1. Your product is complex

Your product is powerful. It solves people's problems. It's also probably very complex. Modern products, whether physical or digital, can have thousands of settings, customization options, configurations, and use cases.

What happens when your customers use your product for the first time? Are you confident they'll be able to accomplish the most important tasks within a few minutes?

If not, they won't come back – and you'll lose revenue. Customer training helps users get started with your product right away on day one.

What about after the first impression? Can your customers easily figure out everything they need to know to get the most out of your product on their own?

If you're not 100% confident that they can, customer training is necessary.

Shopify is a highly customizable e-commerce platform – but that customizability means it can be confusing for new users.

So what does Shopify do? They provide customer training that ranges from very basic to very advanced so every customer can learn something. There are learning paths and courses ranging from "Introduction to Spotify" to "How to Build and Scale a Social Enterprise."

Your product might not be this complex. But you built it the way you did for a reason. And if your customers are able to take full advantage of its power, they'll be more satisfied with your product – and that means better retention and more revenue.

2. Your customers demand high performance quickly

Some customers demand immediate results and will switch to a competing product or service if they don't get them. Can you deliver fast enough to retain customers?

Let's take a competitive arena where companies create very high expectations for results: marketing software. It's an area with many competitors that promise easy-to-use tools that create impact quickly. If a customer starts using your marketing platform but doesn't see results, they won't hesitate to switch to another option.

How can you make sure that your customers are getting great results quickly?

By providing clear education focused on your customers' needs.

In our example of marketing software, that might include more than just product training. What do users of that software need to get results?

Sure, they need to know how to use the software – but they also need to understand marketing basics. Customer training for these users could include information on foundational marketing concepts like establishing a brand voice, assessing competitors, and creating a unique value proposition.

With effective customer education, even novice marketers will see big improvements, and they're more likely to stick with the product.

(If this is starting to sound more like customer enablement than customer training, it's because the two have significant overlap. Training is often part of successful enablement.)

Don't be afraid to think broadly about your customer training. Remember that the more you set your customers up for success – whatever that means for your particular audience – the happier they'll be, and that's what keeps them coming back.

3. You're losing customers during or shortly after onboarding

Time for honest reflection: is your onboarding process delighting your customers and driving retention?

According to Retently, a software customer retention platform, 23% of customer churn happens because of poor onboarding. Even a small improvement in your onboarding could have immediate effects on your revenue.

That's why customer training needs to start before your customer uses your product for the first time.

How early can customer training start?

Earlier than you might think. One great way to start introducing valuable features is to include a link to an introductory guide in the "thank you" email a customer gets after they make a purchase.

This can be a high-level guide – your customer probably doesn't even have the product yet, after all. But it could include a basic overview of important features, ideas on how to use the product on day one, or even case studies that show how other customers have made the most of your product or service.

You could use this to kick off an email series that slowly introduces more features and ideas, getting your buyer excited to start using your product.

This process shows your customer the value of your product and introduces them to some of its most useful features.

Early customer training should focus on getting started and answering common questions, like "How do I download the software?" or "When can I expect to receive the product in the mail?" 

As we're about to see, answering common questions is only going to become more important as time goes on:

4. Your support team answers the same questions over and over

According to McKinsey, customer care leaders expect call volumes to increase by as much as 20% in the next two years.

Is your support team ready for that?

Even with AI-powered customer service tools like chatbots, that's a huge increase. Instead of increasing the size of your support team or investing in expensive tools, you should start with better customer training.

If your support team gets a lot of the same questions, integrate the answers to those questions into your customer training. Now, customers have the most useful information at their fingertips, possibly even before they run into problems.

You might be surprised at how much of your support team's time you can free up with better training.

(This is why you should talk to your support and success teams when you're designing customer training.)

Start training your customers today

Customer training might seem like a huge endeavor. We've gone over a lot of ideas, from creating courses for complex products to starting an email series with introductory guides.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, don't worry. You don't need an entire customer training strategy yet.

Effective customer training can start with writing a single guide or publishing an FAQ with three items. The effectiveness of your customer training is measured by how well it helps your customers use your product, not by the volume of training that you publish.

So start small. Write an introductory guide that covers the most common questions your support team receives. Or film a walkthrough video that shows new users the main functions of your product (you can use a purpose-built tool, like iorad, or a screen recorder, like Loom, to offer this).

Once you've covered the most basic, fundamental areas where your customers need training, you can start thinking bigger and focusing on using an LMS for distributing your customer training.