THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CUSTOMER TRAINING Tips & tricks to transform customers into advocates Barry Kelly Joe Cannata Gordon Johnson John Leh Pat Durante Craig Weiss Samma Hafeez Claire Schooley Michael Daecher THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CUSTOMER TRAINING TABLE OF CONTENTS Customers are No Captive Audience Chapter 6 by Barry Kelly ..............….....................….…... i Design the Perfect Learning Blend for Customer Success Chapter 1 by Claire Schooley ............…............................. 17 Building a Customer Training Program That Starts to Work Even Chapter 7 Before the Sale 22 Ways to Promote Your Training & by Michael Daecher ....…....……..…….……..... 01 Turn Customers into Advocates by Gordon Johnson .………..........…................… 22 Chapter 2 7 Steps to the Perfect Chapter 8 Customer Onboarding Program Strategies for Pricing & by Samma Hafeez ..….............…......……...... 04 Packaging Customer Training by John Leh ...................…........…...........…...... 28 Chapter 3 Customer Engagement, Chapter 9 Retention & Beyond Best Practices for by Pat Durante ......….......…................…...... 08 Creating a Hot Certifcation Program Chapter 4 (that Makes your Product Stickier) Shifting Gears: Making the Switch by Joe Cannata ..........….................…............... 34 from Employee Learning to Customer Chapter 10 Training Measuring the ROI/VOI of by Craig Weiss ..…............…….....….............. 11 Customer Learning by Claire Schooley …...........…...........….....…..... 38 Chapter 5 To Drive Customer Success, Chapter 11 Dial in the Right Mix of Application & How to Assemble a Great Technology Contextual Training Stack for Customer Success & Training by Barry Kelly .........................….........…...... 14 By Barry Kelly ..............……........................…... 44 Appendix: The Thought Industries Customer Learning Platform …..…..…..…..…..…..……... 49 About the Authors................................…..… 51 T 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 are customers successful with your product. As you can imagine, there are a lot of questions to No Captive answer when it comes to customer training. For example, will you make it free or should you Audience 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. By Barry Kelly i Customers are No Captive Audience In the first part of the book, you'll learn how to will ultimately help generate the greatest build a training program that addresses each phase amount of value). of the customer lifecycle. Chapter 1 lays out the basics of the first stage in In Chapter 6 , workforce development maven the customer education lifecycle—pre-sale—and Claire Schooley helps you design the perfect offers practical techniques for gaining traction learning blend for customer success by among your prospects, including one secret examining what elements work for which ingredient that will set your company apart from customers and offers four tips for refining your the competition. blend for the best outcomes. Chapter 2, "7 Steps to the Perfect Customer Onboarding Program," shares seven techniques for Once you've strategized about the types of making sure you squeeze every ounce of benefit content you intend to deliver, it's time to turn from your onboarding efforts to help your your attention to marketing of your customer customers be successful with your product or training. Chapter 7 , written by marketing service from the moment they first come on your authority Gordon Johnson, shares 22 valuable radar. marketing ideas that will turn uneducated customers into highly-trained advocates "who Chapter 3 educates you on methods for keeping would never think of replacing your product customers engaged and provides three metrics to with anything else." help you measure how well you're doing. If you already have an employee-focused training Of course, a big question to answer is whether program, you'll have a few things to "unlearn" and how to price your training. It may be that during your transition to customer-facing training. you decide to keep it free. But there are plenty In Chapter 4 , "Shifting Gears: Making the Switch of reasons to price it too. In Chapter 8 John from Employee Learning to Customer Training," Leh, CEO and lead analyst for Talented e-learning consultant Craig Weiss (who made almost a million dollars selling training that never Learning, drills down on the fundamentals of exceeded $25 a course) shares seven areas to help how to price and package customer training, you shift from a mindset focused on employee addressing such topics as balancing customer learning and development to a customer training success with a profit center, how to test free orientation. (He predicts you'll never look back.) content strategies against paid offerings, how to figure out your pricing scheme, the Next, the book explores from two perspectives how advantages of an all-you-can-learn model and to formulate the right blend of training more. components. In Chapter 5 , I give my insights on two kinds of Another major area to consider for your learning—contextual and application—that are customer training program is whether to offer a essential and that you'll want to use as you flavor certification program. Chapter 9 digs into the your customer training content. training content. link between customer success and One kind helps the customer learn how to use certification, includes four tips for developing a your product; the other addresses the outcomes well-structured program, and provides details your customer is hoping to achieve (and that on an alternative that nearly any company can adopt as a lower-cost, lower-effort option. ii Customers are No Captive Audience Claire Schooley returns in Chapter 10 to About the author: investigate easy techniques for measuring the Barry Kelly is the CEO of Thought Industries, a leading learning management system company that recently return-on-investment and value-of-investment introduced the Customer Learning Platform, a system (ROI and VOI) of the learning you're delivering specifically designed to streamline the online experience and automate customer onboarding. 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 [email protected]. iii O 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