Before going deep into this blog "Why Customer Training is Key to Successful Customer Enablement?", let's have a brief knowledge about Customer Training.
If your organization is a fast-growing SaaS, PaaS, or ISV product company or an established global enterprise and planning to achieve more than 2X growth in coming years, then understanding the essentials of customer training is one of the key considerations for you. If you’re in charge of customer training, customer success, or customer enablement training within your organization you’ve come to the right place. We have summed up the key essentials for you which you should consider before you begin to strategize your Customer Training program.
What is Customer Training?
Customer Training (also referred to as Customer Education) is a well-structured training program designed keeping in mind your new or existing customers in view. A successful customer training program is an amalgamation of various types of content (videos, eLearning, Pdf, Ppt, HTML, Webinar) delivered in a very pragmatic way via self-paced mode or in-person or virtual mode. For most visionary companies this is one of the most important steps to boost their positioning from customer satisfaction to customer delight.
Who Must Think of Customer Training as a Priority?
Any company which is customer-focused and believes in the “Customer Delight” philosophy must think of customer training as one of their key arsenals to be top in the lot. It is a well-rooted myth amongst the young start-ups’ or even with some of the established enterprises that customer training can be thought only once a specific growth is achieved. Contrary to that if you pick up any good start-up which has grown exponentially, you will find “Customer Education” was one of the key differentiators for them distinguishing them from the competition.
So, if you are a fast-growing SaaS, PaaS, ISV product company, or an established enterprise you must be considering customer training as the essential enabler to increase your product adoption and increase customer retention.
Some of the regular use cases which should act as a trigger for you to think of investing in customer education are:
- SaaS companies with complex modules or features.
- PaaS companies with multiple workflows.
- Products with complex workflows and customized processes.
- Complex value SaaS companies.
- High value or costly products where the user needs to train before start using the product.
- Products that are highly agile and frequently release new features.
- Companies focused on customer centricity and want to reduce support ticket volume.
Why Customer Training?
The chances of trained customers becoming advocates of your product are always higher than a non-trained customer. So having the right customer training process makes all the difference. Customer training if done correctly helps to improve customer retention leading to positive business outcomes. With a diversified userbase for your product, it becomes extremely important to address your customer’s pain points related to the usage of your product in the quickest and most efficient manner. And have a well-defined customer education strategy is the key to success to strengthen your brand loyalty.
Key Benefits of Customer Training
Customer Training if done correctly and with the right approach can do wonders for your company.
Benefits of Customer Enablement Training
Key benefits of customer training are:
1. Onboard Customer with Excitement.
- Initial customer onboarding drives further customer success. Take away the hurdles from your customer journey in the first go.
2. Enhance Product Adoption.
- Customized training path created suiting to the needs of your customer reduces the initial hick-ups in understanding your product and boosts user confidence in your product leading to a better adoption.
3. Increase Revenue & Reduce Customer Success Cost.
- If customer training is done correctly it helps to reduce the overall training cost by almost 80% and increases the chances of customer retention drastically.
4. Gain Business Insights with Specific Analytics & Data.
- Customer training can provide some amazing business analytics that can help you to identify which features your customers are liking and which they are finding difficulty in understanding. This data can be further be consumed by the product team, a customer success team, support team to work on.
5. Reduce Dependency on Your Support Team Or Customer Success Team.
- As the customer gets access to any time training, they can go through each section, again and again, reducing their dependency on your team.
6. Reduction in Customer Support Queries.
- Statistics indicate that a well-executed customer education program can reduce the customer support queries by almost more than 35% allowing you to free your bandwidth to support more customers with the same bandwidth.
Customer Training Best Practices
By now you must have understood the how and why of the customer training program. Here are some best practices you can consider while implementing your customer training program:
1. Find Your “Why”?
Try to answer your “Why”. Why do you need to do customer training? The best way to initiate this process is to speak cross-department, try and understand what challenges your customer is sharing with your CS team, sales team, support team. What can make your customer's life easy?
2. Set Smart Goals.
Once your Why is set, try to set SMART goals. This will ensure setting up the right expectations with each stakeholder and ensure that your training program is on track always
3. Define Your Content Strategy.
For any program to be successful, having the right content strategy in place is very important. Decide on what type of content your customer is looking for. Once it is fixed decide on the formats in which this content should be made available. Some of the commonly used formats are videos, Pdf, Ppt, HTML, SCORM, recorded webinars, etc. You can also adopt for virtual training strategy using VILT modes.
4. Choose the Right Technology.
Chose the right technology to partner with to deliver these training programs. There are many purposes to build SaaS-based customer training software that will allow you to keep your cost low in the initial phase.
5. Run A Pilot (MVP).
Once everything is set, run a small pilot with few chosen customers, seek feedback from key stakeholders and make the necessary amendments (if required) and plan a big rollout. Make sure you make a good communication plan in collaboration with your marketing team to announce this to your customer. Surprise your customers with an amazing customer training program
6. Track & Measure the Effectiveness.
Once rolled out customer education must be a regular process. Keep tracking and measuring the effectiveness of each program for each customer and keep improving every day. The agile approach will help to achieve supreme customer delight over a period.
Examples of Customer Training
Some of the great examples of customer training are
- Salesforce Academy.
- Pega.
- HubSpot.
- UI Path.
- ServiceNow.
- Automation Anywhere.
- Blue prism.
- Freshdesk.
- Antworks.
- Zoho.
Conclusion:
Providing a delightful customer training experience is one of the important steps in delivering an unmatched customer experience. This simple yet powerful initiative can add great value for your customers and ensures that you build lifelong advocates for your product. One happy customer leads to ten new leads and ultimately opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. Your customers will surely appreciate your customer-centricity and enjoy the journey with you.
We at CXchery breathe in, breathe out this daily with our hundreds of customers and we will be happy to extend our passport to aspiring organizations to help them to set up this initiative collaboratively. Don’t hesitate to write back in case if you are looking for some additional information, template guides to set up this initiative. Happy Customer Training!!!!
