Customer Training: Important Customer Training KPIs to Track for B2B SaaS Companies

What is Customer Training?

Customer training is a company process that teaches customers how to use a product or service to derive business value. Customer Training is an increasingly important function of any B2Toany. In order to create satisfied customers, a software company needs to ensure that customers are mastering their often complex tools and systems. Proper customer training doesn’t just happen with new customers during the onboarding process. New feature releases and new customer admins require continuous learning to prove business value. B2B SaaS companies thrive when users derive business value- it helps create better customer relationships and reduce churn.

What are Training KPIs?

Training Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are designed to give insight into how customers learn the product and how well they build mastery. These KPIs will help determine the effectiveness of a company’s customer education initiatives.

These metrics can be quantitative or qualitative so long as you have a consistent way of measuring them. While training KPIs can be granular or broad, they should tie to higher-level business goals. Overall, training KPIs need to tell you how your training impacts your business.

When creating KPIs, it is crucial that you define them and collect benchmark data so you can determine if initiatives are improving them.

Most Important Training KPIs for Customer Training

1. Training Retention

Most of us, if pressed, need help remembering what we had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner last week. The constant push and pull of information in our brains causes our system to forget information we aren’t using regularly.

This is important when it comes to training. Why? Because if you offer a course, and within a week someone has forgotten its contents, you need to make it stickier.

Defining and tracking a learner retention rate is crucial to evaluating your courses and training. These can be measured with quizzes, tests, surveys, etc. These performance metrics can then be combined and analyzed by company, department, or all users. Individual instructors (for live training) or individual assessments can be segmented and analyzed to determine instructor and course quality. Training retention data should be a leading indicator of how well your customers are learning the product.

Do you have a certification that requires passing a test? What percentage of users are certified? This is also a telling KPI to measure training retention.

2. Average Time to Completion and Course Completion Rate

For B2B SaaS companies that use learning management systems (LMS) instead of in-person or online live training, what amount of time it takes to complete a course, or a specific module is essential when evaluating the quality of training courses for customers. By understanding the time cost of training a user, you can better estimate the time to value customer experiences.

Understanding the time it takes users to get through different sections of your curriculum can help improve courses. For example, if a specific section of your course takes much longer than others, its layout or content may need to be reviewed to ensure they aren’t overly complex or poorly delivered.

Course completion rate can be instructive in how deep into a course a user gets before giving up for those users that leave the platform. In the same vein, knowing, on average, how far through training videos a user goes can be instructive for improving your training videos.

3. Product Usage and User Activity

One great way to show the value of customer training is to compare the user activity of companies with high completion rates of your training versus companies with poor completion rates. There is often a correlation between user activity and customer churn. This makes sense intuitively because if users aren’t using the product, the company may determine it is not worth the cost. Keeping users active in the company’s software is critical to retaining customers.

Additionally, determining which features and products your customers are using the most (and the least) can help improve the product and training both.

4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The right customer training should lead to competency and mastery of your products. Users who master a product are likelier to be happy customers that use the product and much more likely to provide referrals, review the product favorably, and defend the product’s cost internally. Excellent customer training should lead to happier customers- but how do companies measure customer satisfaction?

While you can always solicit customer feedback, and there are many surveys and KPIs that can be used to understand customer loyalty and satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most famous. You can learn more about NPS here, but it is based on how likely your customers would recommend your product. The survey splits your respondents into “promoters,” “passives,” and “detractors.” It isn’t complicated: the more promoters you have and fewer detractors, your ability to grow is better detractors, the better your ability to grow. Proper customer training should produce a higher NPS score.

5. Customer Retention and Reduced Churn

Customer retention and, inversely, customer churn are incredibly important KPIs for subscription-based B2B SaaS companies everywhere. Calculating your churn rate and retention rate over a given period of time is a matter of math, but how you improve those numbers can take time to figure out.

Studies have shown that poor onboarding and customer education are huge indicators of churn. Ultimately, the goal of customer training is to reduce churn, improve the customer retention rate, and grow the business. When proving the ROI of a customer training program, improved retention and churn rates are at the top of the list. The right training program should improve these KPIs and customer lifetime value.

The Right Learning Management System (LMS) for Customer Training

To effectively measure training, you must have KPIs to monitor both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Analyzing the learning in your business and pairing it with KPIs allows for the development of the company as a whole and improving customer training programs over time.

Customer training can significantly benefit almost any business but is becoming crucial for B2B SaaS companies. Over time, the ability to train customers one-on-one becomes cumbersome and impossible to scale. More than a knowledge base is required. This is why companies turn to a Learning Management System (LMS).

But how do you find the right LMS? There are many features to think about and ways to evaluate different LMS companies, but when it comes to tracking KPIs, these are some of the most important things to look for:

• An LMS that helps you track and collect the critical KPIs you choose can be incredibly helpful.
• Many LMS companies started to help companies train employees. However, the KPIs and tracking you need for customers are not the same as those you need for internal employees. Look for LMS providers specializing in customer education.
• Make sure their customer support is rock solid- improving your training retention and completion rates should be a partnership with the LMS company.

Q&A: Additional Customer Support and Customer Success KPIs

What Are Great KPIs for Customer Success Teams?

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)- Another customer feedback measurement like NPS, a CSAT asks customers how “satisfied” they are with a product.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) – This KPI measures a product’s learning effort. While there is no standard scaling for a CES, defining one for your company and analyzing it moving forward can be very telling.

What Are the Top KPIs to Measure for Customer Support Teams?

• Average Waiting Calls - this metric looks at the typical backlog of live calls that a customer support team is dealing with.

• First Response Time (FRT) – How quickly are support tickets first acknowledged and responded to?

• Resolution Time – How long does the average support ticket take to resolve?

• First Contact Resolution (FCR) – This KPI measures how many of your customers have their issues resolved on their first interaction with a customer service team.

• Average Total Support Tickets: The total number of tickets a customer or user has to open per company is a great KPI to track. Proper training should push this number down.