training

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date June 3, 2022
No Comments on List of Top 10 LMS for Customer Training

Digitalization has proven to be a lifeline for many businesses in the post-COVID world. The COVID-19 crisis has brought years of change in the way companies think and work in only a few months’ time, with physical contact restricted to a bare minimum.

Since COVID-19, there has been a considerable increase in the use of language applications, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools, and online learning software.

In Graphical Research, it is estimated that the Asia Pacific E-Learning Market will cross $90 billion by 2026. This research gives us an insight into the evolution of E-learning and the rise of digital transformation.

During the pandemic, it was not just a challenge of companies’ capacity to encourage employees and customers to embrace new forms of business engagement and connection, but it was also a challenge of their ability to fast-track technology implementations. To tackle this difficulty, several companies attempted to create their own LMS to train customers.

Let’s begin by understanding what LMS for customer training is. You can get all the information you need right here.

What is an LMS & What are its Uses?

LMS is the website or web app used for administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of training courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.

While using the LMS, an admin can easily control the content and measure the impact of the training on the employees and customers.

What is Customer Training LMS?

The customer training LMS is purposefully in-built software that helps to show the product in a structured and controlled manner so that it will be easy to understand the customers. Customer can opt for the courses suitable for them as per their training and upskilling needs.

Do you want to know about the top LMS for customer training? If yes, then this is the best destination for your search.

According to Our Research, the Following is the List of Top LMS for Customer Training

Skilljar
Docebo
Raven360
CXcherry
Talent LMS
Absorb LMS
360 learning
Northpass
LearnUpon
Teachable

Let’s know more about each LMS for customer training in detail.

Skilljar

Skilljar is the leading customer training platform founded in 2013 and has 175 employees & headquarters are in Seattle. Skilljar is the best external LMS that helps companies to accelerate product adoption & increase customer retention and lower the cost to support.

The main advantages of using Skilljar LMS for customer training are driving adoption, scaling resources, and growing revenue.

The Main Features of Skilljar LMS for Customer Training are as Follows.

Actionable Data & Insights
Enterprise-ready Support
Audience-specific Portals
Support for multiple content types
Powerful Integrations
Built-in assessment & certifications engine
Built-in eCommerce & revenue generation functionality
Customizable user experience
Enterprise-grade reliability & security
Native data & analytics

Specialties:

Customer Success, Customer Onboarding, LMS for Customer Training, Learning Management, LMS, Extended Enterprise, SaaS, Customer Engagement, Customer Retention, Customer Enablement, Product Adoption, and Customer Education

2. Docebo

Docebo is a recognized LMS for customer training. If you want all your learning challenges to get solved quickly, Docebo is the best LMS for customer training. You can create and manage content, deliver training, and measure the business impact of your programs with Docebo LMS for customer training.

With the help of Docebo, you can simplify problems like Customer education, partner enablement, and retention.

Docebo LMS for customer training aims to support customer lifecycle, drive product adoption, and build partner channels. It is a single suite for all your enterprise learning needs.

Key Features of Docebo LMS for Customer Training are as Follows.

Audit Trail
Automation
Certifications and Re-training
Courses Catalog
Custom Domain
E-Commerce
Enrollment Rules
Extended Enterprise (multi-domain)
External Training
ILT-Classroom
Gamification
Learning plan
MOOC Builder
Notification
Power Users
White-labeling

Specialties:

E-learning, Elearning, LMS, Cloud E-Learning, LO, E-Learning As A Service, E-Learning Marketplace, E-Learning Ecosystem, E-Learning Apps, Artificial Intelligence, Learning Suite, Extended Enterprise Training, Partner Training, LMS for Customer Training, Onboarding, Compliance Training, and Sales Enablement

3. Raven360

Raven360 LMS for customer training helps you create training experiences easily & connect your sales teams with prospects.

You can customize content & learning paths for educating users, creating happy customers, and turning clients into product champions. It is the best platform for retaining customers & generating revenue.

Raven360 brings technology and users together through hassle-free LMS for customer training & empowers your customers and unlocks growth by automating every step of your training program that involves building content to billing and collections.

the Following are the Features of Raven360 LMS for Customer Training.

Instructor-led Training
Face to Face Classes
Virtual Instructor-led Training
On-Demand Training
Hands-On Labs
Fully Mobile—Any Browser or Device
As Easy as E-Commerce
Video Training & Coaching
Gamify Training

Specialties:

Secure content distribution, Sales Enablement, Coaching, Onboarding, Assessments, Advanced Learning Analytics, Integrations, Sales Readiness, Gamification, LMS, Corporate LMS, Enterprise-grade LMS, Training, Partner Training, LMS for Customer Training

4. CXcherry

CXcherry is the best LMS for customer training since it helps with onboarding, adoption, retention, reducing support tickets, building brand champions, and enhancing upselling. With an easy-to-use, modern, and purpose-built customer education platform, CXcherry streamlines the customer enablement process. With the help of CXcherry LMS for customer training, you can onboard, engage, and retain your customers.

CXcherry is a single suite that increases revenue, lowers customer churn, and encourages product adoption. It’s an all-in-one customer training platform that lets you turn your customers into product champions and brand advocates for the rest of the globe.

CXcherry has the Best Features as Follows.

Easy Administration
Intuitive User Engagement
Easy Content Upload
Built-In Certification & Assessment Engine
Multi-Domain Functionality
API Driven Third-Party Integrations
Data Intelligence & Reports
Enterprise-Grade Reliability & Security
Powerful Integrations

Specialties:

LMS for Customer Training, Customer Education, Customer Success, Customer Onboarding, Learning Management System (LMS), SaaS Customer Training Platform, Customer Engagement, Customer Retention, Customer Enablement, Partner Training, Extended Enterprises Training, Partner Enablement, e-Learning, and Customer Experience

TalentLMS

TalentLMS LMS for customer training helps users quickly create courses quickly to be available everywhere with easy management that saves support time by providing a user-friendly experience that allows you to connect with your tools to automate everything.

You can achieve all types of training like onboarding training, compliance training, partner training, and extended enterprise with the help of TalentLMS LMS for customer training.

Features of TalentLMS LMS for Customer Training.

Course management feature is content-friendly that supports SCORM, cmi5 & xAPI with an assessments engine & surveys engine.
Learning delivery helps in blended learning, gamification, certifications, rich communication tools, Video conference support
Enterprise-ready reporting, branching mass actions, API Single Sign-On, integrations, security, GDPR-friendly
White labeling that is customizable, themeable
System with an interactive user interface having high web standards
Accessible with mobile
Multilingual

Specialties:

e-Learning, Learning, Human Capital Management, Cloud Computing, Learning Management Systems, and LMS for customer training

Absorb LMS

Absorb LMS for customer training can be used to create brand advocates. Absorb LMS helps businesses to earn their customers trust and loyalty that will lean into customer training. You can expect all the functionality in an LMS, plus unique features that empower customers to deploy an intuitive customer learning portal. With Absorb LMS, you can improve customer experience, drive positive business outcomes, and track customer success.

Some of the Primary Features of Absorb LMS for Customer Training are as follows.

Smart Administration
Learner Engagement
E-Commerce
Reporting & Analytics
Learner Experience
Observation Checklists
Content Libraries
E-Signatures
Mobile App
Artificial Intelligence
Absorb Pinpoint
Performance
SCORM Compliance
Integrations

Specialties:

Learning Technology, Learning Management Systems, E-Learning, Corporate Training and Development, Compliance Training, Upskilling, In the Flow Learning, Onboarding, and Professional Development, LMS for customer training

360Learning

360Learning LMS for customer training lets us crowdsource learning needs, find people with in-demand expertise, empower experts to collaborate with L&D, scale course development, maximize course quality and engagement and turn collaborative learning into your competitive advantage.

360Learning builds a culture of collaborative learning to upskill from within and win the battle for skills.

Few Best features of 360Learning LMS for customer training are as follows.

Authoring Tool
Knowledge Check
Content Integrations
Collaborative Editing
Collaborative Learning
First-class User Experience
Mobile Learning
Learn In The Flow Of Work
Dashboards
Blended Programs
User Management
Academies
Customization
Custom Integrations

Specialties:

LMS for customer training, social learning, LCMS, E-Learning, Learning Management System, LEP, Learning Organization, Engagement, LXP, Authoring Tool, Peer Learning, Learning Suite, Collaborative Learning, eLearning

Northpass

Northpass is the platform that gives you the facility of creating, managing, and scaling learning programs. It helps companies effectively train any audience, including customers, partners, and employees. Northpass has an all-in-one platform that provides ultra-fast authoring, intelligent administration, and perfectly integrated learning experiences. Plus, the best support team in the business.

Few Features of Northpass LMS for Customer Training.

Online Course Creation with Media Library
White Labeling from Top to Bottom
Real-Time Reporting
Easy Integration with Third-Party Apps
Automated User Management
Multiple Ways to Deliver Courses
Global Infrastructure Support
Course Monetization Tools
Convenience of the Cloud
Video & User Analytics
Social Networking
Open Navigation & Learning Paths
Webhooks & API Access

Specialties:

e-learning, education, online learning, training, LMS for customer training, employee training, partner training, contractor training, learning management system(LMS)

LearnUpon

Drive great customer experiences with LearnUpon LMS for customer training to strengthen long-term relationships and fuel your business growth. LearnUpon LMS for customer training allows you to onboard faster, educate better, shape lasting relationships, and empower your support team. Create a customer academy to power up training to manage, deliver, and track your programs.

LearnUpon LMS is the solution to streamline and centralize training management across your company.

Here is the List of Best Features of LearnUpon LMS for Customer Training.

Course creation
Training delivery
User management
Learner engagement
Portals
Reporting
Integrations
Webinars
Enterprise-grade security and reliability

Specialties:

LMS, Learning Management System, eLearning, SCORM, xAPI, Gamification, Employee Training, Compliance Training, LMS for Customer Training, and Partner Training

Teachable

Teachable is the platform that thrives for creators to turn customers knowledge into businesses. Teachable is an online platform for businesses to create online courses with videos, lectures, and quizzes. It allows for tracking sales, gaining insights into selling and collect feedback via surveys on a unified dashboard.

Some Features of Teachable LMS for Customer Training.

Customization
Learning Tools
Monetization
Hosting & Security

Specialties:

Online Education, Online Course Creation, and eLearning, LMS for customer training

Conclusion:

People searching for LMS for customer training have many choices for selecting the best LMS.

Considering different needs like budget, feature requirements we have compiled this list to help them so that they can select the best LMS for their business without wasting too much time.

We hope that this list will help. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.

Tags Customer Training LMS, Customer Training Software

Blog Customer Training

Why Every SaaS Company Must Invest in Customer Training?

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date March 2, 2022
No Comments on Why Every SaaS Company Must Invest in Customer Training?

This Blog explains how SaaS Customer Training Programs can change the entire dynamics of their current revenue system & retain more customers.

As a SaaS Company, you have launched a new product feature. Your Marketing team is already tackling how to promote through offers to bring the customer attention.

Your Customer Success team is somehow managing how to support customers during the launch. And Sales teams are piled up with information that needs a single communication channel.

If you are also facing the growing pain points as a SaaS company – this blog is specially made for you.

Use the table of content to navigate the guide.

What is Customer Training?
How Are Companies Training Their Customers Now?
Getting Started With Customer Training
Importance of Customer Training for SaaS Companies
Successful Customer Training Growth Metrics
Conclusion

Key Tip #1: Understanding Customer Training.

Customer Training, in practical terms, means that your organization learns about the specific needs of customers, suggest products to meet their required outcome, and instruct them on how to use your product efficiently to accomplish their desired outcome.

3-Step Process to Successful Customer Training Program.

Identifying Customer’s Specific Needs.
Suggesting Apt Product & Services to Customers.
Instructing Your Customers About ‘How-To’ Use Your Products.

As a SaaS Company, you might have observed that those customers who are mindful of your product are more brand loyal & are an integral part, compared to those with a short-term usage goal with your brand.

So, to accomplish a long-term customer relationship, It gets crucial that you create a more inclusive training program that conveys your product smoothly into customers’ lifestyles. Furthermore, you’ll be able to conduct more mindfulness around your product’s extra features.

Let’s introspect about customers expecting as a buying & implementing experience.

We co-exist in the era where social-media applications are in use as a natural process. And why not? They are easy to use, effortless to connect with a known face, and bring a sense of longing to old memories.

Similarly, SaaS training programs must be an existing touch for your customers. Or it is a new thing for them – it must be an easy-to-progress platform.

Key Tip #2: How Are SaaS Companies Training Their Customers Now?

Many training programs are circulating as a buffet for SaaS companies to enhance their customer retention. Implementing programs just for the sake of achieving an end goal doesn’t lead to customer success.

Because essentially, your SaaS Customer training program must be effective enough to understand, provide, resolve, and evolve customers with their set of your products’ expectations.

And in return, your customers reward you with long-term loyalty. See how these top companies are training SaaS customers now:

1) Slack Gives You the Basics.

Slack is one of the software-as-service (SaaS) companies – educating customers about their added product functionality through the customer.

They reduced minor customer inconvenience and created a robust product delivering training that eases complex business software understanding.

Slack invested in 3 primary types of training content:

New Users Training.
Intro to Slack Training.
Admin Training – Walking Slack admins throughout the basic & complex features.

2) Hubspot

Hubspot is a renowned Digital Marketing space for startups & existing brands to use to grow their business. Their Inbound Marketing Approach has turned the tables while initiating customer education as a central marketing voice.

3) Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is a leading online survey developer tool that helps with data analysis and representation. They introduced training resources that allow customers for a step-by-step instruction-based guide to achieve their customer satisfaction surveys. Also, it educates customers to measure and monitor survey templates creating a truly inclusive and personalized space for their customers.

Key Tip #3: Getting Started with Customer Training.

5 Must Think Reasons – Why SaaS Companies Invest in Customer Training?

1. Lucrative for Subscription-Based Business Model.

Easily understandable & smooth customer experience with your brand means they are more likely to come back to renew their subscription. Because providing enough resources to them leads them in such an experience like they’re pursuing their own desired outcome is freedom.

And, once your customer chooses their expected value from your product, reduced churn rate becomes a consequence of the learning environment they are experiencing as a buyer.

2. SaaS is Booming in B2B & B2C Industry.

Global Software as a Service (SaaS) market size is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 11% with USD 99.9 billion during the forecast period 2021-2025 – It means that most B2B & B2C organizations are switching to SaaS products.

Current Market Trends suggests that in post-covid situations, global markets are likely to choose SaaS products as their customer deliverables & would mark their marketing strategies according to regional market response.

That’s why most Saas Companies are deploying customer training programs, realizing the immensity of future impacts they will have once the customer gets educated about their products & services.

3. Adds Resources to Customer’s Specific Needs.

Providing resources like – Learning Ebooks, Video Learnings, Live Sessions, and ‘How-to’ Modules or Guides adds an ongoing edge in customer’s awareness about your product.

Moreover, adding gamification & certifications results in a competitive self-analysis environment. The customer acknowledges the pace of learning progress.

4. Reduced Customer’s Churn: Effective Approach.

Once your customers are evolving their buyer’s persona in the learning environment, it gets easy for them to understand and implement your product more efficiently.

So, any raised customer query or request for a follow-up automatically resolves during their learning stage – Reliable Customer Support.

5. Feedbacks & Surveys: High Responsive Rate.

SaaS Companies’ revenue depends on customer recurring & long-term collaboration. To maintain a smooth transaction for the customer’s entire lifecycle with your brand – it’s a must that your feedback is not generalized but inclined towards a specific customer progressing stage.

Grouping different customers according to their needs & promoting feedback through quizzes or puzzles helps customers provide their grasping nature towards your learning content.

Key Tip #4: Importance of Customer Training For SaaS Companies.

1. Give Your Customer Success Team a Wingman During a New Product Launch.

SaaS companies admit that their customer success teams are not prepared or fully trained to onboard customers about product features during the launch.

This way, customers are either churned or bored away because of too many technicalities introduced to them at a single given hour.

Providing a pre-launch tutorial or explanatory videos to customers about the technicalities of products gives your customer success team a supportive edge of information.

2. Your Marketing Team Will Have a Specific Understanding of How & When to Promote Offers. (New Product Features)

Let’s suppose your product’s new feature is in ask of promotions – your marketing team prepares offers & engaging content to compel customers’ interest towards this new particular feature.

But, would that be enough to gauge the utmost customer’s attention? Because no matter how lucrative your offers are for customers – They still consider it business!

So, once your marketing team is aware of particular customer desired needs, where customers are in their learning stage, you can plan your offers simultaneously – A better solution than an add-on.

3. It Bridges a Communication Info Network for Your Sales Team.

As a SaaS company, you might have observed that information got misled between the internal communication of customer support & sales teams – Hence, costing an expensive fix with a deal.

It’s all about how resourceful your particular sales team is & how easily they are communicating internally with other customer engagement teams.

Customer Training allows your sales teams a piece of updated information to process & communicate, avoiding any minor errors or glitches.

Especially, SaaS startups suffer miscommunications a lot in the starting phase because of meeting the deadlines, managing the information, guiding the employees, deploying customer supports, promotions, and all.

It gets daunting to share detailed information without any mishaps. Here, investing in Learning Management System is a perfect solution for SaaS Startups to create a head-on-manageable platform & AI support to enhance & expand simultaneously.

How is LMS – a perfect solution for SaaS Startups?

An Intuitive AI Support for your L&D Teams.
Very Cost-Effective & Lucrative Tool.
It helps in Fresh & Creative Marketing Ideas Strategies.
Technological Solution to understand your Customer Specific Needs.

Result of Successful Customer Training on Employees & Customers.

Organizations with highly engaged employees can achieve a 21% increase in revenue.
Reduced Product Training time by 70% spent on customers during onboarding about product knowledge: TypeForm.
84% of employees can meet the required training outcome in Best Performing Organizations.

Conclusion:

Simply having a customer training program doesn’t always lead to a higher customer retention rate. You need to take care of identifying, suggesting, and instructing your customers after onboarding is employed successfully.

As a SaaS company, you have the tips & thinkable points for your whiteboard session introspecting on investing in the education of your customers.

So, once you discuss it over later coffee nights – Here’s Your Starting Point.

A quick pep-talk to our expertise. Welcome Aboard!

Blog Customer Enablement

Top 5 Best Practices to Customer Enablement-a Simple Guide for Saas Companies for Customer Enablement

Post author By Vinay Londhe
Post date October 29, 2021
No Comments on Top 5 Best Practices to Customer Enablement-a Simple Guide for Saas Companies for Customer Enablement

Every Saas Company Needs to Do Customer Enablement. Here Are the Top 5 Best Practices to Customer Enablement Which Every Saas Companies Must Use.

Customers are the root of your business, keep nourishing.

Are you keeping a tap on your customer’s post-purchase journey? To maintain a customer experience that recurs more than just a one-time sell-out, you need a strategic approach that focuses on every stage of your customer’s life cycle.

Addressing each customer’s need will create a personalized atmosphere where it feels like home and even imagines exploring other regions of your products and services.

In this blog, you’ll learn how customer enablement is a steering wheel to your onboarding programs and employ: 5 Best Practices for Customer Enablement for every SaaS company.

Use the Table of Content to Navigate The Guide.

What Is Customer Enablement?
Why Do You Need Customer Enablement In Saas Companies?
How A Successful Customer Enablement Strategy Improves Long-Term Customer Retention?
Top 5 Best Practices For Customer Enablement For SaaS Companies.

Step 1: What is Customer Enablement?

Customer Enablement is a form of the execution process, where you ensure to provide three essential tools to your customer when they buy your products & services.

Your Customer Onboarding, designed to enhance customer retention works frictionlessly once your overall customer experience strategies capture these three aspects from the initial stage of your customer’s journey.

Each customer has a different set of expectations for your products. Invest your time & energy in implying technical landscape to drip down groups of various people – behaviors, specific needs, engagement patterns, and product usage limitations – In short, a virtual walkthrough.

Then, develop learning styles on an intuitive-based platform to support different patterns of customer’s specific needs & expectations from your products.

Step 2: Why Do You Need Customer Enablement in Saas Companies?

Why is your customer expecting a delightful experience while using your product? Isn’t the product itself a solution? Not until the customer is fully aware of ‘how to use it thoroughly.

Especially for Software as a service (SaaS) Organizations, where products require an educative edge to be used by customers in their entirety – hence, enabling customers becomes a constant need for your subscription-based business model.

Once your customers are rolling the dice – it should be your board, showing them the lucky numbers they want to see. In simple words, if you’re strategically putting efforts into your post-sale customer experience – onboarding programs, customer enablement secures your customer’s entire life cycle since the initial stage.

¹. Source: Epsilon, “New Epsilon Research indicates 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer a personalized experience.” January 9, 2018

². Source: Forrestor Analytics Business Technographics Global Data & Analytics Survey, 2019.

So, ensuring that your customers are flowing towards their personalized expectations from your product, customer loyalty comes as a progressive outcome.

And when customer loyalty is maintained, you have successfully matured them into your brand advocates.

Step 3: How a Successful Customer Enablement Strategy Improves Long-Term Customer Retention?

As an organization, you decided to invest in improving your customer’s experience – which means essentially you want your customer to feel at home when they opt for you as a brand.

Because customer’s comfort lies within the way – they seek any solution – the process until their final win.

When Industries started acknowledging the customer’s overall journey, the process became imperative, and customer success programs emerged as a marketing strategy.

Still, many organizations unable to propose successful customer retention programs because they all ensured ‘creating’ but left hanging loose ends of ‘keeping’ the strategy alive.

Successful Customer Enablement Focuses on:

Delivering Personalized Experience for Diverse Customer’s
Tailored Innovative Solutions
Empathetic & Reliable Customer Support
Ensured Customer Growth

These metrics allow your customer to grow their own valuable e-learning space that interests their win. Hence, long-term loyalty becomes an outcome of the entire experience.

Step 4: Top 5 Best Practices for Customer Enablement for SaaS Companies.

Now that you are aware of the basics of customer enablement. Let’s understand, key factors that orient in successful customer enablement. Here are some customer education best practices mentioned below:

Customer Education Best Practices

Reading Your Customer Wants & Needs.
Design An Easy-to-communicate Platform: Resource & Tools.
Bring The Atmosphere Of Customer Growth: Clarity Is A Treat.
The Touch Of Sensitivity: Reliable & Empathetic Support.
Now, Keep Maturing The Process: Feedbacks & Surveys.

Reading Your Customer Wants & Needs.

Your customers are the key ingredient: through guided empowerment & resourceful support, they can convince even the most skeptical buyer to purchase your services.

But, to do so, first, you must ensure that your customer’s foot is in the right pair of your shoes. Now, understanding your customer’s persona becomes imperative, so keep these pointers ready for your long whiteboard sessions.

How To Read Your Customers In 4 Simple Steps.

Employ Technology (Intuitive Data Absorption)
Understand Your Customer: Behaviour Pattern + Engagement Choice + Churn Points + Final Win Expectations
Group Them Into Different ‘wants & needs from your product.
Design An Easy-To-Communicate Learning space for each group.

Design an Easy-to-communicate Platform: Resource & Tools.

Easing the communication bar increases transparency amongst the customer’s community & your team leading to less churn caused. And to design a platform that manages different groups of customer’s needs, you need proper resources & tools that will allow specificity to diversity.

Starting with introducing technology as your landscape, you can use video hosting tools to provide a virtual tour of your new course or even your product overview.

Exercise marketing and messaging to enhance customer’s engagement with your brand. You can use in-app messages or automated email acquainting about your new products.

Keep in mind to employ your organization’s specific LMS (Learning Management System) to deliver & track your overall training that emphasizes learning. LMS is a software solution that acts like an inclusive touch-point maintaining the entire ecosystem.

What Does A Learning Management System (LMS) Offer?

Course Authoring Tools
Marketing Automation & Messaging
Data Integration
AI-Enabled Performance Support
Achievable Analytics & Useful In Critical Decision-Making.

Bring the Atmosphere Of Customer Growth: Clarity is a Treat.

Creating a progressive aura around customers envisions them to have a full-grown self-awareness image with your brand. This intensity of clarity will produce a sweet appetite for your customers to stick to their current stage with focus.

Once your platform allows space for clarity, bring reliable support to administer roadblocks that your customer might face during their learning process.

Grow your community as it gets critical for customers to socialize with their buyer’s journey and share their progress and even difficulties – Less Customer Churn. Host networking events, forums, and social media groups to enable higher customer engagement that leads to authentic conversions.

Also, you can take benefit of a customer referral program with a social community to create a better engagement with your product.

The Touch Of Sensitivity: Reliable & Empathetic Support.

When a customer faces a problem, they expect a fast & quick solution. Your dedicated support team is essential to ensure that customer problem are resolved quickly & without causing churn.

Focus on creating reliable support that acts to a given situation with more sensitivity – Because handling problems with empathy – create personal grounds as a problem is close to customers.

Employ social media that is becoming a popular medium for businesses to provide generic and even technical instant support to their customers.

Enable a support ticket system and keep in touch with customer’s sentiments within the community – the best or the worst experience. It helps to cover the room for improvement within the ongoing learning process.

Now, Keep Maturing The Process: Feedbacks & Surveys.

Once you accomplish these four metrics, you have successfully enabled customers towards your brand. Now, it’s time to gather suggestions & room for improvement for your product & customer success team.

Incorporate customer feedback into your services roadmap. Incorporate customer feedback into your services roadmap. And, stay in close touch with the needs & changing demands of your customers.

Collecting satisfaction data allows your team to have a clear idea about what to prioritize in future development.

Conclusion:

Empowering customers is an investment that every SaaS company must think about because to each product, a slope of education is an imperative need of the hour. So, it needs to include SaaS customer support.

So, once you accomplish customer enablement as an initial measure in your onboarding process, you will realize how crucial it gets to build an effective customer engine.

Employ above mentioned best practices for successful customer enablement. And, also explore our upcoming reasonable blog explaining: Why SaaS Companies Must Invest in Customer Training?

Stay in touch.