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As a Customer Success Manager (CSM), you’re tasked with ensuring your customers can use your product effectively – and that’s no small feat.
Between juggling onboarding, managing customer requests, and keeping engagement high, training programs can easily become a challenge.
When customers don’t receive the right training, they may never fully understand the value your product offers. This not only impacts adoption but can also lead to churn and missed opportunities for expansion.
In this blog, we’ll break down customer training best practices, covering everything from understanding your audience to automating your efforts for better results. Let’s dive into how you can set your customers – and your team up for success.
1. Segment customers based on their technical proficiency, use cases, and goals
Different customers have unique requirements based on their technical skill levels and use cases.
By segmenting customers into groups, such as beginners needing basic guidance and advanced users looking to explore more complex features, you can customize your training to address the specific challenges each group faces.
This ensures that beginners receive the foundational support they need, while more experienced users can focus on advanced functionalities that align with their goals.
2. Create personas that map out customer preferences for learning
Creating customer personas helps you design training that fits each group’s preferences. Some customers might prefer video tutorials, others may find interactive webinars more helpful, and some might benefit from in-app guides or written documentation.
By using a Customer Success tool like Velaris, you can unify data from your onboarding, support, and product teams to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and preferences.
This will also allow you to track how different segments engage with your training materials, ensuring each customer receives the most relevant training for their needs.
By tailoring your training this way, you can expect better engagement, higher satisfaction, and improved product usage, as customers will learn in the way that works best for them.
3. Prioritize the needs of your highest-value customers
High-value customers often need more personalized attention, as their expectations and usage of your product are typically more complex.
Investing in their training experience by offering tailored sessions or exclusive resources ensures they can fully leverage your product’s capabilities.
This targeted support not only helps them achieve faster success but also builds a stronger sense of trust and partnership.
4. Implement a structured post-onboarding training plan
As customers grow with your product, offer ongoing training that aligns with their progress. Reinforce what they learned during onboarding, then gradually introduce advanced content to help them explore more features over time.
This approach helps bridge the gap between basic product knowledge and mastery, ensuring customers can use more advanced features as they progress.
5. Offer refresher courses and specialized sessions for power users
As customers deepen their use of your product, they can benefit from regular refresher courses to reinforce key concepts and stay updated on best practices.
Additionally, offering specialized sessions for power users – those who are exploring more advanced functionalities – can help them unlock the full potential of the product.
These sessions allow experienced users to gain deeper insights into complex features, empowering them to maximize efficiency and productivity with the software.
6. Use webinars, knowledge base articles, and in-app notifications
Regular communication is key to keeping customers informed and engaged. Use scheduled webinars to introduce new features or provide live demonstrations of advanced functionalities.
Alongside this, maintaining a robust knowledge base with detailed, on-demand articles ensures customers can easily find answers when needed. In-app notifications can further enhance this by offering timely tips or reminders as users interact with different features.
Together, this multi-channel approach ensures customers always have access to relevant information in the most convenient format.
7. Measure the effectiveness of your training program
Delivering customer training is only the first step – ensuring that training is effective is where the real work begins.
By measuring the effectiveness of your training, you can refine your approach and ensure that customers are not only completing sessions but are also benefiting from them.
Here’s how you can track and improve the impact of your customer training:
Track key training metrics
Monitoring who shows up and completes training sessions provides a basic sense of engagement. Low attendance or completion rates might signal that the training content isn’t engaging enough or that customers are finding it difficult to participate.
Collecting customer feedback can help you identify specific areas of confusion or dissatisfaction, allowing you to make targeted improvements and understand these issues more fully.
Use customer health scores to assess training impact
Customer health scores are valuable indicators of how well training is contributing to Customer Success.
By comparing the health scores of customers who have completed training with those who haven’t, you can determine whether trained users are more engaged and successful in using your product.
A higher score for trained customers suggests that the training is not only effective but also leads to better product adoption and usage.
Over time, tracking these scores can help you refine your training programs to focus on the areas that have the most significant impact on Customer Success and retention.
Collect feedback regularly to refine training content
Customer needs evolve over time, and so should your training programs. Collect feedback consistently to identify areas where customers may still be struggling. Use this data to adjust your training content, ensuring it remains relevant and impactful.
Velaris can help you track these key metrics in real time, including customized customer health scores. You can also gather feedback via NPS and CSAT surveys directly within the platform, giving you the insights needed to continuously improve your training programs.
8. Automate and standardize your training processes
Consistency is key when it comes to customer training. When each customer receives the same high-quality training experience, they are more likely to succeed with your product.
However, manually managing the training process can become tedious, especially as your customer base grows.
Standardizing and automating parts of your training program frees up your team to focus on more strategic tasks, like building stronger relationships with your top accounts.
Here are a few tips to help you streamline your training program:
Create playbooks that standardize your training approach
Playbooks are essential for ensuring that all customers receive the same structured experience, regardless of who on your team delivers the training.
These guides outline each step of your training process, from onboarding to advanced sessions, so no critical steps are overlooked.
You can create playbooks directly in Velaris to standardize your training workflows, ensuring each customer receives a consistent, high-quality experience.
Automate repetitive tasks like sending reminders and tracking training progress
Tasks like sending training session reminders or tracking completion rates can be automated to save time.
Automation ensures that customers receive timely reminders and that you have a clear view of their progress without needing to manually track it.
Velaris supports this process with a drag-and-drop automation builder, which lets you automate these tasks and more.
Conclusion
Building a strong customer training program is essential for driving product adoption, improving engagement, and ultimately ensuring long-term Customer Success.
By understanding your customers' learning needs, delivering continuous training, and using data to measure effectiveness, you can create a training experience that helps customers get the most value from your product.
Standardizing and automating your training processes will also save time, reduce manual tasks, and maintain consistency, allowing your team to focus on higher-impact work. If you’re looking for ways to make your training more efficient and scalable, Velaris can help.
Book a demo today to see how Velaris can simplify your customer training efforts and help you achieve better results.
