Tag: Customer Education

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

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 Education

Top 6 Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce

Post author By Ivy Lobo
Post date April 27, 2022
No Comments on Top 6 Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce

Let’s Know About the Top 6 Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce

In this blog, you will learn how a new-age hybrid workforce demands the change in learning content strategies for L&D departments. By creating an adaptable learning strategy – your customer training program can stay progressive for the long run.

All of us know about the importance of best strategies for creating customer education content. If you implement best strategies for creating customer education content in your customer education program then you will get more impactful result. So let’s learn which are the best strategies for creating customer education content.

Also, the factors about how enabling a learning management system (LMS) in your content distribution strategy can become your access to wider audiences. Know the best strategies to create your learning content through – 6 best strategies for customer education content creation.

You can also download this free blog for later touchpoints in your content strategic stage with your L&D team and project managers.

To give you an outlook of how dedicated SaaS companies are in structuring their future hybrid work model, Here is how Hubspot is planning to manage its new hybrid workforce:

From January 2021 they allowed employees 3 work options.

From the office: You come into a HubSpot office 3 or more days per week. You have a dedicated desk for your laptop, monitor, family photos, and anything else that makes your workplace truly yours.
The Flex: You come into a HubSpot office 2 or fewer days per week. When you come to the office, you’ll be allocated a “hotel desk”, which will be organized by the team when possible.
From home: You work the majority of your time in a HubSpot-approved entity.

Why mention all these plans & timings?

Two reasons:

1. Customers are changing their work environment.

2. Access to remote working support.

Here Are the Best Strategies for Creating Customer Education Content: Hybrid Workforce You Can Use.

1. Adapt to Blended Learning

Creating a learning experience for a hundred thousand people and million-plus learning items and planning to execute it in a personalized way is not an easy task. Moreover, if it is not deployed at the right time for the right person – your entire efforts and time spend on curating content becomes useless.

“Our leaders are building their strategies to connect to those who are better & faster in building digital content & give our people access hands-on.” -Simon Brown (Chief learning officer, Novaris)

To create a variance of learning content in the age of the hybrid workforce, you need hands-on learning solutions to cater to your different sets of customers.

Here’s why the only 1:1 learning in your L&D course deployment might not be the best strategy:

60% of SaaS companies are adapting to remote culture post-2021.
16% of employees in Top SaaS companies prefer WFH to in-office.
91% of remote job posts grew on Linkedin post-March 2021.

It is not that 1:1 interaction or classroom learning won’t be of any use shortly. Many companies believe that L&D courses are best catered to once they are deployed in person.

Also, an employee retains at a higher level when they are in a classroom environment. But, not to forgot how times have changed the entire corporate working paradigm – Your L&D needs blended learning courses to execute your customers where ever they are.

What is Blended Learning?

Blended learning is an approach to educate your customers with both online learning materials & traditional classroom methods inclusive of online interactions. It requires a physical presence of a student & a trainer, with some elements of student control over time, place, and medium.

Benefits of Blended Learning (Companys’ Perspective)

Reduced 1:1 Training Courses Cost (Travel, accommodation, and printed training material) .
Better learner engagement: Online gamification and webinars.
Greater ROI.
Easy to track learners’ training completion or pending status.

Benefits of Blended Learning (Learners’ Perspective)

Self-paced learning: Convenient & flexible for remote learners.
High comprehensive understanding: According to academic research.
Social learning is supported: Interaction with trainers, instructors, and fellow learners.

2. Enable LMS – Planning, Development, and Distribution (Continuous L&D model)

If you have a hybrid workforce – you need to update your distribution model. You need a continuous adaptive strategy that applies both for remote workers and office ones.

Typically, the customer training program is owned by a single team – The customer success team. But, that doesn’t mean that other teams shouldn’t get involved.

Planning out a combined effort to deploy your customer education content covers each area of how well you know your customers. As an example:

Customer success team: creating course content while developing & managing the LMS.
Sales team: Subject matter experts & customers insights.
Customer support team: Improvement through customer insights.
Design team: Course design creation.

How LMS becomes a need in a Hybrid environment?

Single-channel distribution for different working environments.
Curate diverse learning content for specific training through AI support.
Self-paced learning programs designed for different working profiles.

How you will create your learning content depends majorly on how you distribute it. So, updating your distribution channel will ensure that your remote learners don’t feel left behind & envision their career progression wherever they are.

3. Update Your Content

It real tricky to understand sometimes what type of content would be best for your customers. Therefore, it’s best to create a content audit to identify where your organization’s content strategy stands.

Start by asking few questions:

What type of training resources are we currently giving our customers?
What teams are involved in the customer training process?
What tools are we currently using to train our customers?
What is our internal data telling us?
What are internal teams and our customers saying about the training program?

After you create a full content audit basis on such questions – develop learning objectives. When you have an overall goal in your online training strategy, you can easily plan out training courses that will have a definitive outcome for learners as well.

Researching and planning your learning content on basis of customer-centric goals helps your organization in the long run. From curating and streamlining training courses to defining KPIs, it is the stage that will boost your chances of getting the training right.

For example, if you are training your customers on how to use your emailing software, the objective of your course could be that the customer can add a CSV email list to your system.

In simple terms, one objective is that a customer can build a course using our provided solution. This sounds simple, but it makes creating your training courses much more straightforward.

From here, you can now branch out your content in form of slide decks with images, creating course PDFs, and other easily build text to image formats to help customers develop their skills easily.

You can also use videos using tools like Camtasia or a fully fletched content authoring tool. Because it’s good to develop a mix and match content type to cater to different customers’ choices.

A good LMS can provide you to add multiple content formats into your courses. Also, by doing this you will keep your learners engaged.

Don’t forget to dig into the resources you already have – you have a gold mine already. It can be an eBook written by your marketing head, or decks handed out by your sales guys, or even internal guides. Take a keen look at your current assets to check if the content fits for repurposing into training courses.

4. Be Accessible to a Wider Audience

Many SaaS companies are opting for freemium membership of their education program to reach the broader new customers and existing audiences. Beyond boosting customer engagement, this strategy also helps generate brand awareness during challenging times – goodwill in social impact.

Also, make sure that you employ the right technology while curating your content strategy so that you can scale, improve and repurpose your training impact later on.

For example, Moz, a marketing analytics software company, offers free courses on its training academy to help marketers and other contributors to develop & improve their search engine optimization (SEO) skill sets. By scaling training programs on such a level, Moz is immensely broadening their impact of training impact.

5. Stay Updated

Since Covid-19 has hit, industries have seen an increase in remote work demand. Some SaaS companies are adapting to use technology to curate their hybrid workforce training content and some are still managing flexible classroom schedules as an L&D course deployment option.

But, those companies who opted for online learning are now understanding the value of updating & the scope of engagement. Customer trainers and instructors are becoming proactive in seeking to understand the changing needs via 1:1 interview, zoom meeting coffee hours, and product & service usage analytics.

Once you keep all your ears up, building a learning content strategy for your training programs becomes an iterative process. Don’t get de-motivated if your training program is not deployed on time, or friction points coming now and then, or even you feel that this is not good.

Remember, no training program is perfect, that’s the best thing – It is a continuous process of improving.

The rule of your training program must focus on what is most important for customers? What are they finding value in? Keeping your approach in such a mindset will make the entire process more achievable and will allow you to improve while adding more value for your training courses in the long run.

6. Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The changing speed of L&D courses delivery and development caused many SaaS companies to align their focus on their minimum viable product (MVP).

In practice, it is the most authentic and impactful development strategy to curate your learning content around your high product value.

To create and distribute valuable content – companies are experimenting with new formats like videos and image-texted resources to put out their message as clear as possible.

Conclusion:

Educating customers is a continuous process once you understand the seamless results it gets as an experience for customers.

Friction within the training process is likely to happen in each & every training program. And, setbacks are meant to let you restructure your entire process, but re-creating through tools & strategy will evolve your entire organization dynamics.

To ensure your learning content is helping your customers to understand your products & services better – Bring a learning management system (LMS) as a tool to hammer & shape your content strategy according to customers’ needs. Employ the pioneering in learning technology to retain & delight your customers now.

Tags Customer Education, Customer Training

Blog Customer Training

Best Practices to Measure Impact of Customer Training Program (Intuitive Method + Templates + Tools)

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date April 20, 2022
No Comments on Best Practices to Measure Impact of Customer Training Program (Intuitive Method + Templates + Tools)

Best Practices to Measure Impact of Customer Training Program (Intuitive Method + Templates + Tools)

Learning & Development (L&D) isn’t about what you can remember, it is fundamentally how you apply what you learned to improve your life.

Once you understand that what you are learning are simple tools to operate your complex task without putting extra effort – your interest grows & exercises your will to learn even more.

That’s how your customer should feel about your training program. But how would you know, if they are already in that phase of curiosity? Or maybe they’re excited but clueless to narrow it down. It is better to know best practices to measure impact of customer training program before implementing customer training.

Again, how would you know which part of your training is making a change? Through KPIs, or feedback starters?

Know more about the best practices to measure impact of customer training program.

Fundamental Questions You Need to Focus to Evaluate Which Part of Your Customer Training is Making a Change.

Did they like it?
Did they learn?
Are they able to apply what they learned?
Is training improving their goals in their organization?

Yes, there are countless measuring metrics to analyze your customer response & satisfaction rate during training, but, just think about it for once!

Your self-paced learning program – capable of delivering diverse content according to diverse needs – establishes a personalized benchmark for your diverse audience.

Such a diverse paradigm of training and you decide to limit your evaluation to just tools?

Your training evaluation may find customer pain points & improvement insights through analytical meters.

But, you need an intuitive method to evaluate your training and to establish your success meters.

Yes, we know, it’s not that exciting part though, but by intuitive evaluation, you can easily figure out if your training works and how to improve it.

Kirkpatrick’s model of learning is meant to be the most widely used method to evaluate the results of training and learning programs. Although, this model has been an effective benchmark to evaluate employee training programs, but has shown even more successful results when it comes to customer training.

Donald Kirkpatrick (1924-1950) was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. He developed the four levels of evaluation model in the mid-1950s as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. And, his vision of L&D training evaluation has now been used for over 30yrs by many different companies as a major system for training evaluation.

Kirkpatrick Model – Four Levels of Learning Evaluation

Reaction.
Learning Evaluation.
Knowledge gain.
Results.

Level #1: How Are They Reacting?

There are good chances that you already taking a survey after customers’ first learning session. The fundamental idea to evaluate right after the first session is to gain insight into the training experience from the learner’s perspective.

Ideally, most B2B companies limit their first survey to just collect basic responses from customers because of many reasons like “They might churn off customers soon”, “They are overpopulating after the first signup onboarding emails.

The problem here is, they are focussing on just a customer response. They need the right questions to pinpoint the accuracy of the first survey:

Smile Sheets

A smile sheet is simply a form consisting of a series of questions combined, asking your customers about their satisfaction.

In a recent survey, many B2B organizations were asked about the smile sheet effectiveness, and most responded that “they don’t understand how to bring improvement in training through just good or bad customer responses”.

We understand it can get hard to find precise pain points to improve when scalability is of a wide range. And, we accumulate such common limitations that smile sheets may have:

Limitations

Data is basic.
It doesn’t necessarily correlate with actual learning or customer behavior.
It is hard to scale.

Now you might be confused that whether to use smile sheets? Are there any evaluating benefits? Whether to infuse a smile sheet in evaluating your training or not?

Well! There’s always a good and a bad side to any tool. All you have to do is to find the right way of using it.

Benefits of Smile Sheets

It demonstrates respect for customers thoughts & concerns.
It provides early satisfaction results.
It gives you insights about your training’s valuable side & not so valuable.

Smile Sheets doesn’t limit to the “Just asking for your feedback” tool, you can employ it as a performance-focused evaluation for your customers during training sessions.

Performance-Focused Evaluation

E.g. Writing a TPS Report.

Instead of asking your customer, “How are you liking the course/training?”

Focus on their progression towards set goals, “How well are you able to imply the reporting skills in the practice of your job?”

On a learner scale your feedback to get customer reaction must be of some accuracy, to understand specifically about the customer experience, here’s an example of how you can touch down customer’s understanding:

Are you able to apply what you learned in the training?

I am not able to apply these concepts.
I have some understanding but require additional training.
I can apply the concepts but require support.
I believe I have competency.
I know I can perform to an expert level.

Level #2: Are They Learning?

This phase of evaluating your training programs focuses on measuring the customers’ knowledge, skills, and mindset developed as a result of your training program.

Here we want to ensure that your customers are learning what they are supposed to have learned. Take an example of how Hubspot evaluates their customer knowledge & skills acquired during their delivered training.

Quick Quiz: Few questions to ensure customer retention level.

Hubspot Academy’s – Know Yourself Quiz

Hubspot ensures that its customers are understanding the concept and also, they provide further assistance by providing helpful resources to make it easy for customers to catch up on what they learned, later on.

Resources (to Provide & Understand What Audience Needs)

Slides.
Transcripts.
Goal calculator.
Knowledge Base.
Templates.
Ebooks.
Blog Post.
Reports.
Website.

2. Free Certification: Presenting a Learning Win to Grow for Customers.

3. Hand-on Surveys & Assignments: To Assess Customer Retention Rate by Providing Assignments Right After Each Training Session.

Hubspot Academy’s – Survey Assessment

They assess their customer’s demographics and improvement scale after they are done with the course. Perfect CTA!

Two Major Benefits for Post-Training Session Assessment

The customer is still in the learning mode, high response rate.
Customers want to exercise their choice after learning, future improvement in training required would be answered precisely.

They appreciate customer learning efforts & acknowledge their time, so to improve significantly – They choose accuracy to deliver value. It simply means, “Knowing your customer”.

Level #3: Are They Applying What They Learned?

“One of the reasons why most SaaS companies are failing in customer success program is because their program is driven by cost, not value”- Glide Consulting (Customer Success Expert)

Customers who can achieve success with your product on their own do result in reduced support cost but such consequence becomes your value when you see your customers value in it too.

So, level 3 is all about evaluation based on, “Are you customers applying what they learned or not?”

You can further segment this evaluation into 3 steps:

Monitor customer’s performance.
Offer support.
Measure the results.

How to Monitor Your Customers’ Performance?

Firstly, find a natural data point to monitor your customers’ before and after training performance. Are they improving in any areas of their applied work? Is there any issue they are facing while applying it?

You can develop a demographic survey (one like given above) to understand the basic needs of your customer before you develop a working environment for them.

Secondly, you may have noticed your customers feedback filled up this survey form real quick. You can use a start and stop time to measure the accuracy and pace of answered value. This way you will see if there are any errors customers while answering due to limited time.

After your trainers assessing those errors closely, combine this data with the above data points to understand where the customers are getting that error and offer performance-focused support to customers to improve.

How to Measure Your Customers’ Results From the Training Provided?

Okay, Let’s continue with the above TPS reporting example. Let suppose your manager tells your customer to complete 10 TPS report.

Before training when you delivered this task, customers were able to complete 5 per hour with only 60% accuracy. But after baseline training sessions, your customers can complete 11 TPS reports per hour with 80% accuracy.

Knowing your customers’ improvement gives you direction to assess your level 1 and level 2 training evaluation accordingly to let your customer keep exceeding the benchmark.

Level #4: Is There Any Training Impact on Their Organizational Goals?

In level 4, you assess whether the training program was accomplished? Have they achieved their effective goal?

Now, to evaluate level 4, you need result-oriented data that provides a comparative measure.

Let’s take an example of a company that spends 20 % of their workweek time in team meetings to structure & plan out things accordingly.

Is there any Training Impact on their Organizational Goals

They plan to infuse training with their work environment to reduce team meeting time as a result. And, they found that after employing training for each employee, they successfully reduced their time spent for meeting & whiteboard sessions.

Similarly, you can map data points considering your before and after training results for customer’s in their working areas.

Well, as every L&D experiences this most in their life that no training program ensures perfect results, as there is consideration for using with Kirkpatrick model as well:

Considering Using Kirkpatrick Model

It works best if training results are relatively isolated (It means there are no depending factors that rely on training results apart from customers’ growth itself.)
Degree of accuracy (There are chances that your customer already knows best to be assessed for a basic training test. So, to deliver training, in that case, won’t be necessary.)

4 SaaS Customer Success Metrics (Tools to Evaluate)

Product/Services Usage Rate: The more customers use your product, the more valuable is the product for them. Your customer support team can easily track the product use frequency by customers and create a scale for the ideal growth rate.
Active Customers: As a SaaS company, your goal is to land up recurring customers. Measuring daily, weekly, and monthly active users will provide you access to short-term activity time & long-term customer active time.
Free Trial Conversion Rate: Free-trail conversion metric is a must-have in SaaS recurring business model to identify how well your customers are switching from freemium – to – premium services while monitoring churn rate too.
Average Time Spent on Platform: Evaluating the average time will provide you with a detailed story as to how much time your customers are integrated with your software.

We hope that you understand about best practices to measure impact of customer training program.

Conclusion:

As a SaaS company, you may come across a lot of measuring metrics and perfect training evaluation tools to infuse for results. But, eventually, your customers are changing goals on daily basis – So, it becomes an adaptive practice to employ intuitive methods to evaluate your training program. Also, ensure you are using effective L&D strategies to evaluate your training up to the current market benchmark.

Tags Customer Education, Customer Training

Blog Customer Education

Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date June 29, 2021
No Comments on Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Customer education is a very important part of every company. Every company must use a customer education strategy.

Here Are the Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Often in businesses, one’s worst enemy is itself. This is mostly true when a new product is launched in the market and is foreign to the users. With teams and members knowing the product/service almost inside out since they spend weeks, months, or years designing and developing it, they often forget that the consumer has no or very little idea about it.

In such an instance, customer education becomes vital. Without offering the consumers the right customer education platform, the chances of the product failing to make its mark is exponentially high. In this article, we will discuss the customer education program, the 5 effective key reasons to invest in Customer Education, and the benefits it.

What is Customer Education?

The processor discipline in which a company teaches its customers ways to find value and use the product is customer education. Even before sales, now companies are investing in customer education to equip the buyers about the product. The process ensures that the customer gets the most value of the product/service over time.

In the present day, the technology for customer education has become a central factor in which the materials are delivered through webinars, chats, chatbots, virtual classroom sessions, etc. But it is not about the specific action you take on how you educate your customer. It does involve all these, along with the overall progress of your brand and business.

The next section will discuss 5 effective key reasons businesses should invest in customer education strategy.

5 Effective Key Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Historically it has been witnessed that companies who offer average and middle-of-the-pack products and services are hesitant in educating customers. Of many reasons, the most often misnomer is that a knowledgeable consumer will look for different options and leave the product you are offering.

Customer Education Training

On the contrary, when you offer to educate the customers on the products/services you offer, the consumer is more likely to trust the company. Studies have shown there is enough evidence in which customer education strategy influences the customer’s buying decision while decreasing the customer churn.

You should invest in customer education for several reasons if you want to have a future-ready business. 5 effective key reasons to invest in Customer Education are the strategies which you should drive in the customer education marketing and forming a platform for it is as follows:

1. Increased Brand Loyalty

Despite the belief that educating the customers makes them less loyal to your brand, nothing could be farther from the truth. When you empower your customer with the knowledge on how to use your service/product, give them insight, you are adding value to the product.

They will be equipped to utilize the product/service to its full potential and draw them towards it instead of pushing them away. By educating the consumer and increasing their knowledge, a company is building something vital, which cannot be made or bought, i.e., trust.

According to the researchers, trust is the key differentiator that helps a brand or company stand apart and edge over its competitors.

2. Increase the Purchase Rate

Researches have proved a link between an increase in product/service purchase and customer education substantially. An article titled Consumer Education Produced High ROI revealed that consumers who got the consumer training are:

94% more satisfied with the purchases they make
93% likely more to refer the product and share their experience about it with associates
29 times more to buy the product than those who got the information from the media ads alone
5 times more likely to buy the service/product rather than when reached by direct marketing alone.

The figures itself reveals that investing in customer education platform prove to be quite beneficial for a company.

3. Forging Long-Term Relationship

When you have the loyalty and trust of your customers, you have built a strong relationship with them. With a customer education program, you offer an additional service or value that the customer will appreciate. This will also allow them to open up to you about their pain points about the service/product, thus becoming a key contributor to your improvement.

So, when you engage with them with customer training service and keep them updated with the latest information, you are building the loyalty and trust to support them and hear them. This eventually leads to less churn and easy onboarding of customers.

4. Position Yourself as Market Leader

By engaging your customers with a customer training program, you are willing to showcase your expertise while maintaining transparency. This leads to you having the ability to create a large consumer base. You share the industry-specific knowledge, where you offer guidance and advice that can convert visitors to consumers.

As a result, you can position yourself as the market leader in the industry with a strong follower base.

5. Increase Cost-Efficiency & Quality

When you invest in the technology for customer education, you are offering proactive solutions and training. This can help the customer support team to work on complex issues rather than mundane troubleshooting ones.

With the customers contacting the customer services less, your frontline customer care staff is free to work through the feedback loops that can help in improving the product/service. The process eventually increases the quality of work and product while making the service cost-efficient.

With any business having customer satisfaction in the center to become a successful one, investing in customer education strategy and empowering them will not only increase the loyalty, engagement, satisfaction, and trust in the product/service but eventually the ROI of the business. Thus companies must invest in customer education training programs.

Benefits of Customer Education

It would help if you also were mindful of creating a solid customer education program. It can be achieved when you invest in the content, offer hands-on training, and understand what your customer wants. Play on your strengths and work on your weakness when developing and investing in a customer education program. Some of the purpose build software like CXcherry can be used to deliver successful customer training organization-wide.

I sincerely hope you find our blog post on “5 effective key reasons to invest in customer education” useful.

Final Words

When one implements the customer education program, the company must ensure the material and training are understandable, easily accessible, and available when needed by the consumer. It is the product/service training that can make or break the product by enhancing the user experience.

Tags Customer Education, reasons to invest in customer eduction