6 Must-Read Articles on Training in Customer Success

*This post was updated on 8/15/2017.Customer success is a relatively new discipline in the software/SaaS industry as well as other industries. Today’s most successful companies are recognizing that post-sales customer onboarding, training, and engagement are absolutely critical to long-term customer success. Using customer training software like Skilljar is key to accelerating time-to-value and optimizing product adoption.You may remember back in 2015 when we initially wrote this post rounding up our top 6 must-read training and customer success articles of the time. But as we in the training industry know, trends and best practices are constantly evolving. We decided to share some valuable insights from other blogs and articles that we’ve come across in the years since.Read on to learn more:

• Customer Success: The Definitive Guide 2017 - “Customer Success is about ensuring your customers achieve their Desired Outcome, and when you truly help your customers achieve that ever-evolving goal (their purpose for doing business with you), Retention, Expansion, and Advocacy happen.”
• 7 Ways Education Services Fits into Customer Success - "Education helps to drive engagement, adoption, retention and renewal, and it's a great expand selling opportunity for the product sales organization. So the question is, why wouldn't the CS organization jump at the chance to ensure that education services is an integral part of the overall customer success process and strategy?"

• How to Improve Customer Service, Customer Success At Your SaaS Company - “The nice thing about the term [customer] 'experience' is it includes both the web interface plus how you talk to people, once you've sold them: How you onboard them. How you're going to approach training them, what kind of information you're going to try to utilize with what they've got, how you move that back and forth."

• Why Customer Training is Important (5 Reasons) - “You’ve got a fantastic product or service and you have a PDF user guide on your website to tell customers how to use it. Job done, right? Maybe that was true once, but not anymore. Increasingly, vendors are offering sophisticated customer training programs to augment their products, services or brand. But why would vendors go to this trouble? Surely if a customer has bought into a product, they’re happy with it, right? Again, this could be a dangerous assumption. Here are five reasons why providing training to your customers is important.”

• The Key Components of a Powerful Customer Success Strategy - “By using this framework for customer success, you will be on your way to keeping loyal customers. Remember, for every customer who bothers to complain, nearly 26 others remain silent. So go make your customers happy!”

• How to Create Learning Pathways that Scale - "While Customer Success Managers may serve as the quarterback, making plays and deciding what comes next for their clients, they often depend on the support of their training counterparts to onboard customers and create the path to value."