If you've ever sat through boring compliance training that looks like it was made in the 70s, you might have been left with a bad impression of what training can be.

At Skilljar, we work with companies that take a fresh, innovative, and user-centric approach to enabling their customers. Many of them are reinventing training from the ground up, in a way that uses modern technology that appeals to today's self-paced adult learners.

In this blog post, we share 5 best practices on creating training content that people actually will want to take!

Excited to introduce our new blog series, Ask a CSM! We're talking with some of the industry's leading Customer Success, Education and Training professionals about the ins and outs of their day-to-day. Stay tuned for new Q&As each month!

Much of today's dialogue around customer success is focused on how customer success managers (CSMs) can structure processes, manage handoffs, and coach customers to long-term success. But like any good relationship, the best outcomes happen when both parties are working constructively to achieve success.

While it is the vendor's responsibility to set expectations with the customer and gain their buy-in for onboarding services and support, the customer can help facilitate this process too. In this blog post, we celebrate our customers with the 5 ways they've collaborated with us to drive successful business outcomes.

Customer success organizations are chartered with the mission-critical task of making customers successful. Seems simple enough, right? But achieving long-term, consistent customer success can be anything but. Far too often customer success organizations are unsure of the health of their customers and what they can do to improve the customer experience.  

I’d like to argue that a key factor in determining customer success begins with effective customer training. Unfortunately, customer training is probably one of the most ad-hoc functions in the organization and is often untracked and/or immeasurable.  

Content marketers are entrusted with the responsibility of educating potential and existing customers with valuable resources related to their industry, but the content marketing toolbox hasn’t changed in recent years— eBooks, webinars, blogs, and videos.

At Skilljar, we're seeing many innovative companies successfully use online training for lead generation. While training and education have historically been reserved for post-purchase customers, more and more marketers are experimenting with using on-demand training as part of their content marketing toolbox to attract new leads.

Customer onboarding is one of the most critical stages of the customer relationship, when customers are most fully engaged, excited about the product, and ready to start implementation. Yet customer success teams are often bottlenecked in this critical phase, instead turning their attention to more immediate issues like renewals, complex questions, and fire-fighting issues with launched customers.

Even though the activities and knowledge needed for onboarding are already routine for the customer success team, for customers, the onboarding experience is their first real interaction with the product.

As a result, many customer success teams are looking for ways to scale the traditional sequence of 1-on-1 onboarding calls to a higher-quality, repeatable, and 1-to-many experience. While this may seem like a daunting task at first, there are easy ways to get started and take incremental steps to help scale this process. Read on for 3 tips you can implement immediately to begin scaling your customer onboarding process.

The decision of whether to charge for customer training is a strategic choice often made at the company level. Some companies choose to offer training for free, as a way to enable industries and customers for success with the product. Other companies think of training as a standalone profit & loss (P&L) center. Still others take a hybrid approach, where training is expected to be cost-neutral (customers are charged just enough to cover direct expenses, typically classroom instructors and facilities).

At Skilljar, about one-third of our customers choose to charge customers for training. In this blog post, we walk through the 3 most common business models for revenue-generating customer training organizations - a-la-carte, subscription, and bundled.