What Is Customer Training? 

Customer training involves educating your clients on how to effectively use your product or service. This process enhances customer satisfaction, improves product adoption, and reduces support queries. Effective training can include online tutorials, webinars, user manuals, and personalized training sessions, aimed at empowering customers to fully leverage your offering for their success.

Customer training: 

• Empowers customers – they can use self-directed learning to master your product or service
• Frees your customer service and support reps – they’ll have fewer general questions to field 
• Delivers value – your customers will be able to maximize their investment 

Customer training can start as soon as a customer engages with your service, sometimes before they have started to use your product. The goal here is to predict their learning curve and questions by providing clear answers. 

Training customers is valuable at all stages of the customer lifecycle. It comes in various formats, like: 

• Onboarding materials & quick start guides 
• On-demand training materials 
• Knowledge hubs 
• Instructor-led demos or classes 
• Certification courses

All of these can be leveraged to achieve your goals and provide learning on-demand to new users and long-time customers alike. 

But why is customer training so vital? Isn’t an initial onboarding enough for most? Let’s break down the whys. 

Why Do You Need Customer Training?

Customer training enables your business to function at its highest level. It’s an opportunity to position your services and products in the best possible way for optimal usage and reception. A customer who is well-informed and trained about your products and services is more likely to return to you in the future.

Communicating your product value well builds brand loyalty for life. 

Research by TSIA shows that after training:

• 68% of customers will use the product more
• 56% will use more product features, and 
• 87% say they can work more independently with the tool. 

Customer training may be especially valuable for your organization if: 

• You’re in the software, SaaS, or related industries with the opportunity to retain customers through annual license renewals and give clear support to master your product.
• You have a network of customers, partners, contractors, or distributors who need a strong grasp on your product or service.
• You want to improve customer retention rates.
• You want to free up your customer service team with fewer basic inquiries. 

The Top Benefits of Customer Training

These are the top benefits of a great customer training strategy: 

1. Save time for your customer service reps

Effective customer training can reduce the amount of time your customer service department must spend with each new client. It’s just as effective when medium or long-term customers can confidently find detailed answers in your knowledge base or product guides, 

There will be an up-front investment to design these training materials, but it will ultimately save money when your customer support team can dedicate more time to resolving issues and less on training. 

2. Retain customers & build brand loyalty

Your customers will find real value in the goods and services you offer if they’re equipped with great training. This means that customers will be more willing to continue to pay for your products as time passes through commitment to you and your company. Effective customer training can also turn your customers into advocates and champions who recommend you to their network of connections. 

Here are a few key ways to create this loyalty: 

• Give a great experience with onboarding, using tutorials, microlearning, and anticipating FAQ. 
• Provide courses to become certified in your product or software, giving customers a resume boost and additional qualifications.
• Build well-designed learning tracks for customers to complete at their own pace and access anywhere. 

3. Improve your products and services 

Client training is a great way to get feedback and real-time data on areas of confusion or how customers are using your products. You can use this information to refine your customer training and your products. This promotes a culture of learning inside and outside your organization! 

4. Support your sales team in upselling and cross selling

Effective client training supports your sales reps to close the deal when it’s time for subscription renewals. It helps when a new or different product might be a good fit to cross sell. 

You’re probably sensing the cycle by now: robust and effective customer training improves satisfaction, product engagement, and builds trust and loyalty. All these things drive revenue, increase your customer retention rates, and enhance your brand reputation. 

So you’re ready to rethink your customer training approach. What are the best practices to keep in mind? 

Customer Training Best Practices 

With a few key considerations, you can design a client training program to achieve all those benefits for your business and customers. Don’t forget to consider your end goals and the best methods to keep training engaging and relevant. 

1. Set training goals 

Get into the details of what you want clients to gain from your training. 

Try to list out what percentage of customers you want to engage with your product in a specific way in a given period. For example, you might want 60 percent of your customers to upgrade to a premium package to access more in-depth features in the next three months. 

2. Prioritize microlearning 

Keep your training as short and user-friendly as possible. Identify a logical pathway to master your product and break the pathway into chunks that customers can easily work through. Prioritize video content, tutorials, and charts over written guides. 

3. Keep content relatable 

Overly complex training materials can prevent customers from fully engaging with your product. Remember that every piece of content you make should point out how to practically implement your system in their existing business model. 

4. Consider the full customer life cycle 

Adding new features or more in-depth material to your training courses is one way to keep your customers up-to-date on the latest trends. Anticipate their needs at each stage of the process and provide resources on demand where needed. 

Obtaining a new customer costs five times as much as retaining a current one. Showing customers how your platform, service, or software performs better than anything else on the market will go a long way toward building up their brand loyalty. 

Ways to Deliver Training to Customers

Brandon Hall Group research found that 79% of companies said technology was a key factor in their success at delivering customer training. Among companies who said their customer training was effective or highly effective, 2/3rds use an LMS. 

What’s the difference? These organizations have learned that an LMS is the ideal platform to host, create, and track customer training.

An LMS provides the central platform for client training materials. It allows for multimedia formats, interactive learning, and it’s simple to track learner progress and get reports in real time. With an LMS, you’ll have full insight into where your customers might be struggling and how they prefer to engage with your content.

Great Examples of Customer Training 

Want some inspiration on how to train clients effectively? Here are 3 organizations leading the way with customer training:

1. HubSpot Academy

Online inbound marketing leader Hubspot created HubSpot Academy to provide customers with all the vital information to use their product – plus significant added value. 

To onboard new customers, Hubspot uses an extensive content library of short tutorials to help clients make the most of the platform’s features. Following best practice #2, they keep these short and targeted so users get the help they need without having to sift through every single training module. 

Their free certification courses (and completion badges!) for topics like Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Sales Enablement are widely recognized and valued in the sales and marketing world.

2. Ahrefs Academy

SEO software company, Ahrefs, helps customers to optimize their websites and content for search engines and better rankings. In order to train their customers they’ve wisely segmented their training through their Ahrefs Academy.

They offer incredibly well made articles and videos to train customers on the optimal ways to use Ahrefs for SEO.

From there, Ahrefs offer a blend of help articles, FAQs, and short tutorials to help customers navigate the software and make the most of its powerful features.

3. Google Skillshop

Ubiquitous tech giant Google has numerous products and services for which customers need training. They’ve developed an extensive customer training program that segments content into incredibly specific sections to help clients find answers ASAP. 

Google Skillshop focuses on their professional tools, offering detailed training to help clients make the most of Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and more.

Their customer training program is massive, but it fundamentally consists of small, efficient, targeted tutorials on their products and features. Translation? Your business can do the same for your own product, and your customers will find it just as valuable!

Ready to Rethink Your Customer Training?

Have you been looking for ways to boost customer engagement and understanding of your brand? Maybe you’re ready to formalize and centralize your client training materials.

With careful planning and a clear training plan to execute, you will increase customer satisfaction & engagement. And it never hurts to make life simpler for your sales and customer service teams!

Is it time to dig into the details of creating your program? We’ve written the how-to guide to help you start. With clear steps to success, you’ll be able to confidently guide your customers from onboarding to become champions for your brand!