Should you offer paid training? What about certifications or live training? What type of lesson pathways make sense for your audience?
If you already know how you’d answer these questions, you’re in great shape! But if you need a little extra inspiration for your training strategy, we’ve got you covered.
Check out the following examples to inspire your customer training business offerings:
1. Zendesk
Zendesk offers a blend of both free and paid training to onboard their customers at scale. Their program consists of distinct learning pathways for admins, agents and developers. Their training portal also includes everything from on-demand content to eLearning, virtual instructor-led training, custom training, and onsite training.
What we love: students have the option to select the content that best suits their learning style. As a result, Zendesk has been able to optimize the user experience and increase engagement.
2. Procore
Procore utilizes on-demand training to drive brand awareness, generate prospective customers, and improve customer retention. Specifically, they offer a free training and certification program, which consists of role-based training courses, as well as deep-dive training on their suite of tools, and the option to earn continuing education credits.
What we love: when someone completes training, they also have the option to display a certificate on their LinkedIn profile. This has enabled Procore to build their LinkedIn community and establish the company as an industry thought leader.
3. Outreach
Outreach uses free customer training to proactively address user education support questions. Their program is designed to get new customers up to speed quickly and efficiently.
What we love: Outreach University includes set tracks for different job functions and aspects of their product. When support tickets emerge, their team can then direct customers to relevant training content. They also look at past training performance to provide more targeted recommendations.
4. HubSpot
HubSpot’s customers turn to their free certification program to learn everything they need to know about inbound sales and marketing. Their training portal is organized by category (i.e. sales, marketing, design), content type (i.e. lesson, certification, user guide), and topic (i.e. email, social, landing pages, SEO).
What we love: similar to Procore, HubSpot’s learning center is a great example of how training can drive brand awareness. As someone who is inbound certified, I can also speak to the quality of their training. I learned a wide variety of best practices in a short amount of time.
5. MapR
MapR recently expanded their free on-demand training and development resources for AI and analytics. Their program consists of more than 30 courses; certification tracks for developers, administrators, and data scientists; an expanded support portal and knowledge base; and containerized clusters and code for hands-on experience.
What we love: MapR Academy makes technical training more accessible. Students can take courses on their own time, and easily filter the catalog to find relevant content for their role. MapR’s certification program is also best-in-class.
6. Optimizely
Optimizely recently updated their Optiverse Academy and Certification platform. According to Adam Avramescu, their goal was to make it easier for customers and partners to discover the right content for them, and prepare for certifications.
What we love: Optimizely Academy gives students flexibility. They can opt to learn at their own pace, or get certified. Individual courses and learning paths are also broken down by product, strategy, and results.
7. Splunk
Splunk’s education curriculum is comprised of instructor-led, web-based and on-site classes. Courses are designed for Splunk users, administrators, developers, architects and partners.
What we love: Splunk does a great job organizing their training by experience level. They have nine learning paths and five certification tracks, starting with the fundamentals for users, and power users. This makes it easy for students to find the right content for their needs and interests.
8. ServiceNow
ServiceNow provides an expansive portfolio of customer training across IT, HR, Customer Service, and other departments. Learning paths are available for administrators, developers, and implementers. Individual courses can also be filtered by type, role, topic, and certification.
What we love: ServiceNow has flexible pricing for subscription-based training. Students can either bulk purchase learning credits, or a get a subscription to ServiceNow’s on-demand library.
9. Red Hat
Red Hat has an extensive curriculum, which can be sorted by country and product line. Students can purchase either a basic or standard learning subscription, which provides them with one year of access to training. Among other benefits, the standard subscription comes with the option to get certified.
What we love: Red Hat surfaces a few popular courses at the top of their catalog. They also highlight how many methods of training they offer for each course: classroom, on-site training, online training, video classroom, and virtual training. Clearly, there’s something for everyone.
