I’ll be the first to admit: I’m a fair-weather fan. I’ve gone to quite a few baseball games, and will cheer for my favorite team (but only when they’re winning). Unfortunately, this same concept may apply to your customers, and how they interact with your brand.

If someone is looking to buy your software, it shouldn’t matter whether they work with you, or a member of your partner program. The customer experience should be the same. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Enter partner training.

In this edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Doug McDaniel from Engagio to share his insights and tips about training customers!

Here at Skilljar, we spend a lot of time working with companies who are onboarding customers. Given our experience in this area, we wanted to share some essential principles for great customer onboarding.

In the SlideShare below, we’ll touch on what we like to call the 5 Ms: 

In this blog series, we’re drawing on the expertise of Skilljar’s very own Customer Success team. They’ve helped countless teams launch successful customer training programs, and have some great insights to share. Stay tuned for new Q&As each month!

First up: “What do customer training teams overlook when planning a launch?”

By: Joe Healy & Ezzy Schesvold

The Karmak eLearning team faced a mammoth project. We were in the process of revamping all 300
individual pieces of coursework in our learning management system, and frankly, we were struggling.

I’m fortunate that I often find myself at industry conferences. They give me a chance to step back from my day to day to engage in learning, interesting conversations, and a new understanding of how Skilljar helps our audience, and sometimes, they inspire. Learning Solutions Conference got me excited about our industry, the future, and the role we, as training teams, play in it.

By: Kaliym A. Islam, Ph.D. 

Research on customer education suggests that calculating its business impact is a difficult task. This consensus exists for many reasons, including the fact that the activity is generally not delivered by a single department and there aren't norms around where in the organization the responsibility for educating customers exists. Perhaps the most common challenge facing the individuals responsible for educating customers, however, is the belief that the most common technique used to evaluate all training programs (the Kirkpatrick’s four-level model) is lacking.   

*This post originally appeared on LinkedIn on 3/14/18 

By: Rajeev Batra

The defining mantra for businesses today is customer experience. While, products and services need to be easy to understand and intuitive to use, great training is key to making customers successful and lifelong advocates. One only needs to look at Apple and its Genius Bars in how seriously it takes educating its customers despite the intuitive and easy to use nature of its products. The need to continuously equip customers with the knowledge to use products and services is even more acute in the B2B world, where complexity is higher and often more is at stake for both the buyer and seller. In the modern service economy products are increasingly sold as a subscription, where delivering a superior customer experience is a constant, requiring that users know how to use a product cold. 

In this edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Jesse Evans from Facebook to share his insights and tips about training customers!