Recap: Customer Education Challenges & Solutions

On Thursday, December 14, Skilljar hosted the inaugural Seattle Customer Education Meetup. It was a huge success - thank you to everyone who attended!We kicked off the night with a panel discussion where experts from Gainsight, Payscale, Smartsheet and Outreach shared insights around their top challenges and ways that they've overcome them. Then, we moved to a roundtable format to continue the conversations with everyone.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, we’ve included a few key takeaways below:Demonstrating training ROIWhen resources are stretched thin, demonstrating training ROI can be difficult. Rather than relying on a Business Intelligence team, you may have to do a lot of manual work yourself. If that’s the case, start by identifying what you need to track to prove the value of your program. Examples of relevant metrics include time to value, churn rate, and how training impacts product usage.Balancing stakeholder asksThe consensus on the panel was that it’s best to be transparent from the start. It’s okay to say no! If someone asks if you can take on internal training, for example, let them know that training customers is your priority. They likely won’t want to hear this, but it may make sense to hire additional headcount to handle internal training.If that’s not an option, start small. Remind anyone who wants to learn more about your product that they can always shadow customer calls, or attend live training events.Pricing and packagingWhen considering pricing options, think about the “car vs. bus” model. One is inexpensive, but you may not enjoy the ride. The other will get you where you want to go in style, and depending on how much you pay, you can get a nicer ride.You may receive some pushback internally, but for the most part, training should not be given away for free. It has a price and a value - if you set it as 0, the customer will see it as 0. A good rule of thumb: keep setting a number until somebody laughs. You’ll quickly find out if you’re charging too much.Prioritizing contentTraining content often works best with high volume, low complexity issues. What simple things are you getting lots of questions about (i.e. how to reset a password)? Identify these pain points first, then create content to address them. This can help reduce your number of support tickets.Inspiration for content can also come from popular search terms, meetings with Customer Success Managers, and information around product usage. What common topics come up on customer calls? What features are people not aware of yet?If you’re in the area and would like to attend a future event, join the Seattle Customer Education Meetup here!For more information about customer training, check out our comprehensive online guide to Customer Education.