Once you have successfully completed the onboarding process, it’s important that you continue to find opportunities to engage with your customer. Help them find new ways to meet their business goals. This ongoing engagement between you and your customer should create a win-win scenario. The more you can help your customer solve problems with product training, the more they will come to value your partnership. They will see your company as a trusted partner.
As John Leh, a technology consultant, explains, “the investment in engagement has ‘measurable value’ because it feeds into keeping that customer. And the cost of keeping a customer is far less than it is to find a new one, he points out.”
These points are reinforced in the article, Customer Engagement, Retention, and Beyond. Written by Pat Durante, the President of the Customer Education Management Association (CEdMA) and a Senior Director at Talend, the feature outlines the role training plays as part of an effective customer engagement strategy. It helps companies improve their customer retention efforts.
PRO TIP 1: Use “Blended Learning” to Increase EngagementInvesting in customer-valued learning generates brand loyalty, greater spend, lower support calls, a closer vendor/customer relationship, and higher renewal rates. A surefire way to increase the success of your customer education program is to increase customer engagement through blended learning.
By offering different learning modalities like on-demand or self-paced learning, microlearning, and video streaming, your customers will engage with your content. This helps them advance their knowledge and use of your product. If you’d like to learn more we’d encourage you to check out, Design the Perfect Learning Blend for Customer Success.
PRO TIP 2: Use a Certificate Program to Build RetentionCertification can be a very important component in assuring that your customers experience success with your products. In practice, certification can occur at different stages across the customer lifecycle, depending on how your organization decides to approach it.
Managing certifications—and the delivery of them—can become a complex proposition for any organization. From building completion rules and award criteria to managing recertifications and submittals, certificate management is no easy task to scale. To drill into this idea, we suggest you check out How to get the Most Out of Certification in the Customer Success lifecycle.
How to Measure Your Customer Training Program?There is no doubt that customer learning is a "value-add" that differentiates your company from the competition. In addition to helping you separate yourself from your competitors, investing in customer-valued learning generates brand loyalty, greater spend, lower support calls, a closer vendor/customer relationship, and higher renewal rates.
But, how do you measure and evaluate you success of your training program?
On one level you can evaluate your training by looking at KPIs such as the number of people who registered for a course, number of course completions, and even the number of training course offered in a given time period. But, are these numbers really going to help you understand if your company is getting a ROI from customer training?
Instead, Claire Schooley, a long-time Forrester analyst who specializes in workforce growth and development, emphasizes the importance of using deeper metrics to evaluate the value of your program. In her piece, Measuring the ROI/VOI of Customer Learning, Schooley suggests that companies focus on bigger business metrics like
To reach this level of insight, it’s important that stakeholders from across your organization align and work toward the same goals. If you have any questions about evaluating your customer training program, schedule a call with one of our training advisors now!
Onshape's project team knew they had to deliver an exceptional user experience their customers would embrace. As David Katzman, Vice President of Strategic Accounts and Business Development explains, “One of the challenges of bringing a new product to market after 25 years is that we face a very entrenched market. So, one of the big obstacles we need to address is onboarding, or bringing people up the learning curve as fast as possible so that they can use our software effectively.”
