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.

The benefits of publishing a SCORM package are numerous, but at the end of the day, our goal is one thing: communicate a learner’s interaction with the course content - how long they spent in it, the answers they selected on a quiz, or whether or not they’ve completed the course. The SCORM package “talks” to the learning management system (LMS) and tells it the information we want to know.*

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.

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. 

In our previous two blog posts, we demonstrated how and how customer's and partner's learning styles differ from those of internal employees.

Training external audiences is increasingly important for sales and customer success. Rather than trying to twist an internal learning management system (LMS) into serving an external audience, many companies are now choosing a best-of-breed approach by adopting an Customer Training Platform.

In this post, we discuss the benefits and criteria for choosing a system that's specifically designed for training customers and partners.

When participating in a training program, your customers and partners have different goals and behaviors than your internal employees. Understanding your audience is the first step to achieving successful learning outcomes. Here are 4 key considerations when designing training for external customers and partners.