End User Training Methods: What You Need to Know

What's End User Training?

End user training provides users — customers, employees, partners or gig workers — with the knowledge and resources they need to succeed with your product or service. For example, a company like Uber could use end user training to educate new drivers about how to start earning while helping under-performing drivers improve their ratings. 

What's an End User? 

Before moving on to the types of end user training, let's clearly define "end user." 

In the context of online training, what does it mean? 

Simply put, an end user is anyone that uses your product or service, including customers, employees, partners and gig workers (Uber drivers, people delivering for Instacart, walking dogs with Wag!, etc.). 

Types Of End User Training

End user training is an umbrella term used to describe different types of training. How it applies to you depends on the type of end user you're training. 

Are you training customers? Employees? Partners? Gig workers? Maybe some combination? 

Let's look at each of these types of end user training. 

Customer Training

Customer training (also called customer education) is a strategy company, especially those in B2B SaaS, can use to deliver educational content and resources to their customers. When end-user training is applied to customers, it could take shape during the onboarding process, but generally continues throughout the entire customer journey to ensure they continue to see value in the product or service.

Examples of End User Training for Customers

• HubSpot CMS Best Practices for Developers
• How to use Ahrefs
• Bonfire Basics: Vendor Submission and Evaluation 

These are all great examples of customer training in action. 

For HubSpot, its course helps developers make the most of its CMS. For ahrefs, new customers (users) can take this introductory course to speed up onboarding and reduce time to value (TTV). Finally, for Bonfire, the course outlines a key function necessary to get value out of its technology, ensuring that its customers can actually use it. 

Employee Training 

End user training in the context of employees ensures they're successful in their roles and growing both professionally and personally — employee training aims to make them feel valued and maximize their productivity.  

Examples of End User Training for Employees

• An onboarding course that shows new marketers how to use — and market — the product. 
• A webinar to teach the support team about a new product feature so that they can communicate it with customers. 
• A video series the sales team can use to learn about the product, its benefits and how to effectively sell it to customers.

Employee training leads to many benefits. The end-user training methods you use to onboard and train your employees influences churn rate and the productivity of your whole operation. Better employee training also enables your organization to scale hiring as the company grows because you have a structured process to get new employees off to a great start.

Partner Training

When you’re working with partners who are representing your brand, it’s important to keep them educated about your products. You don’t want customers to get a different experience or a different impression of your product from different partners — you want a cohesive message, wherever your customers are. Part of making this happen is keeping all your partners on the same page about your product.

Examples of End User Training for Partners

• A course that shows new partners how to use — and sell — your product. 
• A webinar to walk them through a new feature that may interest their prospects, like a new integration. 
• Certification courses that enable partners to become power users and be the ultimate champions of your product in the market.

Gig Workforce Training

Keeping a gig workforce aligned and productive can be extremely challenging. Like your partners, you want your gig workforce to deliver a consistent experience for your customers — both in terms of quality and brand image. So how do you achieve this? Once again: with the best end-user training geared toward the gig economy. 

Examples of End User Training for the Gig Workforce

• A course showing gig workers for a food delivery app how to complete their first order. 
• Tips and tricks gig workers can use to improve their ratings and make more money.
• Certification courses that help retain workers and enable them to deliver better service to customers.

Benefits of End User Training

Prioritizing end user training leads to all kinds of positive business outcomes.

When you give users access to great training content, it directly impacts your ability to grow and generate revenue. 

Here are some of the biggest benefits of end user training today: 

Faster Onboarding

User onboarding is arguably the most important part of a customer, employee, partner or gig worker's journey with a company.

Effective end user training makes it simple to get new users set up to use your product successfully. This shortens time to value (TTV) and gets users engaged with the product much faster. It can also reduce support costs because users will need less hand-holding.

Increase Product Adoption, Engagement and Retention

When users can get the heart of your product’s value faster, they’re more likely to integrate that product into their regular toolkit. That’s called product adoption. Better end-user training improves product adoption, which helps your organization retain customers, employees, partners and gig workers. Retention is essential because retaining users is far less expensive than acquiring new ones.

Organic Growth

It’s likely your primary goal for your end user training program is to improve your existing users’ experiences. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t also be a way to gain new ones. By maintaining end-user training materials in a public-facing way that are relevant to not only your customers specifically, but your industry more broadly, you can draw in potential users — think about what HubSpot does with The HubSpot Academy. 

By gearing your training content toward anyone interested in learning more about your field, you can appeal to a wider audience than only your existing users. Offering free educational content is a great way to start off a positive relationship with a new customer.

Create Brand Advocates

Every customer has to start somewhere when learning to use your product. If you give them the resources they need, they’ll grow to become confident, self-sufficient product experts. These are the types of users who act as brand champions and advocate for your products to others. The word-of-mouth marketing generated by these customers is one of the best results of excellent user education. 

If your customers aren’t given the means to educate themselves about your product, you can hardly expect them to understand the product well enough to use it themselves, let alone recommend it to other people. That’s why when you prioritize end-user training, it leads to greater brand advocacy from customers.

Establish Thought Leadership

Fantastic end-user training also positions your brand as a thought leader in your industry. By offering educational content about different end-user training topics related to your industry, you can demonstrate your brand’s expertise to potential customers. This is not only a way to attract new users, but it’s also a way to build your brand’s authority in your space.

Examples of End User Training

If you want to create the best end user training program possible, a learning management system like Northpass can equip you with all the tools you need. A dedicated online education platform is the best way to manage your training content and deliver it to users efficiently.

Ready to get started? Reach out today to talk to an end user training expert.