3 Reasons to Implement SaaS Customer Success Training Now

A crucial part of ongoing Software as a Service (SaaS) success is customer training. Whether for retention and renewals, refresher courses, explaining new product features or updates, SaaS customer success training can provide the tools and resources users need to get more from your product.

Annette Franz, customer experience consultant, wrote in her Forbes essay Evolving Your Customer Success Approach: “Customer success’s role is to ensure that customers receive the value they expect — and achieve their desired outcomes — as a result of using your products.”

Customer success impacts vital variables such as churn, value attainment, product expansion, customer experience, customer acquisition, and customer advocacy.

Therefore, focusing on external training efforts can improve these customer success metrics and become a fundamental piece of your business strategy.

3 Reasons to Implement SaaS Customer Success Training Now

Let’s look at some reasons why SaaS customer success training is necessary and how you can you implement it.

1. Your customers disengage from your product too early in their journey

Following onboarding, customers can continue to strengthen their relationship with your business by developing their skills and knowledge as they use your product. There are several ways to establish specific training opportunities aimed at early value generation:

• Offer detailed explanations on product features
• Provide new training opportunities for your customers’ new employees or new positions
• Provide refresher training to existing users, particularly as new releases are launched
• Educate on best practices, tips, and common hacks with your product
• Deliver online resources and certifications on topics that can help your employees grow

SaaS customer success training is a great way to continuously enhance your customers’ value in conjunction with regular quarterly business reviews. A training program that engages your customers is more likely to enable them to succeed with your product and increase their value.

Related: 4 Ways Companies are Using Customer Education to Drive Product Adoption

2. Product training is not streamlined across functions within your organization

McKinsey’s report Introducing customer success 2.0: The new growth engine explains how critical it is for companies to implement a robust go-to-market (GTM) strategy, where collaboration is essential:

“Leading companies will also define a unified Go To Market (GTM) model that designates specific responsibilities for marketing, sales, customer success, and services throughout the customer life cycle. They should support this model with organizational structures and operating models that encourage collaboration and clarify accountability.”

In other words, Product, Customer Success, Support, Sales, and even Marketing all have a vested interest in making sure customers are satisfied with your product. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a centralized system as part of an integrated Go To Market (GTM) model for training customers from the get-go, ensuring cross-functional results. This can be achieved with a platform specifically designed for SaaS customer success training.

For example, having a robust Learning Management System (LMS) that integrates with your CRM can be a smart solution to let your Sales, Customer Success, and Support teams have visibility into Customer Success these metrics, which can help them know which training is providing the best customer experience.

3. You have no way of knowing if your existing training efforts are working

If you are having a hard time measuring the ROI of your existing training efforts, SaaS customer success training can help. If you have manual training practices in place, are you able to measure the impact these are having on retention rate, revenue growth (upsells and cross-sells), and continuing customer satisfaction?

It’s possible to understand these metrics more in-depth if you cross-analyze them from a training perspective using SaaS customer success training software.

ROI metrics resulting from automated SaaS customer success training may include:

• Number of learners
• Number of enrollments, completions, and certifications
• Hours engaged with training
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Training revenue for paid training sessions

For trainers, this data will become crucial to monitor downstream re-engagement and retention. In addition to tracking the number of support tickets a trained user submits, you can also determine how long trained users spend using your product.

Related: Why Customer Education Is Key To Increasing SaaS Adoption

The Best Software for SaaS Customer Training

A comprehensive Learning Management System (LMS) specifically designed for external training can help you attract, engage, and retain customers effectively if you know what features to look for, such as:

1. It integrates into your existing SaaS platform

The best LMSs let you provide easy access to training from within your SaaS application, where your customers already use your product. These can take the form of links to launch individual courses or buttons. Your customers are more likely to explore and start the training if they see it in your app or within your online experience instead of a standalone site.

TechSmith offers a seamless experience to access TechSmith Academy, powered by Skilljar, from the Resources section in the top Navigation bar.

Using a best-in-class LMS, you can provide customers with the ability to log in once using their same credentials, reducing barriers to training. When you launch training through your SaaS application, your customers will already be logged in. As a result, training is seamless and can start much faster.

2. It offers custom branding

If you want to create a consistent look and feel for your SaaS customer success training site, make sure your LMS platform offers a custom domain (e.g., training.yourcompany.com), custom logos, color schemes, and responsive design. Customers will seamlessly switch from your app to your training site without having a disjointed experience.

Intercom Academy (right) was built to match their homepage (left) in terms of look and feel, for a more unified experience.

3. It lets you create a multi-format training experience

Learners seek short, concise, and relevant training content. Your customers are no exception. The right LMS can ensure they access training materials at work and home, on different devices.

You can make each module of your course as short or long as possible and provide unique links for each session. Your users can bookmark their training progress and enjoy a mobile-friendly platform.

Zendesk’s user training is available in a simple user interface for mobile devices.

4. It lets you target customers based on their behavior

Make customer success training more relevant by pushing it just-in-time to customers based on their behavior in your platform. For example, if a user accesses the reporting feature for the first time, you can display a “next course suggestion” about measuring performance.

Archer offers suggestions for what courses users should take next based on their behavior.

Skilljar is a leading training platform designed specifically for external users. Our enterprise-grade platform gives you the tools you need to onboard, engage, and retain your customers. We provide you with rich features that allow SaaS businesses to engage and enable your customers and partners more effectively.

Would you like to learn more about how Skilljar can provide customer success training for your SaaS business?

Request a demo now

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