Last week, I, along with several other Skilljar team members, traveled down to sunny San Diego for the Technology & Services World Conference (TSW), hosted by TSIA. TSW is a one-of-a-kind event bringing technology Services, Sales, and Product Teams together to network and learn about the latest tech industry trends.

When you’re in the market for new technology, the process of identifying the features you need, the interface you like best, and ultimately, the product that best fits your needs, can often be overwhelming. And yet, once you buy a product, the hard work is just beginning.

The decision of whether or not 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 success within a product for industries and customers. Other companies think of training as a standalone profit & loss (P&L) center. Still others take a hybrid approach in which training is expected to be cost-neutral (customers are charged just enough to cover direct expenses, typically classroom instructors and facilities).

Read on for more details on the following monetization models: revenue-generating customer training organizations (a-la-carte), subscription, and bundled.

One of our core values at Skilljar is a commitment to “Customer Focus.” We take this responsibility seriously and as a member of our Customer Success Team, I know firsthand how dedicated we are to your success. From your initial onboarding session through the post-launch phase, our team will partner with you to ensure you meet your business goals. This is a commitment we make to our customers every day, but what does that actually look like behind the scenes? Here’s a glimpse into what a day might look like as a member of our team.

In my last two blog posts, I discussed the importance of having a cohesive, overarching strategy and the establishment of a content development process in building a Customer Education Program. With this foundation in place, the third element of a successful Customer Education Program comes into play: technology. As our colleagues at TSIA Research explain, “With new learning approaches being introduced at a rapid rate, technology is a critical investment area for education services teams hoping to meet and exceed customer expectations.”

At our inaugural customer conference in November, Skilljar Connect, we asked our customers for their thoughts on the essential steps that must be taken before the first piece of content is developed for a customer education program.  From the responses, there was one recommendation that consistently stood out:

“Start with the goal and then move backward. Training has to be easy and add value. Also, if it is not easily consumable, then no one will take it.”

We recently had hundreds of customer education leaders in town for Skilljar Connect 2018. After the conference, I took some time to reflect on our journey and what distinguishes great customer education programs at companies such as MapR, Nintex, Procore, Quick Base, The Trade Desk, Zenefits and Zendesk.

With so many events competing for your attention in 2019, it can be difficult to figure out which conferences are the right ones for you and your team. If you are looking for the best customer success, customer training, and customer marketing conferences of 2019, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s a handy guide to the upcoming events.

The market is full of products designed to communicate with one another, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the sophisticated software running your customer education and support services to communicate with one another too. Yet for some reason, so many of us are still using dated and legacy business systems that don’t integrate, and house customer engagement data in silos.