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We recently released the eBook “The 3 Stages of Customer Training Development,” where we broke down the process for building a customer training program. In this post, we will be discussing the first of these 3 stages.

Most kids learn to crawl before they walk. And they learn to walk before they run. The same could be said of your customer training program.

In the early stages of implementing customer training, companies may not even have a formal training program in place. Or perhaps they do have one, but it’s led by just one employee, who is training a very small audience. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, many companies in the early stages of customer training do not provide their team with the resources they need to truly succeed.

For instance, when programs are still “crawling,” there is often minimal budget and organizational buy-in. For this reason, customer training professionals may be using free tools, rather than investing in technologies, which would allow them to effectively scale their training. In addition, they likely have limited marketing resources.

Given these constraints, it’s no wonder why so many organizations also struggle with their training content and run into the following issues:

  • Content is entirely customized, and therefore not scalable
    OR
  •  Content is pre-built, and too generic to meet the needs of everyone in their audience.

If this sounds like your current program, don’t panic! You can always start by addressing the most frequent support topics first, then go from there. A great place to start is by analyzing your support queue or frequently viewed help articles. Find the biggest problem areas for customers and create training content to proactively address them. Over time, you can continue to build on this as new issues arise, and as you gather more resources for your program, take a more strategic approach to planning content.

At the end of the day, you should celebrate the start of your customer training journey, and know that this stage is temporary. In fact, you’ll often see the fledgling benefits of training here, which in turn, presents a chance to advocate for additional resources later down the line.

Stay tuned next week to learn about stage 2 and stage 3 of customer training development. Or, if you want to continue reading now, click below to download the free eBook!

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