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.

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.

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.

Going into 2016, many customer success leaders are being asked to do more with less. The uncertainty around the public financial markets is causing many companies to take a hard look at their budgets, in an effort to improve unit economics and shore up margins and profitability.

At the recent Customer Success Summit in San Francisco, many attendees were facing the challenge of supporting a growing customer base with flat CSM headcount. Read on to learn how to increase CSM productivity when you have limited resources and budget.

In this section, we’ll discuss how to measure the ROI of training as used for post-launch customer success.

After a customer has achieved initial value through onboarding, there are many opportunities to strengthen the relationship via ongoing customer training and education. Examples include:

• Providing product updates, particularly around major new features or releases
• Retraining for your customer’s new team members, new roles, and/or regular refresher training
• Education on best practices with your product
• Resources for advanced topics, certifications, and other related products.

Training is an excellent strategy to deliver continuous value to your customers after their initial launch, combined with regular business reviews. Customers who are engaged with training are more likely to succeed with your product and ultimately grow revenue.

What are the biggest issues facing customer success teams as they scale their customer onboarding and training programs?

Whether you are just starting on your customer onboarding program, or manage a fully scaled customer success team, you'll likely face many of the challenges that we've outlined below.

Read on for common pain points in customer training and our quick tips on how to solve them.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to measure the ROI of training as used for customer onboarding.

Onboarding is one of the most critical touchpoints in your customer relationship. Whether you’re targeting SMBs or enterprise, getting your customer to initial product value – as quickly as possible – is vital for long-term customer success and retention.

In our experience, companies typically follow one of these models:

• 1:1 – High-touch onboarding, delivered through instructors or customer success managers (CSMs), either classroom or virtual. Customers are typically at higher price points (mid-market and enterprise).
• 1: Many – Low-touch onboarding, with automated and self-paced components. Customers are typically at lower price points (SMBs).

In either case, onboarding can be free, paid a-la-carte, or paid as part of a services package. Regardless of the pricing model, companies usually find that on-demand training is a very cost-effective way to improve their customers’ product usage and satisfaction scores.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to measure the ROI of training as used for customer marketing. First, what does “training for customer marketing” mean?

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.

Today’s customers are expecting more interactive experiences and are also looking to get demonstrated value from the time they spend with your company. According to Demand Gen Report’s 2015 Content Preferences survey, 91% of buyers prefer content that is visual and has an element of interactivity.

So, innovative marketers are experimenting with the next evolution of content marketing – offering on-demand training. This strategy provides your prospects with demonstrated value from the time they spend with your company, even prior to entering a buying cycle.

Increase your brand awareness by offering industry thought leadership that is scalable, convenient, and interactive. You can even offer industry certifications and accredited professional development hours.

Customer success, training, and education teams are frequently challenged on how to measure the ROI of their activities. It's not as simple as measuring new revenue for sales, or number of tickets and resolution time for support. Customer training is highly cross-functional and pays dividends over a longer period of time, with improved product usage, customer value, and ultimately renewals and revenue.

Whether you’re an experienced trainer, a customer success executive, or an innovative content marketer – this eBook is for you. You’ll find helpful information on how to define, implement, and measure the success and ROI of your customer training program. These metrics are vital to ensuring customer success, as well as demonstrating the business case for training to your stakeholders.