What's Client Training & How to Do it Right?

Attracting new customers is important for every business, but once a new client has signed on the dotted line, the work isn’t finished — in fact, it’s just begun. Businesses need to provide every client with effective training, beginning with the onboarding process and extending all the way throughout the entire customer journey. Offering ongoing client training is one of the best steps a business can take to improve customer satisfaction, customer retention, product adoption rate and much more.

Customers have a lot of different choices when it comes to SaaS products. If you want them to choose yours, you’ll have to show them the value up front. This means giving them access to customer education resources that can help them learn more about your products and how to use them successfully. Training your customers effectively is one of the best ways to shorten time to value and ensure they get the full benefit of the product.

The benefits of customer education affect practically every corner of your business. Investing in better client enablement materials can positively impact numerous significant metrics like customer engagement, customer retention and product adoption. If your customers don’t understand how to use your product or don't realize the full extent of what it can do for them, you can hardly expect them to be fully engaged with it. 

On the other hand, if you provide your customers with ample training content that shows them how to use your products effectively, you’ll likely see engagement and product adoption go up. This often naturally improves retention as well because when customers are engaging with your products and getting significant value out of them, they’re much more likely to stick around.

What's Client Training?

Before we dive further into the topic of client training strategy, let’s stop and define client training itself. So what is client training? Client training encompasses the efforts your customer success team takes to provide customers with the information, tools or other resources they need in order to maximize the value they get from your products or services. 

Client education content can take many forms and may be directed at a specific industry or apply more generally to any kind of product user.

Client education is very similar to client onboarding, but it’s not exactly the same. Client onboarding is often considered a part of a business’s overall customer training efforts, but it’s just one piece of a complete client training strategy. 

The difference between customer onboarding and customer training is that onboarding is a confined process that happens at the beginning of the customer journey. The client completes the onboarding materials and then the process is finished. However, client training is an ongoing process that continues throughout the entire customer lifespan.

Understanding how to plan and execute a successful client training strategy is very important for businesses in nearly every industry. Let’s dig into how customer training works, how to develop a customer training strategy, and what kinds of benefits you can expect to see from a successful client education program.

Customer Training Strategy

Building a successful customer training strategy might sound like an enormous task if you’re starting from scratch. However, the steps for creating a client training strategy are actually straightforward. One of the easiest ways to implement a customer training strategy is to use a learning management system like Northpass to help you manage your training content. You can use Northpass to power your entire customer education program and provide your customers with a convenient way to access enablement materials.

Here are the basic steps to create an effective customer training strategy:

1. Set Objectives

The first step to creating a successful customer training strategy is to set concrete goals for your education program. You should be striving for clear positive outcomes, both for your business and for your clients. Defining these outcomes up front can help you focus your efforts and achieve a more cohesive client training strategy that’s fully aligned with business goals. 

2. Set Aside Resources

The next step is to allocate the resources you’ll use to put together your customer training program. Even if you are working with a small budget and lack the resources to create a fully-fledged learning academy right off the bat, there are still plenty of ways to start small and gain significant advantages.

3. Create Content

One of the most important steps is creating content that will empower your clients. Since you planned the training strategy’s objectives in step one, you can now build content that will contribute to those goals. For example, if one goal of your program is to improve product adoption, you could create guides that show customers how to use specific product features more effectively or case studies that demonstrate the value of those features.

4. Deliver the Content

Now that you have some content ready, you need to get it to your customers so they can benefit from it. It’s very easy for your client education program to become disorganized at this point. One of the best ways to deliver your learning content to your customers in a way they can access it conveniently is to use a learning management system like Northpass. Northpass makes it easy for customers to reach your content via a centralized customer training portal, among many other benefits.

5. Measure the Impact

The final step is to track the impact of your client training program and use the data you gather to improve it. Gather feedback from your clients by asking them to complete surveys or giving them other opportunities to send you their thoughts. You can also use Northpass to track metrics that can give you deeper insight into your client training program’s strengths and weaknesses. Frequently analyzing your client training strategy enables you to make improvements and continually move closer to your customer education goals.

Best Customer Training Programs

Some of the best customer training programs use learning management systems to stay organized and enable successful customer education outcomes. Top companies like Uber, Compass and Freshworks use Northpass to power their customer education initiatives. 

Companies like these have discovered that once your business grows to a certain size, the old ways of approaching client training simply aren't enough anymore. A learning management system is a scalable solution that makes it possible to deliver training content to all your customers seamlessly — no matter how large your customer base grows.

Cutting-edge SaaS training plans frequently rely on learning management systems because LMSs have a reputation of getting results. Disorganized, decentralized customer training programs are often not as effective because they aren’t as scalable and they don’t make it easy enough for the customer to find the right content. Northpass can give your clients access to learning content through a single training portal and guide them through customized learning paths that ensure they always have a next step.

Product Training for Customers

Client training is not a quick, straightforward process; customer training extends throughout the whole time the customer is with your business, and it’s made up of many different parts. One aspect of the overall customer training ecosystem is product training for customers. 

Product training is a specific part of the training experience that specifically deals with teaching customers how to use your products more effectively. Other kinds of training may relate more directly to other parts of the customer experience. 

You can use a learning management system like Northpass as product training software if you create product training content that teaches your users how to get more value from your products. Product training results in many of the most significant benefits of customer training, like improved product adoption and increased customer engagement.

Customer Training Example

Learning management systems often result in the most successful customer training examples, and world-class customer academies are usually supported by the very best learning management solutions. For example, the Hubspot academy is one of the best customer education programs on the internet.

Aside from benefits like improved organization, accessibility and analytics, Northpass also offers useful customer education features like gamification. Examples of gamification in customer education can be found in many different training programs because gamification can be a very effective way to engage learners. Gamification doesn’t incorporate actual games into the learning process, but it does adjust the learning experience to include game-like elements, such as awarding points to learners as they complete courses.

Customer Training Software

Today, customers expect a lot from their training experiences. Providing your customers with an effective, streamlined client education process is essential for retaining their business. Not only does a great client training experience contribute to customer satisfaction, but it also helps customers understand the value of your products or services faster. 

The right customer training software can make it much easier to deliver an outstanding training experience to your clients. However, how do you know which is the best LMS for customer training?

Customer training tools come in many different forms. If a SaaS company is looking for a scalable way to train clients, the best option is usually an LMS. For training providers, a learning management system can be the difference between successful client training outcomes and a disorganized strategy that fails to accomplish its goals. To choose the right LMS for your business, you have to consider your goals and the unique training needs of customers in your industry.