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.  

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 a poll of enterprise contact centers by Deloitte, 82% view the customer experience as a competitive differentiator. But who in the organization is responsible for this customer experience? This topic has been one of much internal debate here at Skilljar, and we often have customers ask us what we recommend as they think through their organizational structure. Training and education is a function that spans all stages of the customer lifecycle, so determining who owns communication to customers is crucial to ensure a seamless customer experience if the responsibility transfers hands internally.