There's No Luck in eLearning

St. Patrick's Day was this past weekend! We'd like to continue the fun by giving four-leaf clovers to everyone at the start of their customer training journey. But unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to the end of the rainbow. If you want to reach that pot of gold and engage your customers with high-quality content, you need to develop a plan.

Continue reading for a few tips from our recent eBook, Your Guide to Creating a Customer Onboarding Program: 

1. What is your customers’ path to success?

When creating an onboarding program, you want to provide customers with a “yellow brick road” to success.

As Linda Schwaber-Cohen explained, this can be as simple as a checklist or illustration of the commitment you need from them. For example, a list may involve: first, attend this live training session and learn skill A to accomplish this goal, then complete this on-demand module where you'll learn skill B and master XYZ, then meet with your CSM for custom implementation, etc.

On that note, a good rule of thumb is to create skill-based, rather than feature-based content. Our recommendation: map out your customers’ goals first. From there, you can teach the features needed to achieve each of those goals. Once your plan is ready, present it to the customer and get buy in from key stakeholders.

2. Which technologies support onboarding?

Before investing in a new tool, think about whether it provides the best fit for your use case. Also consider how much it will cost, and whether you have the necessary internal resources.

Webinar providers

Remember, webinars are not always the right solution for customer onboarding. However, some organizations have seen success when they combine webinars with an on-demand option.

Learning management systems

Every learning management system (LMS) on the market is designed to deliver and track online training activities. However, an LMS like Skilljar is specifically optimized for customer and partner training, rather than employee learning. Since customer training is not mandatory, the user experience is crucial. For this reason, there is an increased emphasis on:

• Flexible content creation
• E-commerce functionalities
• Integrations with marketing systems

3. How can you drive students to your onboarding program?

If a training course launches and no one takes it, does it make a sound? That may sound like a joke, but in all seriousness, you should actively promote your program. These marketing tactics can help:

Email campaigns

If your LMS is connected to a marketing automation tool like Marketo or HubSpot, you can set up a workflow to ensure new customers receive an email from your team on day one. You can also remind them to complete lessons after a certain period of time, or recommend similar courses upon completion.

Word of mouth

Customer onboarding is a valuable resource, which internal teams are likely excited about. Use this to your advantage by asking those in customer-facing roles to spread the word. For example, sales and customer success teams can include links to your training center in their email signatures, and mention it on relevant calls.

For more tips, check out our full eBook, Your Guide to Creating a Customer Onboarding Program.

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