What's Customer Training? A No-nonsense Guide

Are you looking to get into customer training (aka customer education) but need more information to get your program off the ground, secure leadership buy-in, or optimize an existing strategy? 

We've got you covered. 

What you'll learn in this guide: 

• A simple definition of customer training
• Why customer training is so important today
• Customer training best practices you can use ASAP
• How to pick the best customer training LMS for you 

Ready? Let's go. 

What's Customer Training?

Customer training — also referred to as customer education — is a strategy companies can use to train their customers about their product or service and help them realize its value. 

The Importance of Customer Training in 2022

You're reading this, so you probably already know customer training is valuable. 

But, let's dive in deeper and look at six specific ways customer training can transform your business — and bottom line — in 2022. 

More Money

Studies show that retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. 

What's the best way to retain customers? 

Simple: Make sure they get value from your product or service.

The best way to do this is by using a customer training program to give your customers the resources they need to succeed — think blog posts, videos, instructor-led training (ILT) and help center documentation.

More Product Adoption

Don't let anyone tell you that product adoption isn't the most critical part of customer retention. 

No fancy marketing campaign, 24/7 support or low prices will save a customer if they're not using your product or service. 

For customers to use your product or service, they need to know how, which is preciously what customer training aims to do. 

For example, a customer training program could include a video or brief webinar guiding customers on using a new feature or resolving a common technical issue.  

Faster Onboarding

Onboarding is arguably the most important part of the customer journey. 

Unfortunately, many companies fail to deliver a good experience — more than 90% of customers think companies could improve onboarding.

A good onboarding training is more than just ensuring your customers have access to the resources; a good process also happens ASAP. 

Like, the second a customer signs the dotted line or a new admin comes on board. 

If you're powering your program with a customer training LMS, you can automate these first steps to ensure customers or admins instantly have access to what they need to get started — like a welcome email with their first course.

Fewer Support Tickets 

One of the biggest challenges for scaling companies is providing a growing customer base with the support they need. 

Said another way, as 10s of customers become 1000s, expecting customer success managers (CSMs) and support reps to provide white-glove service to all these people isn't realistic. 

However, supplementing your support strategy with customer training is possible. 

This way, customers can take proactive steps to learn on their own. 

For example, if a customer wants to learn about a new feature, instead of reaching out to their CSM and scheduling a 30-minute call that'll eat into everyone's time, they can use available resources to figure out how to use it. 

Then, if they have additional questions or want more information, they can reach out and have more strategic conversations. 

Because these customer training materials stepped in where a CSM historically would, CSMs will have more time to focus on more important things, like success planning with customers or showing them how the next product tier can help them.  

Faster Sales

The importance of customer training usually confines itself to the customer. 

That said, it can impact other teams, too, including sales. 

If you have a public-facing customer training program — think The HubSpot Academy — prospects can actively learn about your product or service before reaching out to you. 

Think about it: If you're considering buying new software for your business, like Drift, will you just reach out to schedule a demo or go to its website first for more information? 

Nine times out of 10, you'll do the latter. 

From there, you'll gather information, learn about the product and decide if you want that demo.

How does this help your sales team sell faster? 

Because these prospects come to the demo with knowledge of the company, product and some idea of how it can help them, sellers can skip this part of the conversation and go right into selling. 

So, instead of giving a company history or how you can help them, they can dive right into strategic conversations that actually close deals. 

Organic Growth

If you have a public-facing customer training program, it can help you grow, too. 

Public-facing academies, like The HubSpot Academy and Shopify Learn, position both these companies as thought leaders in their industries. 

For instance, when someone wants to learn about inbound marketing software or SEO, it's likely that they either immediately think of HubSpot or come across some of its content through search (customer training has significant SEO benefits). 

Over time, HubSpot's become the leader in its industry and instantly inserts itself into the consideration set of prospects simply because of the availability of its training materials.

Customer Training Best Practices

We've covered the "what" and "why" of customer training. 

That's all well and good, but how about making it work for you? 

Here are some customer training best practices that you can implement right away to deliver the most impactful learning experiences to your customers.  

Take Advantage of Microlearning 

In a perfect world, customers would sit — either in person or in front of a screen — and consume content. 

For various reasons, including the rise of mobile devices and nomadic living, expecting anyone to sit and consume sizable pieces of content at once is risky. 

It's why no one reads the TV manual or why the idea of sitting through a 12-hour movie seems ridiculous, but watching a series at once is perfectly reasonable. 

Whatever way you look at it, people are most likely to engage in bite-sized pieces of content.

Enter microlearning. 

If you have a 2,500-word ebook, turn it into 5 blog posts of equal length or break it down into individual courses as part of a learning path. 

If you have a 45-minute webinar, separate it into 4 or 5 shorter videos, each centering around a topic or talking point. 

Whenever and wherever possible, provide bite-sized learning and assume your customers have just a few minutes to consume — and digest — your content. 

Bring Your Content to Life with Visuals and Videos

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it. 

For this reason, work with an instructional designer to introduce visuals and videos into your customer training program whenever and wherever possible. 

This will help with content comprehension and retention while decreasing burnout when paired with shorter text and quiz responses.

Personalize the Experience

You need to deliver your content in an engaging way — this is the only way to get your customers to retain knowledge. 

An easy start is to include their names on the welcome screen. You should also consider building groups, which will let you segment customers and provide them with a more tailored learning experience. 

You can even customize the end-of-course screen to make a great final impression, which will also help create a more seamless transition in their workflow and helps ease any confusion or uncertainty about what they should do next.

Integrate Your Customer Training LMS with Any Existing Technology

The increasing importance of customer training means that the technology powering these programs should work alongside other essential internal tools, namely, your CRM. 

Integrating your LMS and CRM instantly aligns your learning efforts with Sales, Marketing and Services, allowing you to walk in lockstep toward a shared goal: Growing the business. 

How to Pick the Best Customer Training Software

There's a lot of customer training software available in 2022, making it difficult to decide which one's the best aligned with your business and learning goals.

There's no one-size-fits-all answer; however, there are some questions you can ask yourself and the software vendors to make a smart decision.

Questions to ask: 

• What are your goals for customer training?
  
  Are you trying to accelerate onboarding? Increase NPS? Reduce churn?
  
  While most LMSs will be equipped to help you achieve all these goals, some may be better suited for certain ones and come with tailor-made features. 
• What's your budget?
  
  There are some free LMSs out there (often called open-sourced LMSs) that offer an excellent foundation for upstart learning teams. 
  
  That said, they can lack the power you'll need to scale and deliver a truly personalized learning experience. So, when trying to pick the right customer training software, keep this in mind. 
• Do you have technology and development resources?
  
  Most LMSs come out of the box with an intuitive interface internal teams can use to create an impactful learning experience. 
  
  That said, there may be another level you want to reach but can't without technical and development resources. If that's the case, you'll need an LMS vendor who can supply those. 
• How many customers are you training? 
  
  Just a handful? Thousands? Look at this from a now-and-later standpoint. 
  
  While you may be training 100 customers today, you likely have plans to train thousands down the road. Selecting an LMS that can handle this rush of customers, regardless of your current customer base, will save you from completely switching to a new LMS when your original one reaches capacity. 

Your answers to these questions will help you decide which customer training software is best — or at least give you the ability to narrow your consideration set. 

From there, you can look for software with the needed features. 

For example, if you have a small team, you'll want to go with a software vendor with a strong support team. Similarly, if you don't have any technical resources internally, you'll want to find a vendor that can help with implementation and ongoing technical support. 

If you're training customers with vastly different needs, you may want software with powerful automation capabilities to build learning paths to deliver consistent content to all of these people automatically. 

Finally, if you're training thousands of customers, you'll want a cloud-based or SaaS training software that'll allow you to deliver and scale content to customers around the world easily. 

This is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Still, it's an iceberg you need to navigate. 

Understandably, the iceberg will look different, which means the training software you need will differ from what a colleague may need. 

That said, there are some specific features you cannot compromise on when picking your customer training software: Scalability, usability and analytics. 

• Scalability: As your customer training program grows and you'll need to get more customers using the software, which is why it's so important to have a reliable and flexible LMS engineered to easily add more courses and customers.
• Usability: The success of your customer training program hinges on your customers using it, which is why your training software must be painfully easy for them to use. To get the engagement you need to reach your goals, you always have to put your customers first. This means making your academy as mobile-friendly and intuitive as possible, which you can do by using supported integrations.
• Analytics: Old-school learning resources like in-person training and manuals just don't give you the ability to track metrics and KPIs, like engagement, that your leadership team will be looking for. By powering your customer academy with software that has robust analytical capabilities, you'll be able to arm yourself with what you need to prove the value of what you're doing. Plus, you can also use these insights to help enhance your iteration process mentioned above. 

Northpass: The Customer Training Software Trusted by Leading Companies

Do you want to learn why companies like Uber, Shopify and Shipt trust Northpass to power their customer training programs? Reach out today.