In our previous two blog posts, we demonstrated how and how customer's and partner's learning styles differ from those of internal employees.

Training external audiences is increasingly important for sales and customer success. Rather than trying to twist an internal learning management system (LMS) into serving an external audience, many companies are now choosing a best-of-breed approach by adopting an Customer Training Platform.

In this post, we discuss the benefits and criteria for choosing a system that's specifically designed for training customers and partners.

When participating in a training program, your customers and partners have different goals and behaviors than your internal employees. Understanding your audience is the first step to achieving successful learning outcomes. Here are 4 key considerations when designing training for external customers and partners.

I am delighted to introduce Molly Barber, our Customer Success Manager at Skilljar! Molly actually started with us last June, but has been so busy taking care of our customers that she just got around to her new hire blog post (better late than never).

The interesting consequence is that customers themselves can share how much they've enjoyed working with Molly:

Whether Molly is humming along to Adele, dreaming up new crafts, surprising us with light-up sweaters, reorganizing our tea supply, trying to adopt cats named Potato, or simply troubleshooting a Marketo integration, Molly is truly a gem to work with. I have personally been in awe of her organization skills, her ability to interact with customers, and her constant thirst to learn new information.

Meet her in person at Gainsight Pulse in May this year! Molly will be attending on behalf of Skilljar.

We are so lucky to have Molly on the Skilljar team. Read on for more, in her own words.

If we were to position Skilljar as an "extended enterprise learning management system (LMS)," our customers would probably look at us with blank stares. Even mentioning the term "LMS" produces mental images of clunky, old-school HR compliance systems.

At Skilljar, we prefer to call our product a "customer training platform." But no matter what you call it, what makes Skilljar unique is our focus on customer and partner education - aka the "extended enterprise." This blog post describes the extended enterprise and what to look for in an LMS that serves this particular audience. 

At Skilljar, we help companies streamline their customer and partner training. Our learning management system (LMS) is designed specifically for customer and partner education, with unique features like our Salesforce and Marketo integrations, our e-commerce and certification engines, and multiple catalog visibility options with self-service student registration.

When it comes to selecting the right LMS, it's important to consider the unique system needs and requirements for training customers and partners. To assist you, we've collected specific considerations into our new eBook - Choosing an LMS for Customer Training.

In the previous 3 blog posts, we introduced customer lifecycle training and how it can be applied during the marketing phase and onboarding phase. In this final article, we'll cover the benefits of providing training for ongoing customer success and support.

Continuing customer education during the support stage of the lifecycle can keep your customers engaged after initial launch and increase overall satisfaction. The key is to make sure that customers continue to find value in your products and your company. Providing training about product updates, new offerings, and even refreshers on how to maximize the use of their current products are great ways to help cultivate the customer relationship.