3 Benefits of Self-Paced Training for Customer Onboarding

At Skilljar, our clients are typically looking to both scale and improve their customer onboarding process. "Customer" onboarding also refers to channel partners, 1099 contractors, and community members as well as direct customers. Training sessions are typically driven by customer success managers and delivered either in person or via live video conference using a program like WebEx.

There are many benefits of adding an on-demand, self-paced option for customer onboarding and customer training. Here are the top 3 benefits!

Photo by Dennis Skley / CC BY

1. Faster product adoption

A self-service customer training option means that your customers can get started right away. There's no need to schedule live sessions or fly an instructor across the country. This is particularly true for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, where accelerating the time to value means your customer is more likely to adopt, engage, and renew. With well-designed training, your customers will also appreciate having diverse training options, and reward you with higher satisfaction ratings.

2. Reduced onboarding costs

If your onboarding process is currently led by instructors, it's likely you can highly reduce or even eliminate the hours required with your internal staff. Perhaps a 4-session training series can be changed to 2 self-paced, 2 instructor-led. You will also save on travel and logistics costs if you are currently conducting classroom training. Ultimately, you will be able to train more customers with the same budget.

Providing a self-paced training option also saves on long-term support and retraining costs. Customers can easily refer back to the training course to refresh their memory, or retrain new internal staff.

3. Increased training effectiveness

Self-paced training is the format that most adult learners prefer today. It enables your customers to pick up and resume training at their own convenience, and review material as often as they like. You can also easily assess their knowledge with interactive quizzes. Self-paced training is a valuable option for customers who have scheduling conflicts or just prefer to learn on their own terms. Building out specialized role-based training and advanced topics also gives customers the ability to self-select into exactly the areas they want to learn. Of course, nothing replaces access to a live instructor, but offering a variety of options will increase your overall training effectiveness.

Conclusion

Self-paced training is a format that all businesses should consider adding to their customer onboarding process. Your customers will learn faster and more effectively, leading to higher product adoption, engagement, and long-term retention. In addition to these benefits, you'll be able to train more customers with the same budget, saving costs overall.