THEULTIMATE GUIDE TO CUSTOMER TRAINING

Tips & tricks to transform customers into advocates

Barry Kelly

John LehGordon Johnson Joe Cannata

Michael DaecherClaire SchooleySamma HafeezCraig WeissPat Durante

Customers are No Captive Audienceby Barry Kelly ..............….....................….…... i

Chapter 1Building a Customer Training Program That Starts to Work Even Before the Saleby Michael Daecher ....…....……..…….……..... 01

Chapter 27 Steps to the PerfectCustomer Onboarding Programby Samma Hafeez ..….............…......……...... 04

Chapter 3Customer Engagement,Retention & Beyondby Pat Durante ......….......…................…...... 08

Chapter 4Shifting Gears: Making the Switch from Employee Learning to Customer Trainingby Craig Weiss ..…............…….....….............. 11

Chapter 5To Drive Customer Success,Dial in the Right Mix of Application & Contextual Trainingby Barry Kelly .........................….........…...... 14

Chapter 6Design the Perfect Learning Blend for Customer Successby Claire Schooley ............…............................. 17

Chapter 722 Ways to Promote Your Training & Turn Customers into Advocatesby Gordon Johnson .………..........…................… 22

Chapter 8Strategies for Pricing &Packaging Customer Trainingby John Leh ...................…........…...........…...... 28

Chapter 9Best Practices forCreating a Hot Certifcation Program (that Makes your Product Stickier)by Joe Cannata ..........….................…............... 34

Chapter 10Measuring the ROI/VOI ofCustomer Learningby Claire Schooley …...........…...........….....…..... 38

Chapter 11How to Assemble a Great Technology Stack for Customer Success & TrainingBy Barry Kelly ..............……........................…... 44

Appendix: The Thought Industries Customer Learning Platform …..…..…..…..…..…..……... 49

About the Authors................................…..… 51

THE ULTIMATE GUIDETO CUSTOMER TRAINING

TABLE OF CONTENTS

o attract customers, capture them, and keep them requires you to produce a product they need or want and to persuade them over and over that it's worth sticking around. To keep them, you must continue to deliver value, not only to each individual user but also for their business. Training and behavior change is a key part of delivering value, and the process requires continual engagement throughout the lifecycle of your customer.

The importance of training in the customer success lifecycle can not be understated and starts as early as the presale period. At this stage, training can be leveraged to get prospects engaged. By showing one or two well-chosen benefits quickly, you can help uncover the key value to their business. Post-sale, a highly curated and effective onboarding program and training process will lead the customer to a better understanding of your program, which in turn will help them gain value for their investment as quickly as possible. This metric is called “time to value”, and it is a critical measurement at the early stages of the relationship. After the onboarding period, the goal is to continue to keep your customers successful with your product.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of questions to answer when it comes to customer training. For example, will you make it free or should you charge? How do you design a mix of learning that will help the customer succeed? If you're already delivering training to an internal audience or your external partners, how do you convert those materials and processes to customer-focused training? What kinds of technology do you need to run a successful customer training program? Should you plan on certification too?

In this ebook, we take on these questions and more with practical guidance to help you become a customer training expert as quickly as possible.

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In the first part of the book, you'll learn how to build a training program that addresses each phase of the customer lifecycle.

Chapter 1 lays out the basics of the first stage in the customer education lifecycle—pre-sale—and offers practical techniques for gaining traction among your prospects, including one secret ingredient that will set your company apart from the competition.

Chapter 2, "7 Steps to the Perfect Customer Onboarding Program," shares seven techniques for making sure you squeeze every ounce of benefit from your onboarding efforts to help your customers be successful with your product or service from the moment they first come on your radar.

Chapter 3 educates you on methods for keeping customers engaged and provides three metrics to help you measure how well you're doing.

If you already have an employee-focused training program, you'll have a few things to "unlearn" during your transition to customer-facing training. In Chapter 4 , "Shifting Gears: Making the Switch from Employee Learning to Customer Training,"e-learning consultant Craig Weiss (who made almost a million dollars selling training that never exceeded $25 a course) shares seven areas to help you shift from a mindset focused on employee learning and development to a customer training orientation. (He predicts you'll never look back.)

Next, the book explores from two perspectives how to formulate the right blend of training components.

In Chapter 5 , I give my insights on two kinds of learning—contextual and application—that are essential and that you'll want to use as you flavor your customer training content. training content. One kind helps the customer learn how to use your product; the other addresses the outcomes your customer is hoping to achieve (and that

Customers are No Captive Audience

will ultimately help generate the greatest amount of value).

In Chapter 6 , workforce development maven Claire Schooley helps you design the perfect learning blend for customer success by examining what elements work for which customers and offers four tips for refining your blend for the best outcomes.

Once you've strategized about the types of content you intend to deliver, it's time to turn your attention to marketing of your customer training. Chapter 7 , written by marketing authority Gordon Johnson, shares 22 valuable marketing ideas that will turn uneducated customers into highly-trained advocates "who would never think of replacing your product with anything else."

Of course, a big question to answer is whether and how to price your training. It may be that you decide to keep it free. But there are plenty of reasons to price it too. In Chapter 8 John Leh, CEO and lead analyst for Talented Learning, drills down on the fundamentals of how to price and package customer training, addressing such topics as balancing customer success with a profit center, how to test free content strategies against paid offerings, how to figure out your pricing scheme, the advantages of an all-you-can-learn model and more.

Another major area to consider for your customer training program is whether to offer a certification program. Chapter 9 digs into the link between customer success and certification, includes four tips for developing a well-structured program, and provides details on an alternative that nearly any company can adopt as a lower-cost, lower-effort option.

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Claire Schooley returns in Chapter 10 to investigate easy techniques for measuring the return-on-investment and value-of-investment (ROI and VOI) of the learning you're delivering to your customers. As an example, if you work in a software-as-a-service operation, your executives are probably interested in understanding the connection between the training they're investing in and rates of customer retention, product renewal, spend and satisfaction scores. Claire provides formulas and explanations about what to measure and how.

Finally, in Chapter 11 I show you how to assemble a great technology stack for customer success and training. This chapter does two things: First, it offers a lay of the land for the various kinds of software (and leading examples) you'll want to consider for building a solid foundation for your customer training business. Second, it shares guidance to help you make the right choices as you're building your technology stack.

This ebook was written and published for people who play a role in customer training. If that's you, it means your ultimate job is to help customers succeed. By doing so, you'll increase retention, reduce customer churn, and build trust among customers for your organization and its products and services.

We hope you'll let us know which of the numerous tactics, strategies, tips and techniques help you find success. Send your feedback to info@thoughtindustries.com.

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About the author:Barry Kelly is the CEO of Thought Industries, a leading learning management system company that recently introduced the Customer Learning Platform, a system specifically designed to streamline the online experience and automate customer onboarding.

rganizations that are authentically focused on the success of their customers are also the ones that will succeed themselves. This is especially true in the technology segment, where competition seems to abound for any given flavor of product or service. Before customers bother to invest in software, they want to make sure they're choosing a technology provider worth partnering with in the long-term (even if that term lasts just a year).

How are choices made? The customer experience plays an ever-bigger role. As Walker Information reports, nearly nine in 10 buyers (86 percent) "are willing to pay more for a better customer experience." In fact, by 2020, this customer consultancy asserts, "customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator."

One way to set yourself apart from the competition is in how you handle customer education. Leaders view customer learning as a lifecycle that starts a lot earlier and continues longer than you might think. This chapter lays out the basics of the first stage in the customer education lifecycle—pre-sale—and provides practical techniques for gaining traction among your prospects, including one secret ingredient that will set your company apart from the competition.

Attractingthe right attentionIn 2006 a marketing company surveyed 200,000 consumers who had participated in online education programs during the previous year. What they found probably won't surprise anybody: Individuals who participate in sponsored educational programs tend to view the sponsoring brand "favorably." And they're "very likely" to buy the branded products after their training.

What astonished the researchers was this: Compared to the impact that traditional advertising

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had on the behavior of these consumers, people who fnished their training were 29 times more likely to buy the sponsor's products. Educational programs turned out to be a far better marketing investment for companies than other kinds of outreach mechanisms.

The question is how to translate education into scalable practices that will help you attract prospect attention and help them understand the value of your product. The goal: to get them to that "Wow! moment," as venture capitalist David Skok calls it—that recognition of the benefits they'll enjoy if they use your product.

Many software companies use freemiums and trial periods to allow a prospect to test software. And numerous marketing experts have debated every aspect of these: how long the trial should last, how much functionality the freemium should include, whether to require credit card information upfront, what a reasonable conversion rate should look like, whether to force users through complex processes (such as loading data) before they get to the good stuff.

The challenge is that complex products won't deploy or configure themselves, and prospects may not be willing or interested in having your consultants or sales engineers come into their operations to load a program onto their systems. Besides, in the sales process, it's one thing to say, "Here's our product, here's an important feature, and here's how it works." It's very different to be able to help your prospect understand what the value of that particular feature is.A more important consideration than free trials and sales pitches is what kind of educational experiences you can provide upfront, whether or not the prospect has your service or program loaded and ready to run.

According to Thought Industries CEO Barry Kelly, a particularly effective practice is to create shortform, on-demand learning content—think video, in particular—that provides quick walkthroughs of features leading to an outcome

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EducationalProgramsduring Pre-saleWhat kinds of educational content work in the acquisition process? You can't approach customers with a monolithic approach. They're all going to be in a different part of the lifecycle, have a different set of outcomes they care about and possess varying levels of product understanding.

The answer is to try a variety of content and see what works. Thought Industries' Barry Kelly has seen success with these:

These forms of content are especially valued by prospects if the focus is on helping them gain skills and knowledge for doing their jobs better—with or without your product. As the old advertising adage goes, tell me about my lawn, not your grass seed.

Curated short-form, on-demand learning content, including online courses and curated learning experiences;

Product guides and introductory learning information to provide overviews and dive into the benefits of specific features;

Use of customer advocates and product experts, as references, to cultivate thought leaders and develop content for the knowledge base;

Scheduled webinars, including expert presentations and synchronous live learning events to share advice and answer questions; and

Scheduled weekly email guides, tips and custom learning content.

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experience with your technology. For example, if the person watches a short, introductory video all the way through to the end, the learning management system captures that data and can send a message suggesting a follow-up video with a

slightly deeper or diferent exploration. If the viewer gets stuck at a particular point, the system could recognize that and ofer immediate chat-based help or give a prompt linking to explanatory content.

For people who work through a set of training sessions, the system might reward them with a digital badge, a discount or a free consulting hour.

You can use the data you collect through the training experience to get a better understanding of the motivations of the prospect, identify knowledge gaps and provide a feedback loop to track where they are in the engagement process and guide them or coax them along in their journey. The goal: to tap into the endorphins that fire off when they buy your product for the first time.

About the author:Michael Daecher is the Chief Marketing Officer at Thought Industries and brings years of experience in growth startups and online learning. He first encountered Thought Industries while using the platform to launch the multi million dollar online ‐education business within Active Interest Media.

Building a Customer Training Program Tha Starts to Work Even Before the Sale

the prospect will value. "People don’t have a lot of time," he says. "You want to walk them through a couple of steps, give them some information, a couple of ways to interact with the product. Those can be offered simply and easily."

The more complex the product, the deeper that educational experience will have to go. You may need to produce a whole series of videos—along with training webinars, virtual instructor-led sessions, case studiesand whitepapers—with the idea that you're leading the prospect toward a better understanding of your program, fostering engagement, establishing authority in the market, and encouraging trust.

The secret ingredient:DataCurrently, here's what many companies do: Somebody comes to the website to view a pre-recorded webinar or a whitepaper. He or she has to register and provide a bit of contact information to gain access. Almost immediately, an automated email will be generated and sent to the prospect as if it had just been thoughtfully composed by a salesperson, offering any kind of assistance required. Or a salesperson might call and leave voicemail with the same offer. Frequently, these responses come even before the prospect has had a chance to watch the webinar or read the whitepaper. It's not the best timing—and probably not the best way to determine level of lead interest.

What's a better approach? A well-designed customer learning program will help you reach out at the most effective points in that prospect's

The more complex the product, the deeper that educational experience will have to go.

This chapter shares seven techniques for making sure you squeeze every ounce of beneft from your onboarding eforts and help your customers be successful with your product or service from the moment they frst come on your radar. Although many of these examples are from software companies (because onboarding is such a critical part of their success), most of the tips can be applied to any type of company that wants to get better at retaining customers.

t first glance, you might believe that customer onboarding is that part of the buying process in which you teach new customers how to use your product—which buttons to click and how to navigate around the interface. After all, employee onboarding is the part of the hiring process where HR gets a new person outfitted with the equipment and training needed to do something productive.

Customer onboarding, however, is a bit different. It includes that productivity phase, but a customer isn't truly onboarded until he or she has achieved something of value.

That's especially important to understand when you have a SaaS business. The sooner the customer experiences success with your product, the greater the chance that he or she will buy and continue paying for the use of your software or service.

"There's a lot of data out there around adoption timeframes," notes Thought Industries CEO Barry Kelly. "If customers don’t really adopt the product and see traction with it quickly, the chances of gaining traction later is less likely."

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Samma Hafeez

7 Steps tothe Perfect Customer Onboarding Program

Your customer is more likely to use your product or service if they have actually seen it add value to their lives—and quickly.

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How a customer values your software will vary from role to role. On any team being onboarded, there might be multiple departments represented, each with its own needs for the product, its own uses, and its own way of evaluating whether the program meets those goals. It's important to make sure you deliver first-time value for each of those key personas.

The goal is to develop a deep understanding of personas to better understand the business at-large, which ultimately helps to build deep horizontal and vertical relationships and socialize your product across an organization.

Let's say you always host an onboarding training webinar for new customers. While your presentation may hit most people's needs, pay close attention to those who ask the questions that come across as "out in left field." Those inquiries may offer clues about what that person (or that type of role) will value in your software. Also, consider reaching out directly to people who ask no questions at all. If they haven’t yet found value in what you offer, they may give up before your product gets a fair chance. By sending them an email, even if it’s only semi-personalized, to encourage them to take a moment and tell you what they're thinking, you might be able to keep them engaged and ultimately convert them to a believer. These nuggets of information could also help build out personas you hadn’t previously considered while offering insight into new ways to relay benefits of the program to new groups of users.

It’s important to point out that the key decision makers should be involved in identifying the core users/personas and help to set training goals. Without early executive buy in and continued executive visibility, the success of onboarding is in peril.

1Exploit your customer personas—every one of them

Map training to your customer’s unique pain points and goals

Being selective means a couple of different things. First, don't try to teach every important feature of your program. It goes without saying that you must spend some time on how to use the software. You should also spend equal or more time on how to succeed in reaching the goal they're adopting your software for in the first place. Give your customers enough help to get them moving in a specific direction that will have impact for them and meet their needs. Being able to satisfy their workflows and use cases is more important than simply learning to use a feature.

Second, make the training succinct. "Customers don’t have time to waste. They're extremely busy," observes Pat Durante, president of CEdMA , the Customer Education Management Association, and senior manager of training and enablement at Synopsys a pioneer in software security and quality. "If your web event is wandering all over the place with a demo, that's a waste of the customer's time—especially if they can get that same content in a five-minute video that shows them exactly what that new feature is and how it would be of value to them."

As Durante explains, your philosophy should be customer-centric: "Get me there fast. Teach me exactly what I need to know. Don’t give me any fluff. Get right to the point." That's especially true, he adds, for the YouTube generation. "Tell me what I need to know right now and then get out of my way, so I can do it myself."

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Kelly recommends specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of your onboarding experiments—and, really, it's all an experiment. Sound obvious? According to a survey shared by Harvard Business Review , less than half of executives (49%) reported that their firms use data to understand or predict higher—level customer needs.

A primary metric to pay attention to is "time-to-value," a concept that measures how long it takes for a user to gain success or value. How do you recognize when this has happened? Well, first, it needs to be based on something that's measurable. For instance, at Natero , a customer success platform, the company identifies the ways that successful customers (those who continually renew) are leveraging the product capabilities as compared to those who "struggle or churn." The main aspects they monitor are the features being used. From there, they create onboarding tasks that guide new customers to try similar successful behaviors.

Other useful indicators include engagement (as measured by social activities, for example), level of demand for training, and interest in add-on products or services. Often, the specific KPIs that will matter for you may be unique to your product. For example, an accounting service may want to track the number of statements sent out through

This is particularly important in early days. If somebody isn't logging in, follow up. Groove has found success when they do just that. The company sends a friendly email that asks the recipient, "What's been keeping you from getting going with the app?" It ends with a P.S. that offers a “quick Skype session” if the user needs help with the program. "That email and others like it," writes

You can't expect software to do all the heavy lifting in customer onboarding. Reach out for personal contact with customers for feedback on why they have decided to sign on and pay for the software, why they've decided to relinquish the program after a trial, what they hope to achieve with your product, and how they plan to evaluate their success. These conversations—whether by phone, email, online "office hours," or some other method—can help you tune your onboarding activities to make them more effective.

Alex Turnbull, the CEO of Groove , a SaaS company that produces help desk software for small businesses, set out to talk with " every single Groove customer ." What he learned, he said, "amazed" him. "Not only did I better understand where people struggled and what we needed to do to increase retention and reduce churn, but we learned valuable insights about the words that are important to people." As an example, in those discussions, a lot of customers asked about "filters." It was no wonder they couldn't find the filtering capability in the program—the company called it "rules."

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3Don't hide behind automation; talk to your customers

Measure successand fine-tune

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Build a strategy with well-timed touch-points and milestones4

Turnbull, "have brought back hundreds of users who, for one reason or another, hit a snag in their early days with Groove."

Outreach could also include results of recent customer surveys, best practices, trip reports from online and in-person customer events, and regular access to baseline data compiled anonymously from among all users.

When a customer first adopts your service into their organization, you may be driving multiplepeople through the onboarding process simultaneously as they integrate your product. After that initial push, new hires or replacements who are brought in will need onboarding as well, which presents a new challenge. Some vendors will provide webinars or other digital forms of training to help bring new users up to speed. Others will make training and resources for new hires available at an additional cost.

Kelly prefers to use those situations as an opportunity for building up the relationship with the customer and "re-onboarding." The message: "We'd like to bring back the whole team for training and product updates. It's been a year and we've released a lot of new features and updates. Why don’t we take you all through a half-day of training to get everybody re-acquainted and up to speed on all the new stuff?" The work invested in that is a whole lot easier, he points out, than starting from the beginning with a new customer.

Like a coach talking into an earpiece to urge the cyclist through the next phase of the race, you need to find ways to nudge users through activities that will help them find success with your product or service. Approaches that have found success include:

● Offering a certificate of recognition for completing training within a specific window of time after sign-up● Giving an immediate discount on the next renewal● Delivering a "tip of the day"● Offering free consulting time for each person who completes the training within a certain deadline

As a example of what this looks like in practice, Thought Industries has a team of onboarding specialists. Each enterprise is assigned a dedicated resource who answers questions in weekly webinar meetings over the first 12 weeks of usage, guiding them from sign-on to launch. Along with that, customers receive access to specific kinds of training and a "bank of hours" for additional training in their specific areas of interest.

And most importantly, Customer Success Managers should be working to turn users into rock stars who get promoted and recognized within their organizations for solving business problems with your product.

the trial period or pilot. If the number hasn't grown over 90 days, that may be an indication that support for the service has flatlined and needs attention. A different company may choose to track the feature usage score among customers or new bookings. Here's where understanding the goals of your customer will come in handy. The things that they've expressed as adding value to their experience should form the essence of the metrics you need to track.

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Recognize that onboarding is a continual cycle

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Nudge your usersduring onboarding6

About the author:Samma Hafeez is the Vice President of Customer Success at Thought Industries and has more than a decade of experience in customer success, leading and scaling industry recognized teams in the delivery ‐of technology and services around the world.

nce you've attracted a customer and helped them onboard, your job has just begun. Now it’s time to focus on helping them stay happy by keeping them engaged and coming back for more.Gallup research has found that, when compared to the average customer, customers who are "fully engaged" represent a 23 percent premium "in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth." The same survey revealed that companies that successfully engage their business-to-business customers enjoy 63 percent less customer attrition, 55% more "share of wallet," and 50% greater productivity.

Engagement matters—more than simple customer satisfaction, more than big sales promotions or lower prices, more than loyalty programs—because it helps your company hold onto the customers you have. Gallup calls engagement the "emotional connection between your customers and your company." The organizations that do it best focus on helping their customers in ways that matter to the bottom line—not their bottom line, but that of their customers.

In this chapter, you'll learn techniques for keeping customers engaged and three metrics that help you measure how well you're doing.

The two roles of customer learning—and a challengeCustomer learning has two roles in engagement. The first is to help people understand how to reach their goals—to advocate for them. The second is to help them understand how to use your technology more effectively.

“The investment in engagement has ‘measurable value’," says John Leh, technology consultant, 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.

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The forms these pathways take can be as varied as the companies providing them. For example:

● HubSpot Academy features core learning pillar;● MailChimp’s learning resource center helps customers at all levels achieve their goals;● Salesforce TrailHead offers a number of learning pathways; and● Roland Academy provides in-person, online and virtual training programs.

Three measures of engagementAs with the other phases of the customer lifecycle, the success of your engagement efforts can be measured by analyzing the data. The biggie here is "churn," the loss of a customer. While Kelly mentions that customers may stop using your product for reasons that are "sometimes inside your control and sometimes outside your control," he notes that it's still important to stay on top of churn as an indicator of the overall health of engagement with a customer.

Here's a simple example. If you start the month with 100 customers and you lose 25 of them by the start of the next month, your customer churn would be calculated like this:

(100 customers - 75 customers)/100 customers= 25 customers/100 customers= 25% customer churn

However, customer and revenue churn are rarely the same in the real world because companies have multiple product lines and different levels of customer buy-in. While you may see a fairly consistent level of customer churn, revenue churn will likely vary over time. It is, logically, dependent on the revenue you were generating from those specific customers who have churned.

How do you accomplish this level of "continual touch," as Leh calls it? There's no one best practice, but a bunch of them. The aim is to be as proactive and relevant as possible. Rather than helping people prepare "for something that might happen in the future," you'll want to look for opportunities to assist them with something they're struggling with right now: new regulations, new trends for their specific industry, new technologies they'll want to understand, and new demands from their own customers that they need to address.

As you provide those types of help, you can also keep them informed about what your own product offers to assist them in their efforts. By tying together their needs with your software, you become a go-to source for authentic guidance on two fronts.

Engagement can also be targeted by creating outcome-based learning that focuses on using your product for specific purposes. Salesforce, for example, does an enviable job of catering to specific verticals—banking versus non-profit versus healthcare.

Then there's the usual form of continual touch: email newsletters that offer questions of the day, tips of the week, and more general how-to assistance.

One challenge during this phase of thecustomer learning Lifecycle is addressing the different levels of interest and experience for customers. Some users have a lot of practice with the product you're selling and others don't. Some are highly experienced in the field you're serving while others are fairly new.

Barry Kelly of Thought Industries recommends the development of "pathways"—learning paths that help individuals understand what's next for their learning, no matter where they are in their usage and understanding.

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As you provide those types of help, you can also keep them informed about what your own product offers to assist them in their efforts.

Another vital measurement to track is "negative churn." This represents your ability to offset churn metrics by increasing the amount you are able to generate from other customers through upselling. If you lost two $500/month customers in a given month and you were able to increase the SaaS fees from another customer by $1,000/month, you've nullified that particular churn metric. That additional buy—in is also a signal that your engagement efforts are working for that customer.

One important non-numeric metric to consider is "referenceability"—how willing your customers are to serve as references for your company. A number of marketing and promotion techniques are much more effective when the voice of your customer is present, whether that’s by offering a quote for a press release, being part of a case study for your website, or fielding a phone call from a prospect. The willingness of a customer to stick with you—and speak on your behalf—says a lot about the level of service your organization delivers month in and month out and the strength of engagement they believe they're getting in return.

A common way to measure this engagement is through Net Promoter Score surveys. They are used consistently across industries because they are easy to put in place and provide solid data.

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About the author:Pat Durante is the President of CEdMA and is the Senior Manager, Training and Education at Synopsys. He is an education executive with significant experience managing sales, customer, partner, and employee training initiatives for global technology companies.

Eliminate the requirement that end users must complete your course. Customers will generally focus on what is of interest and relevance to them. For this reason, you should build your course to cater to the way they actually engage. You might consider eliminating assessments, for example, since customers are rarely fans of assessment. What does interest them is getting training on the product, service, or solution you are expert in.

Approach your curriculum development with a structured mindset where the content follows a chapter or activity format, which will allow customers to move around. You may see that they go right to one section—maybe even repeatedly—

s an organization, you likely have your employee learning program running smoothly. Now, your company has decided to deliver customer training—free or paid—as part of expanding into new markets. It’s important to be aware that the modality, approach, and techniques for customer training are quite different from those you may be used to in employee training and development. As such, you'll need to change your mindset and current approach to how you provide learning. It's not as easy as it sounds. Your whole way of doing things, your focus on skills related to job role, compliance offerings—all must go.

The move into customer training isn't as simple as turning on a new light. It requires shifting gears in several ways: going modular, thinking like a customer, focusing on data, and pursuing a blue ocean strategy.

The five truths explored in this chapter will help you shift from a mindset focused on employee learning and development to a customer training orientation. Once you get there, you'll never look back.

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Craig Weiss

Shifting Gears: Making theSwitch from Employee Learning to CustomerTraining

1Customersbounce aroundwithin courses

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—and ignore other sections completely. Guess what? That’s completely fine. You should allow them to learn and focus in their way, not yours.

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Even when providing software training, focus on a specific topic and only one or two areas of interest in a course. Then, make sure it takes no more than 10 minutes to complete. Better yet, try to break the material up into two mini-mods at five minutes apiece. With this approach, you’re seeking to be as modular as possible in the learning you offer.

If you're training someone on how to use your software via a screen recording, make sure to add clear chapter headings to help learners jump around to the parts they care most about.

Better, create a "show me, let me do it" type of course. Those work the best in any type of software training where interactivity is essential.

2Microlearningworks the best,BUT...

Since customers aren’t a “captive audience” like employees, they are less likely to take training without some convincing. To be successful with them, you need to treat them special and truly understand how they think and what they need.

Here are some questions to answer: What does your customer need to know? What should they expect to gain from the courses, content, and activities you'll be providing? What’s in it for them? What words do they use?

I bet many of them think "training" is a four-letter word. In most cases, they simply want quick answers to quick questions. For them, anything over 10 minutes is probably overkill, unless it’s entry-level onboarding training. Microlearning was built for exactly this customer mindset. Think

3 Think like a customer, not like a manager or employee

about when you have a question about a software application that you use. You don’t look for a “course.” If you’re like me, you look for a YouTube video or search for text answers.

If you can consider the learning you offer from that perspective—as the customer—you'll do far better than if you approach it from the perspective of an employee or manager.

The need to focus on data is true for employee training as well, but it’s especially true for customer training. Customers tend to bounce around in videos and eLearning, trying to find answers. They aren’t required to “finish” training for compliance purposes, so they are less patient with content that doesn’t help them right then and there.

Pay special attention to the trends in how learners engage and consume your material. If you notice that multiple customers hit a certain chapter in a course, this is a flashing light telling you that you need to create a course on that specific topic.

If they're stalling at a certain point, then it may mean you need to evaluate how you're presenting the information. That could be an opportunity to break it down further or come up with new ways of explaining those concepts.

A sure way to build mass is to focus on lower price points, perhaps keeping your pricing below $50. If your cost per seat comes in at $10, chances are good that you are already making a profit. If your cost becomes at $25 a seat, then charge $35. (I made nearly $1 million dollars and never went above $25 a course.)

People like subscriptions, especially if they can pick the bundle of courses they want. If you are putting

4 You mustfocuson data

5When charging for your training, go low & imagine a blue ocean strategy

together a few course bundles, make sure your naming and promotions strategies make sense and encourage engagement and progression. For instance, you could utilize course naming modelled after college curriculum. With that approach, a beginner course would be called "101"—never "Entry" or "Beginner." Intermediate courses, would be numbered with "201”; and, for "advanced" offerings, go with "301." The reason this is appealing is that people never really see themselves as beginners, intermediate, or advanced; they will always think they have a higher skill set. So, abstracting away from descriptors of skill level actually increases your potential audience.

Customer training is both useful and beneficial. Once you are deep into this type of training, you will never want to go back to providing employee development. And, if you are one of the folks who must provide both, you will most likely find yourself working on the customer training side more and more. This is because it delivers a level of satisfaction that employee training will never have.

Shifting Gears: Making the Switch from Employee Learning to Customer Training

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About the author:Craig Weiss is the CEO and lead analyst for the Craig Weiss Group, a consultancy focused one-learning. Craig is the author of the popularE-Learning 24/7 blog, which covers the "truth and realities" of digital learning. Contact Craig at craig.weiss@craigweissgrp.com.

ll customer training is not created equal.There are hundreds of learning technologies on the market. All of them offer specialized options to create and deliver training and learning custom-fit for your audience and their needs. As training becomes more and more a part of the software customer success playbook, two distinct learning delivery mechanisms emerge: "contextual learning" and "application learning."

Contextual learning addresses how to use the software. It generally offers instruction-based teaching to take the user through a set of steps. As an example, it could be as simple as “Click the button,” “Select from the dropdown,” and “Save.”

Application learning, on the other hand, addresses uses for the software in the wild. For instance, it might offer ideas on how to get the best open rates from your email campaign. Both of these learning approaches are important and necessary for a customer to understand how to use your software and how it can be most useful in their lives or careers.

Layered above these two approaches are many different training delivery options:

● In-person instructor-led training● Virtual instructor-led training● Webinars● On-demand learning and courses● Microlearning● In-app videos

Many software organizations—or companies with software products—have already begun the learning delivery journey by leveraging their knowledge base and offering scheduled webinars. As online training becomes more and more robust, these new ways to scale also help drive a positive impact on the customer success lifecycle.

Ultimately, you will need to be in the business of both contextual learning and application learning.

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By

Barry Kelly

To DriveCustomer Success, Dial in the Right Mix of Application & Contextual Training

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Embracing both will help you move the needle on Net Promoter Score, reduce churn, and—for a seasoned customer success group—drive negative churn.

ContextuallearningContextual learning focuses heavily on completing a direct task either within a product or by using a product. Continuing the example of email marketing, imagine a user looking to send a bulk email to a specific segment of his or her company’s audience. Sounds easy enough, but a whole set of choices and tasks need to be executed along the way. They’ll need to add a subject line, pick the recipient segment, choose their design template, add specific content, include a call-to-action button or link, preview their layout, and send a test email.

The user’s objective is simply to send a marketing email. Contextual learning focuses on this task to help them make the right decisions. There are many incredible tools available—such as Appcues, Walkme and Pendo—thatenable organizations to delivercoach marks, guides, and more. Then, to benchmark how successful users are at those tasks, organizations look at Customer Effort Score (CES).

For a good overview of Customer Effort Score, take a look at this article from HubSpot: “What is Customer Effort Score?”

Contextual learning is a critical part of the customer success process. Application learning, though, is what moves your customer success outcomes from good to great.

To Drive Customer Success,Dial in the Right Mix of Application & Contextual Training

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ApplicationlearningApplication learning refers to how your product or product feature can be used to create the most amount of value. These outcomes are what make your customers successful and ultimately more reliant on your technology. They need to experience wins and plenty of them.

Time-to-value is a common metric and key performance indicator in customer success. It measures how quickly a customer experiences positive impact when using your product. However, one tricky aspect of time-to-value is that perceived value can be very different for different users. For instance, a business sponsor may expect something distinct from what a production team member or somebody deeper in the weeds needs from the product. With these kinds of diverse needs

at play, it is critical to segment your customers. Work to break down your audience in ways that help you understand what value means to them. Then, implement programs that help them meet those objectives.

This is exactly the moment when training becomes critical, where understanding their level of competency can map directly to a course offering. Learning pathways are a powerful way of curating specific learning content targeted for certain needs and then measuring outcomes to help optimize. Think of pathways as playbooks for each persona at every stage of their learning path. Then work to deliver the right content at the time when it can be most useful and in a way that matches their learning style and is easy to digest.

There are many incredible tools available—such as Appcues, Walkme and Pendo —that enable organizations to deliver coach marks, ‐guides, and more."

In contrast to contextual learning, you may struggle to deliver useful assistance with application learning while users are executing a task with your product. Application learning is often a much deeper dive that requires a different delivery model and content strategy.

These two approaches work so well together, though, that once you’ve gotten used to delivering one method it’s not hard to move into the other. In fact, if you only embrace one and not the other, you'll be missing out on an important part of the bigger customer success picture.

When both are well executed, expect to see strong outcomes for all of your customer personas.

About the author:Barry Kelly is the CEO of Thought Industries, a leading learning management system company that recently introduced the Customer Learning Platform, a system specifically designed to streamline the online experience and automate customer onboarding.

To Drive Customer Success,Dial in the Right Mix of Application & Contextual Training

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oday's focus on "the customer" bodes well for customer learning. You can gain a strategic advantage over your competitors with well-designed customer learning. After all, we're in the “Age of the Customer”, and concocting just the right mix of learning for them will help ensure their success and your own.

According to Technology Services Industry Associates' (TSIA) State of Education Services 2017, there's a surge in customer success-related activities: "The time has never been more perfect for [education services] organizations to seize the day and establish themselves as a major force in enabling customers to achieve their outcomes."

As the report explains, you can think of learning as "engaging" the customer with your product or service. Investing in customer-valued learning generates brand loyalty, greater spend, lower support calls, a closer vendor/customer relationship, and higher renewal rates. In fact, TSIA's study also showed the average renewal rate among trained software subscribers was 92% versus 80% for untrained customers. While we can't be sure the gain is all from learning experiences, the data indicates that learning has a strong impact on customer satisfaction.

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By

Claire Schooley

Designthe Perfect Learning Blendfor Customer Success

In this chapter we look athow improving customer engagement through training goes right to your bottom line, the role "blended learning" plays, what elements work for which customers, and how to refine your blend for the best outcomes.

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The blendedapproach to learning provides flexibility &In-the-moment learning

Customer learning continues to move to a digitaly-enabled online environment where learning is available anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Learning is no longer entirely classroom-based or focused on lengthy elearning courses. Rather, customer education now uses multiple learning modalities chosen according to the nature of the content. This approach is called blended learning.

Learning approaches don't abandon classroom learning—certainly some learning experiences need

Design the Perfect Learning Blendfor Customer Success

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hands-on, face-to-face instruction. But today's technologies allow a great amount learning to move online. Online modalities include on-demand learning, short single-concept microlearning, video, virtual classroom, and online social interactions.

The secret sauce is in the blend—choosing the approaches that best fit the learning content—and wrapping these together into an engaging learning experience.

Learning approach Definition Example

On-demand elearningSelf-paced learning accessed by customers when they need the information

Overview with text and graphics to help customers learn about the product

MicrolearningBrief (2- to 4-minute) single concept, multi-model andin-context learning

Review one feature of the new software product with an instructor, text and graphics

Video streaming Short real-time capturesShow the process for replacing or setting up a part of the software

Virtual classroomInstructor-run, virtual online discussion or interactive presentation

A scheduled online discussion of best practices after customers have been introduced to the product

Online social interaction Asynchronous discussion and collaboration with feedback

Blogs, online chat, FAQs, user group site

Performance support system

Help feature built into the software that intelligently knows when the user is having a problem and helps

A short help screen enables the user to solve the problem and continue in the application

Examples of Blended Learning Modalities

Here's an example of the features a blended learning module for a customer becoming familiar with new software might include:

● A video host who introduces the product, explains with graphics what it will do for the business, and gives examples of how it will make user's job more efficient;

● An elearning module on how to get started using the product;

● Microlearning lessons with each focusing on one feature or function of the product. Label each short lesson clearly for easy access;

● Chat set up with support services for questions;

● Frequent virtual session for admins and users after product introduction for feedback, questions, issues, and other follow-up as needed;

● Blog articles with shared authorship across IT, customer service, sales marketing, and the executive suite, addressing many aspects of the product from a variety of perspectives; and

● "Social" learning to allow customers to interact with the company and other customers around questions, discoveries and best practices.

While this example shows end-user learning, a similar approach for administrators, for instance, would use some of the same content and add extra material specific to their role.

Customer learning needs the right technology for blended learningA learning platform—most likely a learning management system—is an essential technology component for blended learning and it must be consumer-like in its ease-of-use. In other words, the platform shouldn't require any end-user training on how to take the training.

Design the Perfect Learning Blendfor Customer Success

An LMS carries out many basic tasks. It enables customers to register for learning, see all the learning opportunities related to the product, and launch an appropriate blended learning module.

Those with administrator access can track the customer learning by running reports. This lets them see metrics on the most-used learning content or pinpoint parts of lessons where users are spending a lot of time—which could suggest that the content needs to be revisited, streamlined, or made clearer.

In addition, a consumer-ready LMS has other features:

● A content creation tool

● An assessment engine

● Analytics

● eCommerce

● Localization

● Taxation

● Gamification, such as scores and badges

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LEARN MORE...

Drive customer learningby infusing education into the sales processCustomer success is top of mind for all companies. It drives renewals, higher product spend, and referrals of potential new customers, to mention just a few benefits. This means that the sales organization must understand the learning strategy of their company as well as the customer's strategy, be knowledgeable about training opportunities the company provides, and feel comfortable discussing the learning blend during the sales process. Training is no longer an extra that’s tacked on at the time of purchase. It’s now a service that is in development right alongside the software as it's being brought to life.

But it's not just sales that needs to understand learning opportunities and why they are important. The customer success management (CSM) role has grown with the continual movement of companies to "software as a service" (SaaS), a subscription model for software. If a customer is not "beyond satisfied" with the product, it's easy for them to move to a competitor—since there are no more perpetual licenses or installed software. CSMs are in a perfect position to emphasize learning opportunities, recommend starter learning—which is generally free—and make customers aware of more advanced learning that carries a cost. Professional services as well as customer support need to talk to customers about learning opportunities too. Learning becomes a partnership effort among Sales, CSMs, Professional Services, Customer Support, IT and the Customer Learning department.

Design the Perfect Learning Blendfor Customer Success

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Four ways to getyour blend rightThe top challenge in enabling good blended learning is to get the blend right. In preparation for creating blended learning, do the following:

Design the Perfect Learning Blendfor Customer Success

Determine any appropriate content you already have.From a company video, you might pick out two minutes that reinforce how your company values customers or customer learning. If you have recorded classroom sessions, look for a two- to three-minute piece that explains a technical component, for example.

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Consider design thinking to help develop a stellar learning program.If learning is stale, you don't feel your existing program meets customer needs, or you are starting fresh with learning, institute some design thinking sessions. Design thinking for learning is all about ensuring that the user's learning experience is simple and easy to use. Make sure learning is easy to get to and the blend makes sense. As a learning leader, get input from other groups in the company and be innovative in your approach.

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Work with marketing & PR to advertise the value of blended learning components.Brand your learning. Make sure it's integrated with other information about the product. Work with marketing to reinforce the message that learning is available and the ways it will help users obtain value from the product. Let marketing create a deliverable that will provide customers with the array of learning opportunities available.

Curate learning into blended learning packages for different groups.The groups you package for could include users, administrators, super users, and IT. Start with one group and build your learning—most likely the users. Some blended learning components will be a part of all packages while others will be appropriate for one or two groups. Each package will be multi-modal depending on the mode that is best to communicate the learning.

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About the author:Claire Schooley, principal, Claire Schooley Consulting, and long-time Forrester analyst, specializes in workforce growth and development. She has over 25 years of experience in education and corporate human resources, focusing on learning, recruiting and performance.Contact Claire through her website or at claire@claireschooleyconsulting.com

If you ever wonder when the best time to market the next class is, just remember the law of RFM, which stands for "Recency," "Frequency," & "Monetary."

raining is arguably the most important part of every customer success program, but customers don’t have the time to master your product like you want them to. Sometimes they put off training until it’s too late, which results in expensive support and unhappy customers.

The solution is to treat your training programs like your company’s products and insert a healthy dose of marketing to drive training consumption. Here are 22 marketing ideas that can turn uneducated customers into highly-trained advocates who would never think of replacing your product with anything else.

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By

Gordon L. Johnson

22 Waysto Promote Your Training & Turn Customers into Advocates

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Market that next class1The most important way to measure the success of your marketing is by how much training each individual consumes. An extraordinarily high percentage of your customers will take one class and never come back.

They all need more to be successful, so how do you get them to take more? First, you need to map out training paths so that you (and they) always know the next logical class. If they take class A, then what is class B? Or, more likely, if they take class A, then what is class B1, B2 or B3? We’d love for everything to fall neatly into a linear sequence, but that’s usually not the case, especially with more advanced training. However, at the introductory level, there needs to be a sequence, and as a marketer, you need to know what it is. Because, after they take class A, then you need to let them know about class B. And the faster you do that, the better. See why in #2...

Never Forget the Law of Recency and Frequency2

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This is a marketing guideline that says the more recently a customer has purchased something, the more likely they are to want more. The same goes for frequency. The more frequently they purchase, the more likely they will purchase more. And last, the bigger their purchases (Monetary), the more likely they will purchase more. All of this is to say that you should strike while the iron is hot and know that it’s never too early to market the next class. So, if they finish a class today, then tomorrow is the best time to market the next class.

22 Ways to Promote Your Trainingand Turn Customers into Advocates

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Bundle Training into Packages3

If you want customers to consume more training, then bundle it into larger packages that logically fit together. Watch Amazon.com. That company does a great job of upselling with its “Frequently bought together” suggestions. As a marketer, it’s easy to be a big fan of Amazon because the company puts extraordinary effort into developing ideas that drive more consumption.

ConsiderAll-You-Can-Eat

4If you charge for training, then your customers may be picky about what training they invest in. One reason is the painful process of getting approval every time they buy a class. If that’s the case, then the all-you-can-eat concept—offering all-access options for the entire selection of your learning—can be very attractive. They only have to get approval once, which gives them the perception that they’re getting a great deal. You probably generate more training revenue AND, more importantly, your customers consume more training and get more value out of your product.

Build a Great Certification Program6

If you don’t have a certification program yet, it’s time to start working on one. There’s nothing else like it, especially for tech companies. Nothing else has the potential to increase training consumption, customer loyalty, customer success, product adoption and customer retention, all in one program.

The trick is to build a certification program that customers can get excited about: something that will improve their individual careers and make them a better user of your product. In the meantime, while they strive for certification, they consume around 50 percent more training and develop a tighter bond with your product.

Use Email to Keep Training Top of Mind

I don’t know about you, but I never have time for much training. Short-term projects and needs always seem to get in the way. But constant learning really is the key to long-term success. Just look at the biggest over-achievers on the planet, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Oprah. As busy as they are, they carve out 5 hours a week for training. Most of your customers are more like you and me.

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If you want to avoid all-you-can-eat, then consider training credits, vouchers, or subscriptions as alternatives. These aren’t as risky as buffet pricing, because you’re basically substituting cash for credits, but it’s attractive to customers because it’s convenient and feels good when it’s discounted. Many of the largest and most successful tech companies, such as Microsoft, Cisco and Citrix, sell training credits because it increases training revenue and gets more people trained.

Sell Training Credits and Vouchers

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22 Ways to Promote Your Trainingand Turn Customers into Advocates

Try "Drip" Campaigns8A good drip campaign is continuous communication that adds value and reminds customers about the training that’s available to them. The keys to success with drip campaigns are to deliver small doses on a regular basis and avoid being intrusive. "Drip" just a little bit at a time and always add value.

For instance, if they just took course A, then immediately send a preview of course B. Next week, send an email promoting something else that would be valuable to them, like a recording of a recent webinar. The following week, send them a link to an article related to the course they took. The following week, send a link to the entire course catalog and invite them to browse for other relevant training. Of course, you’ll have to determine the right level of communication so that it’s not too much or too often.

They still need a gentle nudge that encourages them to make time for training. The best and the most cost-effective nudge comes in the form of emails. There are a million ways to use emails for marketing. Here are just a few...

Automate Your Marketing9Many of these suggestions can’t be accomplished without some form of marketing automation. There are hundreds of systems to choose from and many of them will do the most important thing, which is lead-nurturing and drip campaigns. Look at proven tools such as Hubspot , Marketo , and Pardot.

There are also lower cost and simpler systems such as Act—On and ActiveCampaign that will do most of what you need.

You'll find reviews of marketing automation systems here.

Preview Your Courses10It takes a lot of time to watch a long movie, but I always have the time to watch the preview of a movie. And if I like the preview, I’m much more likely to find the time to watch the whole movie. The same applies to training. Most of the customers who browse your training won’t actually decide to buy anything. But if you can get them to watch a preview of the course, they are much more likely to take the course.

The preview you show can be as simple as offering the first section of an elearning course or it could be as elaborate as a one-minute promotional video. Regardless, previews will increase training consumption. If you have to, start small and do just a little bit at a time, but definitely try it. Just make sure you have a learning management system (LMS) with preview technology built in.

Run Webinars Regularly11If you’re training your customers, then it’s a good bet that webinars were one of the first thingsyou added to your training mix. There’s no faster, more cost-effective way to get training to a lot of customers. Plus, each webinar recording becomes an asset you can continue to reuse, remarket, and repackage in the future. For marketers, webinars are the gift that keeps on giving.

Get Managers to Assign Training12

Which of these two things would make you more likely to sign up for training? A call from me or a call from your boss? Nobody is better at convincing you to get trained than your direct supervisor. That’s why it’s so important for marketers to focus some of their marketing efforts on managers and

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getting buy-in about the importance of training.

Also, managers need to know which of their direct reports are getting the training they need and which are not. Managers also need a super easy way to reach out and congratulate those who are getting trained and remind those who are falling behind. Much of this can be automated or made easy through an advanced LMS.

22 Ways to Promote Your Trainingand Turn Customers into Advocates

Don’t Forgetthe Executives13

If you want managers to encourage training, then company executives need to be on the samepage. If you get executive buy-in, then everything else becomes easier. When executives realize the importance of your product on their success and understand the role of training in that product, then it’s a no-brainer. Suddenly, those invisible roadblocks disappear and, remarkably, training consumption and—eventually—customer satisfaction go up as well.

Mix Up Your Training& Repurpose the Good Stuff

14No two customers are alike, and no two students are alike. We all learn differently. Some of us are visual, some auditory, some kinesthetic. Some of us want live training, while some want recorded videos or something to read.

If you can cover that variety of learning styles, then you will deliver a lot more training. The best way to do this is to develop a repurposing strategy where you put a lot of effort into developing core content, then repurpose it into multiple media. The hard part is developing the core content. But once you have that, then everything else becomes easy, while you carve it up and make it available in different formats. For instance, you could develop one elearning course, then repurpose it into bite-sized chunks of videos, documents, blogs, instructor-led courses, and webinars.

Pursue Referrals15All salespeople agree that the best lead is a referral. But how do you encourage more referrals? The best way is to stop being shy about asking for them. Most customers want to help you if they like what you have to offer. It’s just not top of mind for them unless you ask.

So, consider this: Include a question on your course evaluation asking who else at their company needs this training. If that’s not encouraging enough, then offer incentives or even a raffle for a bigger prize. This really works. I know of a training company that generated over 10,000 referrals in just a few years. To this day, the referral program is still their highest performing and least expensive source of leads.

Work with Your Customer Service & Customer Success Teams

16Do your customer-facing personnel realize the importance of training? Do your customer service reps know that if their customers get training, then their job will get easier? Do your customer success people know that a better trained customer is inevitably a more successful customer? If they do, then they should always know what training their customers need and continuously encourage them to invest time in it.

Brand Your Training17Branding is a subtle thing and not very well understood by most people, including marketers. Agood brand makes buyers more confident that their time and money will be well spent, and a badly executed brand erodes buyer confidence and causes indecision. The most important component of a strong brand is the perceived quality and

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reputation of your product, but the other complementary side is visual branding: The consistency of the logo, colors, fonts, writing, and style in general—the personality of the brand. If all of this is done right, it definitely helps. If it’s done wrong, it hurts.

22 Ways to Promote Your Trainingand Turn Customers into Advocates

Reach out to Marketing18While reading all this, you might be saying, “I know very little about marketing and nobody on my team does either.” If that’s the case, then it’s important to get close with someone in the marketing department.

They can help you in many ways, but you need something to offer them in return to make it a win-win. For instance, if your organization is really good at creating quality content, that could be your stock in trade. Marketers always need more quality content to help sell your products, so help them out. Work with marketing to develop pre-sales training that shows how easy the product is to use. Or, simply help them develop better marketing videos to show how your product solves their problems. That way, they will be more than happy to help you with marketing activities that come with a steep learning curve—such as marketing automation.

easier for customers to buy. We would make it easier to find training, register for training, and consume training. But it’s really hard to make something easy. It takes empathy and a desire to make life easier for our customers. It takes walking a mile in their Nike Airs and really understanding how they look at the world. Until you do that, you're putting up obstacles on the way to the consumption of your training.

Make Training Easyto Buy

19One of the worst things that can happen is that a customer looks for training that they desperately need and then goes home empty-handed because they either couldn’t find it or got frustrated because it was taking too much time.

This happens more than you might think. It's like that adage: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” The same is true for marketing. If we had more time, we would make it

Create Urgency20My days rarely turn out like I planned them. There’s always something getting in the way of doing the long-term important stuff. For instance, I’ve tried to write this article for several weeks, but because it requires a lot of time and because there wasn’t a real deadline, all the urgent stuff got in the way.

Training is like that. It requires a lot of time and it tends to be put off and put off until it’s either forgotten or until a real deadline pops up. Because of this, you need to create a sense of urgency. That doesn’t mean making up false deadlines. It means being suggestive of urgency.

A great example of that is the phrases that you hear over and over in advertising: “Buy Now,” “Register Today,” or “There’s never been a better time...”. Marketers use these phrases because they really work and create a subtle sense of urgency.

Consider Gamification21A few years ago, gamification was the hottest thing out there, but it’s subsided a little in recent years. However, at the very least, gamification is a great marketing tool. If you proudly show which individuals have participated in the most training and give out awards, then you can spur others to pump up their overall training efforts too.

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22 Ways to Promote Your Trainingand Turn Customers into Advocates

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Find New People to Train22Training for customer onboarding is easy. You know who needs the training, so you go train them. But shortly thereafter, people leave and get replaced and teams grow and contract. You can consider these new arrivals as little untrained threats to customer success. Yet, it’s rare that your customers are banging on your door to tell you they have a new person who needs training.

It’s in your best interest to get ahead of this by being extremely proactive about finding out who has departed and who has replaced them. For some companies, the customer success team is responsible for this. Part of their monthly check-in with customers is to find the skills gaps and develop a plan to close them. Others don’t really address it and eventually pay the price with untrained customers and greater churn.

I know I've presented a lot of ideas here for you to consider and you can’t do them all, especially without a lot of marketing expertise on your team. I advise you to start small. Pick one or two that look easy and do a little bit at a time. I've seen it over and over: You will start showing results. Eventually, you can get more resources as training consumption grow and, in the end, customer success will grow as well.

About the author:Gordon Johnson, author of "The Ultimate Guide to LMS Marketing," has industry expertise in learning management systems, learning engagement platforms and content management systems and consults organizations on their marketing plan development, analyst relations, lead generation and pricing and packaging. Communicate with Gordon at info@gordonljohnson.com.

t’s easy to understand why companies want to educate their customers. Success stories from every industry show compelling results. When customers know how a product or service will help them achieve their goals, they're likely to have a more successful experience. And when customers succeed, they're likely to buy more and encourage others to do the same.

So, customer training is not just common sense. It is also powerful fuel that can help drive a virtuous cycle of business revenue and profit. This chapter looks at how thoughtful packaging and pricing can improve the impact of your customer education initiatives.

Customer training:To charge ornot to charge?Since training is such a critical dimension of the customer experience equation, it naturally begs the question, should you charge customers for educational content? If you educate new customers at no extra charge, will the long-term business benefits outweigh the near-term revenue streams you could capture from selling that training directly? How exactly should you define your pricing scheme?

Every organization must answer these questions differently. It depends on an organization's business model, product positioning, competitive landscape and customer base. As a backdrop for this decision, it's useful to consider relevant industry standards and practices. First, let's weigh the pros and cons of free versus fee-based pricing.

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By

John Leh

Strategiesfor Pricing& Packaging CustomerTraining

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Strategies for Pricingand Packaging Customer Training

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Free content:Pros and ConsThere is no free lunch. Even if customer training is offered at no additional charge, the cost of content development, delivery and administration must be included somewhere in the price of every product or service. No matter what, buyers will pay, but whether they pay separately is a packaging question that should be driven by marketing strategy.

Our research indicates multiple reasons why organizations choose not to charge customers separately for training, including:

● To remove another roadblock on the way to product adoption, because adoption is a key factor in customer retention and lifetime value. Ensuring that more customers are successful more swiftly can lead to stronger overall revenues and long term profitability.‐

● To differentiate their brand from competitors and drive more upfront sales.

● To "pad" the bundle of core products being offered when companies see that their educated customers tend to purchase additional products over time, through upselling or cross selling.‐

Fee-based content:Pros and ConsGiven the potential business benefits of free content strategies, why would any organization want to charge customers upfront for training? Well, if you can generate training content revenue and expand your overall business revenues and profitability, isn't that a better choice? Here are several ways that fee based methods work:‐

● In some industries, charging customers for training is a well-established model. Customers expect to pay for educational content, and there is no advantage to changing the status quo.

● The more complex a product, the more important it is to offer sophisticated education and certification content. Typically, customers who purchase complex products want to gain skill, competence and expertise as quickly as possible. These buyers are inclined to invest in training that shortens their learning curve.

● Free content can be an excellent introduction for new customers, but paid certifications can add business value for you and your customers. For example, when Amazon, Cisco or Microsoft developers obtain IT certifications, these credentials qualify them to earn more for their expertise. Think of this as a way to formalize and monetize the customer relationship.

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The best of both worlds: The freemiumOver the past decade, the rise of cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and subscription business models have popularized a strategy known as the "freemium." Another way to describe this is the "Trojan Horse" approach. Companies bundle free training with core products to demonstrate the content's value. This initial exposure is intended to open the door to incremental paid training upsells.

A freemium strategy differs from purely free content because it's designed specifically to drive conversions to fee based relationships. Freemiums ‐come in multiple flavors:

● Land and ExpandThis business-to-business technique focuses on attracting a legion of individual customers at a basic free level, one user at a time. When the number of users in an organization reaches "critical mass," it often makes sense for the organization to invest in a premium volume based relationship. Numerous ‐enterprise applications have succeeded with this kind of strategy, including Slack, MailChimp and Dropbox.

● Alternative Product StrategyThe goal is to leverage a high-value free product to get a foot in the door, and eventually cross-sell an entirely different premium product. HubSpot offers a good example. The company launched its free CRM offering to win new accounts that would ultimately be attracted to its premium priced ‐marketing automation platform.

● Network EffectWidespread digital connectivity makes it possible for platforms to leverage users and their connections for content co-creation, learning and knowledge sharing at scale. Examples include YouTube, Twitter, TripAdvisor and Quora.

● Free ToolWho doesn't appreciate a handy online calculator, assessment or decision support tool that resolves specific issues you regularly face on the job? Think of lightweight apps or browser extensions like SEO widgets from Google or Moz. That's the logic behind free functional utilities from brands that want to remain top-of-mind while aiming for a larger share of your business

● EcosystemThis "marketplace" model depends on revenue sharing from a broad community of ‐third party developers or affiliates that ‐support a central platform. Successful examples include Google Play, iTunes and Salesforce AppExchange. There are also many examples in the commercial training space, including Udemy, Skillshare, Teachable, Pluralsight and Lynda.

Although freemium models have become popular in recent years, success can be elusive. Conversion rates are typically less than 10 percent. Without a massive addressable market, it's difficult to reach critical mass. Furthermore, if a product isn't truly self-service, it may be too complex for a freemium model.

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Picking your price:How much to chargefor trainingPricing customer education is tricky and there is no universal equation, but it helps to frame the problem strategically. The optimal price will depend on two critical factors: your business goals and your customers' perceived value of the learning experience.

Can this content stand on its own as a profit center, or will it be more successful if it is positioned as an enabler of your product strategy?

For profit centers, the primary selling objective is to achieve profitable recurring revenue streams. Price points should reflect the perceived content value, the cost of the core product, the level of expected demand and competitive pricing pressures. More complex products naturally command a higher price for customer training.

For example, a software company charging $1,000 a user/year for an individual product license should expect to charge 10 percent or less for training. Alternatively, a medical device manufacturer selling a diagnostic system for hundreds of thousands of dollars could easily charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per student.

For training designed to drive product sales, you'll want to consider the mindset of customers as you establish pricing. Do they expect training to be free or fee-based? How confident are you about this assumption? Although you may not want training costs to inhibit product adoption, it's equally important not to devalue customer education at the outset.

Before you commit, conduct informal or formal research with customers. Ask your best customers for feedback about your content value and various pricing and packaging scenarios.

Testing:Tips for measuringpricing strategiesAll of the free and fee—based customer pricing strategies we've outlined are measurable. This means you can test their effectiveness, an essential step both before and after a product launch. And although pricing models themselves may be challenging to develop, the measurement process may be easier than you think.

The first step is perhaps the most difficult: You must clarify and operationalize your business goals. For example, say your training goal is to increase the adoption rate among new customers. You'll want to determine the appropriate metric, such as your customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS) or customer renewal rate. This will help you establish reasonable benchmarks.

Then periodically track relevant data from customers who consumed content for each of the training packages you provide. Compare these scores with customers who didn't use the training. After several reporting cycles, it should become clear which pricing approach generates the optimal business results.

Successful organizations understand that testing never really ends. It's a process of applying relevant, standardized intelligence to drive continuous improvement.

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How to package training:Considerations & examplesMost of the costs involved in developing content occur upfront. The incremental cost of selling content is nearly zero. The investment required to design, build and deploy customer training is identical, regardless of whether you sell it to one buyer or a thousand. It also means that the more quickly you sell an individual piece of content, the more quickly your profits will accumulate.

Now that we've considered various pricing models, let's look at the most popular ways you can package training to accommodate a variety of customer preferences.

● A la CarteThis is the most common way to sell training content, books or really anything—pricing courses (products) individually and charging upfront. The fee may cover a live training event or access to specific online content for a predetermined timeframe. Pricing is based on the quality, length and perceived value.

● BundlesBundles "package" a group of courses or any content together as a collection and are priced as one piece of content—usually at a discount to purchasing the content pieces individually. These collections may include any number of courses, but don't necessarily involve a sequence or clearly defined path for learners. Access is typically offered for a defined period. An example of creative training bundles comes from the HR Certification Institute (HRCI), which lets HR professionals build their own custom training bundle to save money on exam preparation.

● Training plansTraining plans, learning paths, customer journeys and curricula are different terms for the same concept. They are all pre-defined paths that help learners move through multiple pieces of content in a logical sequence. They usually involve prerequisites and timed availability of content. Upon successful completion of a training plan, learners often receive a formal certification or designation. One of the most visible and successful examples of learning paths is the Salesforce Trailhead online training program. Subscribers can pursue a series of challenges and projects to earn points and badges while they learn how to use the product in a hands-on, self-paced environment.

● SubscriptionA subscription provides access to content for a pre determined time interval. Often customers ‐pay monthly or annually (with a one or two‐ ‐month discount) for access. Content subscriptions can be applied for a single course, a series of courses, a bundle, a training plan, a catalog or an entire library. Some organizations, such as Lynda.com, provide access to all content for the same flat fee. Success with this kind of business model depends on selling a massive volume of lower cost subscriptions. ‐Alternatively, organizations can offer subscriptions for more targeted areas of content, such as topic-specific bundles or training plans. This helps maximize the opportunity to drive incremental sales among individual customers.

Additionally, the free and freemium concepts discussed previously can be used toaugment any of the above models.

LinkedIn Learning is one example of subscription-based professional training. Courses are sold on a monthly or annual subscription basis but are also included "free" with every LinkedIn Premium account bundle.

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“Universal principles”Clearly, there are countless ways to package, price and manage customer training. Established companies often charge for training through a customer education profit center. Startups tend to focus on broader objectives and forego immediate training revenues to grow their customer bases more quickly.

There is no simple "correct" solution. However, there are universal principles. Start by reconciling your revenue priorities with the need for customer success. If the pricing and packaging options seem overwhelming, let your business strategy be your guide. Then verify your assumptions by testing and tuning, early and often. With relevant data, you'll have a reliable foundation as you build a virtuous cycle of profit.

About the author:John Leh is CEO and Lead Analyst at Talented Learning, LLC. Named among the "Top 20 Global Elearning Movers and Shakers" in 2018 and 2017, John is a fiercely independent LMS selection consultant, blogger and podcaster who helps organizations develop and implement learning technology strategies—primarily for extended enterprise applications. His advice is based on more than 20 years of industry experience, serving as a trusted LMS selection and sales adviser to more than 100 learning organizations with a total technology spend of more than $65 million. You can connect with John on Twitter at @JohnLeh or on LinkedIn.

here's nothing like a certification program to prove that your company has a robust ecosystem of partners, solution providers, and other experts—internal and external—ready to help customers deploy, integrate, and train on your technology. But not every organization is a Microsoft or a Cisco.

How do you know when your operation is ready to introduce a certification program? In this chapter we explore the link between customer success and certification, dig into proven approaches for developing a well-structured program, and provide details on an alternative that nearly any company can adopt as a lower-cost, lower-effort option.

Why add certificationto trainingThere are multiple reasons why companies add certification to their training operations. A primary one is to validate the skills that employees and individuals in your partner network possess, to show the outside world that they know what they're talking about.

Also, customers who choose to pursue certification in your technology become more self-reliant. They learn how to use the product more effectively, make fewer basic calls to tech support, and tend to be happier with the implementation—which means they tend to buy more. Frequently, you'll find certified individuals working in the corporate center of excellence or other units where best practices are developed and embedded into the rest of the organization.

Another big driver is brand loyalty. People who have achieved a credential by going through extensive training and passing multiple exams, for example, are less likely to switch to another company's product line on a whim. They have a deep investment in the current one and are proud

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of what they've accomplished. Their certification sets them above and apart from others working with your software. That translates into stickiness for your products and services.

Then there's the link to the value of your training program itself. Earning a certification after training

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4 TIPS FOR BUILDING YOUR CERTIFICATION PROGRAMS

Demonstrates a tangible return on investment for that effort. Plus, studies have shown that employers are more likely to hold onto staff that has been certified. This is because people appreciate the investment the company has made in their personal and professional development.

#1 Start with the strategyA certification program needs two ingredients to succeed: Executive commitment and a reason for existing. Frequently, those go hand in hand. Is certification meant to turn training into a profit center? Claim huge numbers of certified experts? Reduce support costs? Nail down what your C-suite's goals are for your program, manage expectations, and keep them informed as you make progress. Once your certification work has gone live, feed them relevant metrics. If they ever begin to appear disengaged, that’s an indicator that it may be time to have new conversations and reconsider the strategy.

#2 Lack staff?Contract with the expertsThe most ambitious certification programs are carefully crafted by certification experts, people who have worked on training and certification in other companies. Two such organizations, CEdMA, the Customer Education Management Association, and TSIA, the Technology Services Industry Association , are great sources for identifying vendors who can provide these services and getting references from people in the field regarding reliability, quality, and cost.

#3 Keep people hungryLike a popular video game that pushes players to "level up," the best certifications reward people by recognizing their hard work and encouraging them to continue pursuing additional titles. If you have a level one exam, for example, make sure you have plans at some point to introduce a level two and even level three—when the timing is right. Bundle exams into a mastery credential. Then, reward them when they've reached the goal. Grant customers or external experts special access to company insiders or technical resources, present them with wall worthy certificates ‐and logos, provide company swag, add a ribbon to their conference badges, and recognize them on your website and in your promotional materials.

#4 Get help from other departments to make your program succeedBesides management buy-in, you'll need support from multiple business units:

• Financebecause it can be expensive to build a certification program

• HRwhich will want to include your credentials as required or nice-to-have skills in job descriptions

• Marketing and communicationsto make sure your logos, messaging, and outreach efforts fit into company guidelines and reach further than you could on your own

• Product groupswhere you'll find subject matter experts who can help you develop the contents of your certification and be the first in line to test the exams you create.

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The certification alternative: MicrocredentialsMicrocredentials or "digital badges" are the newest form of certification. Typically, they don’t require the level of training that a full credential requires and they fit well into a digital format. Microcredentials may emphasize specialty aspects that aren't part of the base product or service, such as add-on apps or useful soft skills. They could also emphasize specific, crucial skills.

Whereas a full certification exam may last 90 minutes and have 60 questions, microcredentials may have half as many questions and tend to be less expensive to earn. Rather than receiving a certificate for their feat, learners who pursue a microcredential do so for the digital reward: a badge they can immediately put in their email signature or post to their online professional profiles.

For companies developing microcredentials, the investment is less than for a standard certification program and visibility may be greater because of the social aspects of badging.

About the author:Joe Cannata has many years of expertise in the development of training and certification programs for some of the world's largest tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Brocade. Most recently, he serves as the certification director for Kinaxis and as a board member for CEdMA, a leading professional association for training leaders.

Certification asstealth marketingThink about certifications as a form of stealth marketing. People will pay for the training, they'llpay for the exam, and, in return, they sit through a 60- or 90-minute commercial in which they hope to answer questions about your product or service correctly.A well-designed certification program is another way of telling customers and prospects that there's value in getting to know about your company and learning about your products.

Best Practices for Creating a Hot Certification Program(that Makes your Product Stickier)

Then it was time to start writing questions. I gave a brief training on the guidelines for that (shared in a CEdMA blog post here), emphasizing the importance of the quality of the questions and making them legally defensible, should a test-taker decide we were being unfair with the exam items. We concluded with an in-depth group review of the questions.

In the course of five days we had built our first test. We duplicated that process for every exam developed afterwards. Six months after joining the company, I was pleased to be part of the launch of the program at Kinaxis' annual employee/partner conference, where we gave two new exams free to scores of attendees.

Now we've developed a "master"-level credential that requires no unique exam itself because those who earn it have already taken a number of the other tests, along with gaining years of experience in the field working with the product in multiple scenarios. We already sense the excitement and interest among experts inside and outside of the company to earn this new title because we've given them a new, ambitious goal to pursue.

Kinaxis:How We CreatedOur CertificationsBy Joe Cannata

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Kinaxis produces a cloud-based supply chain management application sold by subscription. In July 2015, the company brought me in as certification director to launch a program with three credentials, each one addressing a different role tied to its product, RapidResponse. "Authors" are people who create what-if scenarios in the software; "Administrators" understand the architecture of the software and serve in a data or system administrator role; and "Contributors" serve as power users who understand how to navigate in the program, work with data, and understand its basic functionality.

A small cross-functional group developed a "rough wireframe," which laid out the basic structures for each credential. Our education group began building out the training program in tandem. Once we had an outline of what we planned to do, we brought in additional people throughout the company to provide feedback—and eventually to serve as the "subject-matter experts" to create the items that would become exam questions. Those participants came from education, technical marketing, professional services, support, research and development, and product management.We went into the exam development process first, with the intention of creating a blueprint for each test. We followed an industry-standard process called the "job task analysis," to identify the entire body of knowledge required within a given job. Those were divided by topic and within each the experts identified objectives they considered most important.

Best Practices for Creating a Hot Certification Program(that Makes your Product Stickier)

ustomer learning is a "value-add" that differentiates your company from the competition. This is because it's a win-win: Customers learn to use your product or service more effectively and you benefit from the revenue stream. These qualities are often considered by looking at return on investment (ROI) and value of investment (VOI), which have a well-defined connection.Unless your customers find value—their VOI—from the learning that you provide, you will not reap any financial reward—your ROI. The emphasis of this chapter is how to you can measure the ROI and VOI of learning throughout the customer lifecycle.

Why customer learning?The vendor movement toward more in-depth customer learning experiences is relatively new. Vendors have provided some end-user "feature" training but, in general, customer training has not been a high priority of software vendors. If training is included, it's often developed toward the end of the development cycle or just before launch. This "feature" focus of training also means that the users have a very narrow product exposure and often don't understand the context and higher purpose of the software—the real reason behind why they're doing it.

Today, customers are savvier about what they need for training. Especially with subscription software, vendors have to do more than provide a product. The competition is fierce, and the goal for vendors becomes the added business value training provides to help retain and grow a long-lasting partnership with the customer.

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Measuring the ROI/VOI of Customer Learning

What to measurein customer learningThe measurement process for external customer learning programs is very different from the measurements used for internal corporate learning. The number of people registered for a course, the number of course completions, test scores, and the number of courses in the library are important to learning and development people. But the C-Suite wants business data that indicates that customer training influences business results. They're looking for results such as:

● Increased customer retention and higher renewal rates

● Increased customer spend and use of more product

● Better customer satisfaction scores

● Improved customer engagement

● Decrease in questions to support team

To get results in these areas, you must focus on:

Understanding the needs of customers

Creating oracquiring pertinent and engaging content aligned to the business

Establishing an infrastructure to enable delivery

Communicating learning opportunities to customers

By following these guidelines, you'll be on your way to achieving the kind of business results outlined in the embedded infographic, "The ROI of Customer Training."

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Who's involved incustomer learningIn some companies marketing has taken on the customer learning management role. In other companies learning and development assumes this role. No matter who leads the initiative, your chances of success increase if you assemble a coordinated team approach. Executives must commit staff and financial resources to enable this interdisciplinary team to work together.

Since customers reach many parts of the business and customers are the concern of all employees, it makes sense to gather expertise from many business units in planning for, executing, and measuring the effectiveness of customer learning. The team composition depends on your business but most likely it will include people from sales, marketing, learning and development, IT, and finance. Each unit has a role and contributes to providing learning that keeps customers coming back and wanting more.

Business unit Role in customer learning

Learning and DevelopmentBased on customer surveys, data, and L&D knowledge of adult learning, L&D creates and/or acquires content and assembles it into a variety of effective user experiences.

Sales

Uses customer learning as a differentiator in making the sale. Customer success managers (CSMs) explain the opportunities and suggest appropriate learning for new, intermediate, and advanced users. Sales stays up to date on present and future learning content.

Information TechnologyAssures that the customer learning technology is consumer-like in its ease-of-use, provides quick access 24x7 from any device, and supports learning in multiple formats (elearning, microlearning, social, virtual classroom, etc.).

Marketing

Uses market analysis to help determine what customers want. Continually informs customers about learning events and activities and how these add to their success with the product. Emphasizes increased productivity due to high-quality content that uses a variety of formats personalized to users.

FinanceProvides data on aspects of business, such as retention rate, product adoption, and how to apply tax. Financial analysis can assist in interpreting data and suggesting other areas of data collection.

The customer learning team working together decides on the program goals, works through technology infrastructure (build or buy), surveys customers, collects and analyzes data, and decides how to optimize training content to get those desired ROI/VOI results.

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How to measurebusiness effectivenessNo matter what your strategy, basic measurements include:

● Tracking revenue from your customer learning initiative year-over-year.

● Tracking volume of use to account for the free learning provided.● Expenses such as technology used to provide the learning, marketing to customers, and internal, outsourced, and acquired content. Although most customer learning is online, add in the costs associated with any onsite instructor training.

Companies provide some learning for free and leverage it to move customers to fee-based training that is more in-depth and developed for different roles. For example, sales uses free training as a strategy at renewal time. The ratio of fee-to-free training is generally about 75 percent fee-based to 25 percent free.

Accounts that renew and those that do not renew (churn rate or attrition). Training data of accounts that buy more product versus the training data for those that reduce their spend.

Consumption level by comparing number of users who have consumed training versus number of users in the account.

Training conversion, the number of users who moved from free training to paid training versus number of users who used only free training.

Support team reduction in "how to" questions received from those trained versus those not trained.

Customer satisfaction data from trained versus untrained customers.

Number of product components used by trained customers versus underuse of product by customers not trained.

Shorter time to reach productivity for trained customers versus those who aren't trained.

If you are providing some free or fee-based customer learning and want to quantify results, look at comparison data between those customers who took or bought training and those that did not. Examine:

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Because the extended enterprise market of customer and partner learning is young, vendors and companies have not yet explored all that can be done with this kind of technology. The results may not be all numbers-based. Even now, some companies are looking at gaining broader value from customer training by:

● Using it to build community among customers and the company● Becoming a trusted adviseri.e. a medical products company● Creating an ecosystemi.e. users becoming proficient on the platform, then developing on the platform

Salesforce has developed and marketed training successfully using a team approach. They say that training is core to customer success with their customer relationship management product.

Internal data showed the company that customers who invested in training on an ongoing basis got 80 percent higher ROI on their Salesforce investment. Customer learning provides education throughout the ecosystem, starting with an introduction to the platform and continuing with more advanced—and more appropriate—learning as users become more familiar with the product. The outcome: Numerous customers have chosen to build solutions on the Salesforce platform.

of product by customers, and an overall better customer experience.

● As TSIA found, the average renewal rate among trained software subscribers is 92 percent vs. 80 percent for untrained customers.

● At least 64 percent of customers use products more after they participate in elearning, virtual instructor-led training, classroom training or on-site training,Talented Learning reported.

● Over 86 percent of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience, according to Walker's "Customers 2020, A Progress Report."

● The leading causes of churn, according to Retently , are poor onboarding (23 percent), weak relationship building (16 percent) and poor customer service (14 percent).

● Only 29 percent of B2B customers are fully engaged, Gallup found. The other 71 percent are ready and willing to take their business elsewhere.

● In a Brandon Hall Group survey, more than half of companies (55 percent) reported that customer learning improves customer relations; 41 percent said it maximizes client retention; and 26 percent said it reduces client support interactions.

Remember: Customers engage in learning voluntarily. They will access the content you provide and ask for more only if they know about it and the learning offerings help them understand and use the product to increase their productivity. Learning needs to continue through the customer lifecycle, leading to a closer relationship and solid brand affinity between the customer and vendor.

Customer LearningDelivers ResultsAlthough customer education is still in its early stages and company data isn't plentiful, findings from research firms shows that it's working. Even as far back as 2010 research data showed that the #1 factor in company loyalty was to reduce customer effort. This is testament to the importance of providing the right learning—easily accessible, short and to-the-point. Customer learning wins by providing additional revenue to companies, more brand-loyal customers, more use

About the author:Claire Schooley, principal, Claire Schooley Consulting, and long-time Forrester analyst, specializes in workforce growth and development. She has over 25 years of experience in education and corporate human resources, focusing on learning, recruiting and performance.Contact Claire through her website or at claire@claireschooleyconsulting.com

nless you intend to build your training business around serving just a handful of customers, you can expect to automate much of the operations for managing users, training content, data, and other aspects of the operation. Otherwise, the manual effort will quickly overwhelm you and put you behind even before the organization is really off the ground. Fortunately, the customer success segment is rife with programs and services ready to address any aspect of your work.This chapter does two things: First, it offers a lay-of-the-land for the various kinds of software (and leading examples) you'll want to consider for building a solid foundation for your customer training business. Second, we offer guidance to help you make the right choices as you're building your technology stack.

The layers ofthe customer training technology stackThe different types of software for customer success and training can be divided into a few broad usage categories:

● Used for overseeing the customer lifecycle; ● Used for managing the learning processes; and ● Used primarily by you and your customers for

the sake of communication and collaboration.

Customer lifecycle managementThese products are designed to help you oversee some particular segment of the customer lifecycle: collecting information about prospects, managing your leads, marketing to them, turning them into paying customers and keeping them happy. Some companies, such as Salesforce.com, have programs to address every aspect of the customer lifecycle. Others focus on their specific task and offer

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Barry Kelly

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features that encroach on the other groups. For example, companies classified as marketing automation may also consider themselves players in the customer success category.

Customer relationship managementTake every lead you can drum up and plug them into a system to track through the sales cycle from every angle—individual, division, company, industry. That process includes managing renewals, gauging the temperature of your customer, and recording every interaction you have, which is all exactly what a CRM is made for. Salesforce.com is the granddaddy of customer success, but there are many other CRMs that share most, if not all, of the same features.

Marketing automationWhile the best learning management systems include features to help with marketing, this category is dedicated to the job and has gained ready pickup among marketing pros in training businesses. Among the activities these programs handle is lead generation and nurturing, email campaigns, lead scoring, and data analytics for tracking success and failure. Prime brands include Marketo, HubSpot, and Oracle Eloqua.

Customer successThe newest category of application among those profiled here, the basic idea of this product type is to help you stay on top of your customers throughout the entire lifecycle. By doing that, you'll retain them longer, discover what drew them in to facilitate finding more prospects just like them, and help them become successful with their goals. As a result, they can be expected to buy more from you. Or, as the Technology Services Industry Association succinctly expresses it, the right customer success technology can "reduce churn, lower costs, and improve customer loyalty." Prominent examples include GainSight, Natero, and Totango.

Customer serviceOtherwise known as help-desk or support systems, these programs provide a means for giving help to the organizations buying your training and the individuals receiving it. The best offer a combination of services, including chat, a knowledgebase for self-service, a ticketing system, service level agreement views, and reporting to let you stay informed about support metrics. Two examples are Zendesk and Kayako.

The learningmanagement systemThe LMS lies at the heart of digital customer training. First, it serves as the waystation for learners—where they head to get their assignments, view alerts, receive notifications, take assessments, receive evidence of learning, and communicate with subject matter experts. Second, on the administrative side, the leading examples of LMSs (such as the Thought Industries Customer Learning Platform) provide a myriad of features:

● Content authoring tools to create lessons and assemble training modules from text and graphics, video and audio, quiz questions, gamification scoring, simulations, animations, and other types of learning materials;

● A learning object repository for storing lessons, videos, PDF documents, and other resources;

● The ability to embed a "virtual lab" inside the LMS for hands-on training and allow people to use the software they're learning;

● Communication components to continually "tickle" learners, as Pat Durante, president of the Computer Education Management Association (CEdMA) puts it, to remind them about the next lesson, encourage them to keep going and upsell them to the next phase of their learning;

● Data management for capturing details about delivery, user engagement and consumption of training;

● Certification and digital badging management, to keep users on top of their progress and automate the issuing of credentials as they're earned them;

● E-commerce components that enable you to bundle your training into modules or collections and sell them online; and

● Front-end and back-end reporting to keep learners informed of their own progress and enable you to track learner progress behind the scenes.

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Communicationand collaborationThese programs enable real-time and non-concurrent communication and collaboration.

This is also known as virtual classroom, videoconferencing or webinar software or virtual instructor-led training (VILT). Some programs are better suited for pulling people together with video, audio and whiteboard for a virtual meeting session, while others are intended for slideshow presentations with audio. Some companies offer both flavors of services. "There are times with customers where you want to bring them together in a live environment so that they can ask questions," explains Claire Schooley, analyst and researcher in the field of workforce growth and development. By meeting in a virtual classroom, "you can follow along with them and see if they're having difficulty and then talk about it." Examples include Zoom, BlueJeans, Webex, ON24, and GoToMeeting.

MEETING SOFTWARE

Chat windows, otherwise known as messaging or instant messaging, are common on software home pages, asking if you need help before you've purchased a product. Chat is also a useful mechanism for on-going customer support. It is essential to the stack because people would rather chat by text on a web page than pick up the phone and talk with a support rep. Frequently, these are available as an add-on to help desk— Zendesk Chat or Kayako Messenger—or customer relationship management programs— Salesforce Service Cloud.

These products serve as a targeted form of social media. They give people a place to go to ask and answer questions and help each other. Even though answers may come from customers, the company should expect to check responses to make sure they're correct or add additional insights, advises Schooley. As the information piles up in the program, it serves as an FAQ, allowing people to search for information without posing a question at all.

Every serious company has a blog these days, as a forum for sharing news directly with customers, promoting upcoming events, broadcasting new case studies, and sharing advice, feature how-to's and other kinds of information. Now blog software has also turned into content management software, serving as the platform for creating entire websites. WordPress, with both open source and commercial versions, leads the way with most of the global market. Oftentimes, as John Leh, LMS selection consultant, points out, the functionality of typical blog software will be included in marketing automation programs.

CHAT

COMMUNITY SOFTWARE BLOG SOFTWARE

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Make sure you have the ability to run customer satisfaction surveys. SurveyMonkey is the favorite here. Not only can you quickly set up stylish surveys to check on how happy people are with your latest customer support help, but you can use it to query new customers about why they haven't really done anything with their trial product or find out what it would take to get them to try the latest features you've unfurled.

Other usefulprogramsBelieve it or not, the list above isn't complete. There are a few other lingering programs you may consider including in your technology stack. Sometimes the features provided by these "one-offs" are also encompassed in one of the platforms we've already covered, but that'll varyfrom vendor to vendor.

SURVEYSOFTWARE

Until you have full-fledged marketing automation software in place, you may rely on a dedicated email marketing service such as MailChimp or Constant Contact. These programs serve to help you stay in touch with your training prospects and customers.

EMAILMARKETING

How to Assemble Your Customer Training Technology Stack

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THREE STACKING TIPSFROM THE PROSNow that you understand the various kinds of technology that make up a winning customer success and training operation, it's time to begin building. But first, here are three stacking tips from the pros that will save you time, money, and frustration.

Choosebest-of-breed

While some of the companies referenced here would like all of your customer success and training business, they're not all best at what they do, suggests Thought Industries Sales Engineer, KJ McGowan. Spend time mapping out your technology needs to cover the big areas of your operation, sort out what portions of the spectrum your existing software already addresses well, identify the gaps, and run trial versions of software that could help close them. Where you see overlap, go with the services that appear to have staying power, explain their data privacy options clearly, and play well with the other services in your stack.

Interoperabilityis important

All of the programs we've listed here generate their own data, but it's just data in a silo unless you can integrate it to make new discoveries. An advantage of working with the big names in each category is that they follow industry standards that will enable you to connect diverse systems, says John Leh. That can be done by connector, application programming interface (API), or a dedicated third-party tool, such as Zapier.

Remember, you'rea customer too

Your customers expect certain things in the training they buy from you, advised Clair Schooley: service that's mobile to work on any device and while on the go; that's browser-based so it's always available; and modular and video-based so they can learn just what they need and rapidly.

Make sure any service you subscribe to as part of your tech stack offers the same feature set: mobility, browser-based, and outfitted with video training so you can quickly pick up what you need as you need to learn it.

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About the author:Barry Kelly is the CEO of Thought Industries, a leading learning management system company that recently introduced the Customer Learning Platform, a system specifically designed to streamline the online experience and automate customer onboarding.

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Appendix:The Thought Industries

Customer Learning Platform

The Fastest Wayto an EducatedCustomer

Guide your customersto success and create fans for life

Customer onboarding, training, certification and support are time consuming and hard to scale. Streamline the learning experience, automate customer onboarding and mobilize your training for your hard-to-reach customers.

Deliver exceptional learning experiencesBuild engaging online learning experiences with powerful drag-and-drop authoring tools. Leverage over 20 learning objects such as surveys, interactive content, discussion boards, and more to create customer learning programs.

Improve customer success & satisfactionBuild engaging online learning experiences with powerful drag-and-drop authoring tools. Leverage over 20 learning objects such as surveys, interactive content, discussion boards, and more to create customer learning programs.

Modernize the software education experienceDeliver engaging, interactive online learning-from onboarding to advocacy-to ensure your software customers get the most out of your product offerings.

Discover new revenue generation opportunitiesLeverage the most powerful and comprehensive suite of monetization tools in the market to offer premium content, service packages, subscriptions, licensing,up-selling, and cross-selling.

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BUILT—INTOOLSFOR…

✔ Onboarding

✔ Content Creation

✔ Certifications

✔ eCommerce

✔ New Product Training

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Powerful customer learningcapabilities built for customer success

Integrated AuthoringIntegrated tools eliminatethe need for third-party authoring tools and make content creation fast and easy.

In-App Training DashboardEmbed in-context training within your software, so that users learn what they need to know without ever leaving the application.

SoftwareEmbedEmbed your software inside the learning platform to offer live exercises and step-by-step product training.

Customer PortalsDeliver dedicated portals for special customers and unique customer groupings easily and at no additional cost.

Certification EngineA built-in certification engine eliminates complexity, making the certification process easy to manage, update, and document.

Powerful CommerceTake commerce to a whole new level with subscriptions, bundling, taxation, licensing, service sales, up-selling, and cross-selling.

Panorama for LicensingUse Panorama to license content, segment groups, and manage many multi-tenant enterprise customers from one instance.

FullyWhite-LabeledCreate a perfect complement to your look and feel with seamless brand-matching of your apps and website.

Seamless IntegrationsRobust set of integrations with critical and widely used platforms such as Salesforce, Citrix, Adobe, Marketo, and Hubspot.

BOOK A DEMO ATwww.Thoughtindustries.com

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Appendix:The Thought Industries

Customer Learning Platform

THE ULTIMATE GUIDETO CUSTOMER TRAINING

Aboutthe Authors

Barry Kelly Thought IndustriesessKelly is CEO and Co founder of Thought Industries. He is a marketer and digital ‐learning innovator and has a proven track record in web and mobile product development, customer success, and creative digital strategy. His career has been focused on helping organizations leverage the power of online learning to grow their businesses. He has over 20 years of experience in online learning, product development, and learning technology.d not. Examine:

Pat Durante SynopsysessDurante is the President of CEdMA and is the Senior Manager, Training and Education at Synopsys. He is an education executive with significant experience managing sales, customer, partner, and employee training initiatives for global technology companies. Building on 25 years of experience in high tech, including 17 years of education and management, Pat has designed, delivered, and managed several new hire sales training programs, customer facing training programs, and partner certification programs.‐

John Leh Talented LearningessLeh is the CEO and Lead Analyst at Talented Learning, LLC. Named among the “Top 20 Global Elearning Movers and Shakers” in 2017 and 2018, John is a fiercely independent LMS selection consultant, blogger and podcaster who helps organizations develop and implement learning technology strategies – primarily for extended enterprise applications. His advice is based on more than 20 years of industry experience, serving as a trusted LMS selection and sales adviser to more than 100 learning organizations with a total technology spend of more than $65 million.

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Joe Cannata KinaxisessCannata is the Membership Trustee on the CEdMA Board of Directors and is the Certification Director at Kinaxis. He has expertise in all aspects of education services leadership, including market analysis, strategy, certification, development, delivery, partner alliances, customer experience management, digital learning, P&L management, social media marketing, forecasting, field readiness and sales. Joe is a frequent industry speaker and is a member of other industry trade groups in the education and certification industry.d

Claire Schooley Claire Schooley ConsultingessSchooley is an expert in corporate learning, recruiting, and performance management technology. As principal analyst, Claire led Forrester Research Inc.’s strategic HR practice worldwide in the areas of employee development and selection. This work included research, writing, and speaking engagements on these topics. She has her own consulting business — Claire Schooley Consulting-focused on helping companies find, nurture, and develop talent.

Craig WeissThe Craig Weiss GroupessWeiss is the CEO and Lead Analyst for the Craig Weiss Group LLC. (formally known as E Learning 24/7). Craig was named the most influential person in the world for e‐ ‐learning and the LMS space. He writes the E Learning 24/7 blog, which is read in 174 ‐countries and territories. Craig has been involved in the e learning industry since the ‐late 1990s with experience as a training director, creating and launching successful online learning programs, including purchasing LMSs. He is on the advisory board of The Moment and is the co chair of the training committee for VRARA. Craig speaks ‐regularly at conferences, events, and companies around the world.

About the Authors

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Michael Daecher Thought Industries Daecher is the Chief Marketing Officer at Thought Industries and brings years of experience in growth startups and online learning. He first encountered Thought Industries while using the platform to-launch the multi million dollar online education ‐business within Active Interest Media. Prior to Active Interest Media, he led the marketing team at Craftsy, which was acquired by NBC/Universal. At the time of the acquisition, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Craftsy had “an audience of 12 million for its expert workshop videos and e commerce shop, with 2 million active ‐visitors a week.” Most recently, Daecher was Chief Marketing Officer at ArtistWorks, an online music education provider, which recently landed their Series A funding.

Gordon JohnsonTraining Growth Consultant Gordon L. Johnson has been a marketing leader in the corporate L&D industry for over twenty years with the last ten years dedicated to learning technology. Gordon’s specialty is developing transformative marketing strategies that generate qualified sales opportunities. He employs the latest digital marketing channels, coupled with traditional techniques to achieve industry-leading brand awareness and widespread web presence.

Samma HafeezThought IndustriesessHafeez is the Vice President of Customer Success at Thought Industries and has more than a decade of experience in customer success, leading and scaling industry-recognized teams in the delivery of technology and services around the world. She spearheaded key corporate restructuring initiatives and managed multi million dollar ‐Fortune 100-1000 portfolios at high-growth, venture-backed enterprise SaaS companies in healthcare and marketing. She recently served as Senior Manager, Client Success and Operations at CloudCare, and prior to that, she was Senior Manager Customer Success-Enterprise at BrightEdge.

About the Authors

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