The Importance of Training and Development For Customers in B2B SaaS

CS 1: “What if we train customers on our product, and they still leave?”

CS 2: “What if we don’t and they stay? All those support tickets...”

As this classic customer success conundrum demonstrates, if you want your company to succeed, you must invest in training sessions for your customers.

But what if you invest and they go elsewhere? To a (yikes!) competitor? 

They need to think differently about training and development initiatives 

In short, educational initiatives and instructor-led training software must be part of any B2B SaaS company’s customer retention strategy and wholly aligned with its growth ambitions.

Let’s consider the differences between training and development and how both can positively impact customers and a company’s growth.

Check this out to learn about Raven360's customer training software.

Training & Development. Same But Different?

Training and development have long been placed together as a single phenomenon. However, a big misconception needs clarification – they aren’t one and the same thing. 

Customer training is generally a short-term, company-focused necessity, while development is more about putting measures in place to get customers’ time to value down.

For example, training tends to be task-focused – such as how to use a particular piece of your software; or how to use a new product feature.

It’s about giving customers particular skills they’ll need daily – use your product and get the most value out of it. This is similar to employee training which is usually an in-house effort – depending on the level of depth and specificity needed – and can also be a module or part of a program to help someone advance. Employee training has been around much longer than customer training. Still, if you look at the benefits for your team members: employee engagement, employee retention, and less employee turnover, these are the same benefits you find with customer training.

Development, however, is usually a program of long-term learning – created and tailored to your particular software and your customer’s job at large.

Development may take place over several months or years in some cases.

Customer-Focused Training and Development 

While the above definitions demonstrate the purposes of training and development, it’s equally crucial to understand their importance. Regarding specific benefits, both have a much broader role to play.

Provides Consistency & Benchmarks Customer Skills

In a world where individuality is overtly embraced, a consistent approach to training and development may sound counter-intuitive or a recipe for blandness at worst. 

When there’s a tangible way of measuring an individual customer’s skills, it becomes much easier to understand their progress. It enables companies to gauge customer competence levels and ensure they get the most out of their product.

Many larger businesses will use a traditional enterprise LMS – as part of their assessment and delivery solution – which helps to track progress and record outcomes. 

However, most LMSs struggle to meet the needs of complex customer training and certifications. Companies need a flexible LMS beyond basic sensitivity or customer service training.

Increases Customer Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Profitability

With new skills and a fresh focus on the way forward, customer training and development initiatives are much more likely to improve user experience and encourage stickiness with a product.

When customers know how to use a product to its fullest potential, they derive more value from it – which in turn has a positive impact on customer satisfaction and, therefore, company revenues.

Reduce Churn and Gain Referrals

The bottom line is that customer success is about much more than customer support. It isn’t just about support tickets. When you train your customers, you help them get value out of your product, making them less likely to leave and more likely to refer you to others in the future. If your training helps them succeed not just with your SaaS product but with their job, they will fight to bring you into any new job they have in the future. Quality customer service is about putting the customer first.

Customer Training Is the Key to Business Growth 

Customer satisfaction comes in different guises. Depending on the business sector, the type of product and services being sold, and the overall sophistication of the offering itself, often customers themselves are likely to receive some form of training or development.

This is common among businesses with a distribution or partner network, for example, where the manufacturer – whether they’re selling industrial machinery, construction equipment, an advanced piece of software, or something else that requires advanced knowledge – routinely delivers insights and product updates to them: often through in-house, in-person training, or, increasingly, via eLearning platforms.

Let’s consider the main advantages of customer-based training and development.

Enhances Product Value

The benefits of customer training and development are clear.

Essentially, initiatives like these help customers and partners better understand their products and services. That’s a given.

As a result, learners know how to use the product’s features to optimum effect, helping them get more value from the offering and, in turn, firmly embedding its usage within the customer’s day-to-day working environment. Your product is now a problem-solving tool for the user.

Increases Customer Satisfaction

A thorough understanding of how something works – and having the help and support of the vendor who can walk them through more advanced features – undoubtedly enhances the customer experience.

It becomes easier to use when users can see how something works at each touchpoint and have an in-depth working knowledge of a solution. Untrained users will bog down your customer service representatives with support tickets- well-trained customers need less help.

But mastery is an ongoing endeavor, which is why providing different levels of training can also help drive longer-term – and therefore continued – use of a product or service. Most complex software requires more than just a knowledge base.

Types of training for customers can also boost individual users’ overall hard and soft skills, mainly when other companies widely use the solution itself. 

Take Salesforce, for example. Administrators able to attain a certain level of proficiency in using this brand name CRM can quite easily find a role requiring the same experience – in any number of organizations.

When the path to customer success is clear, and continued training and development programs are created to address new features and uses, the better the customer retention rate and the lower the churn rate.

Boosts Profits

With a comprehensive customer training program in place, the more competent and independent users of all kinds become.

This alleviates the need for support teams, leads to easier onboarding, creates better awareness and appetite for up-sell opportunities, and improves word-of-mouth marketing.

After all, happy customers are the best advocates any business can have. And when word spreads, more prospects are referred – which means new customers and increased profits. Focusing on learning and development will help companies reduce churn and grow revenues.

At Raven 360, we offer a full range of employee and customer-focused training and development programs. Our eLearning and LMS solutions can be tailored to individual customers’ needs at scale – helping learning and HR professionals deliver a consistent, on-brand education experience to their growing teams: anywhere in the world. To find out more, contact us at 1-508-786-0500.