3 Ways to Use Training for Customer Onboarding

The best customer success teams understand that customer communications is a multi-channel process. When you think about it, most customer-facing functions in a company are already multi-channel:

• Sales teams use email, phone and LinkedIn to hunt down prospects;
• Marketing teams use web, mobile, social, and email to educate buyers;
• Customer service teams use chat, phone, email, and social to provide support.

All of these teams have multiple software tools to provide analytics and improve productivity. Yet many customer success teams still rely on a single channel - their customer success managers (CSMs), who schedule meetings and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) manually.

Our free 10-Step Checklist for Customer Onboarding provides a handy reference for ten different customer onboarding strategies. In this blog post we dive deeper into the first three - on-demand training, instructor-led training, and public webinars.

1. On-Demand Training

On-demand training, also called self-paced training or eLearning, is a scalable way to provide new customer education. Typically this consists of 30-60 minutes of content, such as videos and interactive quizzes.

Benefits include:

• Students have access 24/7/365, from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection;
• You can collect detailed analytics on student engagement with each module; and
• With thoughtful instructional design and Skilljar's learning management system (LMS), the learning experience is interactive, engaging, and effective.

Challenges include:

• You'll need to create training content. Depending on your organization, this may be as simple as PowerPoints, or as complex as shooting live action video;
• Choosing an LMS that's technically scalable, easy to implement, and meets your content & reporting needs can be challenging (we recommend Skilljar of course!); and
• Some students or subjects aren't well-suited for on-demand training.

2. Instructor-Led Training

Instructor-led training in virtual or physical classrooms is a long-standing delivery model for customer education. Whether it's delivered at your company headquarters, on-site at the client, through a partner, or via WebEx, nothing can replace the dynamic and tailored interaction between instructors and students.

Benefits include:

• Live instructors who can answer specific questions and tailor the training to the audience.
• Networking between students and with the instructor.
• Some students and subjects require instructor-led training.

Challenges include:

• Costly for both students and the company. Students often are required to spend multiple days and thousands of dollars out of the office. The company has to hire instructors and provide facilities.
• Not scalable to all customers operationally, due to limited schedules and geographic constraints.

3. Public Webinars

Public webinars strike a middle ground between on-demand training and instructor-led training. These are scheduled in advance and available for pre-registration to some or all groups of customers. The webinar format enables you to reach more students at once, and the regular schedule means the sessions are more repeatable and standardized.

Conclusion

On-demand training, instructor-led training, and public webinars are 3 ways to use training for customer onboarding. Stay tuned for the next 3 parts of this blog series, where we'll be reviewing other ideas in Skilljar's free 10-Step Checklist for Customer Onboarding.

To get the entire checklist today, or if you'd just like to follow along, download our free checklist for customer onboarding below!