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6 Tips to Maximize the Success of Your Customer Training Program Using an LMS

Picture of Joe Moriarty Joe Moriarty : March 10, 2020

Customer Success

6 Tips to Maximize the Success of Your Customer Training Program Using an LMS

The benefits of implementing a customer training program are well-known.

Educating users on how to quickly extract value out of your product not only increases adoption rates, upsells, and upgrades, but it also improves the customer experience, leading to higher retention rates, as well.

Best of all, the rise in customer satisfaction from your training program converts satisfied customers into outspoken product evangelists, reducing your marketing costs and drastically increasing your profit margins.

If you’re ready to begin developing your own customer training program, here are our 6 best tips for making it as successful as possible using an LMS:

Find out more about Raven360's customer training platform.

How to Maximize the Success of Your Customer Training Program Using an LMS

1. Know Your Customers

The most important tip when developing your customer training program is to find out what the training needs of your customers actually are. However, you want to prioritize your ideal customers first. Typically, these are the profitable customers who receive the most value from your product, and who enthusiastically recommend it to others.

Begin by conducting surveys with these ideal customers to determine areas where they are the most confused about how to use your product. In addition, survey your ideal customers on what their most important, desired outcomes are that they are hoping to use your product to achieve.

Follow up with 1-on-1 interviews to get even more detailed feedback, if possible.

2. Start with an Enjoyable OnBoarding Experience

Implementing a customer training program is the perfect way to walk users through the crucial first steps of getting started, so they don’t get lost, confused, frustrated, and give up.

This initial “onboarding” stage is where most churn happens, so it is critical to get right. The faster you can get customers to a “quick win”, the more likely they are to stick with your product.

Focus on helping your customers dive into your product and extract value out of it to ensure they will keep coming back to use it over and over again.

3. Work Collaboratively to Create New Training Content

In a previous article, we spoke to Monica Green, the Director of Learning and Development Strategy at Epicor Software to get an inside look at her process for producing content rapidly and efficiently.

According to Monica, the Learning and Development team shouldn’t be siloed off to develop customer training content after products have already been developed. Instead, she believes that L&D should be part of the product development process, from beginning to end.

Monica went on to explain the benefits of Epicor’s customer training development process:

“[Epicor] customers don’t get software updates, and then wait 6 months to receive training on new features. Training is ready and goes live alongside the product, so customers have instant access to everything they need to adopt the product right away”.

Regardless of what your content creation process looks like, seek to involve key members from different departments within your company, as they can add unique insights you won’t have access to on your own.

4. Enable Custom Learning Paths

In order to maximize user adoption and retention of information, you must be able to send your customers down pre-defined “learning paths” according to their individual needs.

You need to provide exactly the right content, to the right people, at the right time. This requires that you organize your content based on roles, topics, categories, skills, products, etc.

To keep learners engaged, it’s important to include a combination of different mediums, including recorded lectures, live video classes with two-way interaction, self-labs, live practice, quizzes, and a final assessment.

5. Gamify Learning

One of the best ways to incentivize customers to complete your customer training program is to offer rewards, such as points, badges, and trophies to recognize their progress.

In addition, your LMS should give you the option to provide dashboards to customers so they can see how far they’ve come, and also see how close they are to completing a course and receiving their next certification.

You can also spark a little competitive spirit among your customers by providing leaderboards so they can compare their progress with that of their peers.

Not only do these gamification features increase engagement, but they also allow customers to share their progress and certifications with their colleagues and friends on social media, which can attract new customers and further establish your brand in the market.

6. Improve Your Training Program Using Tracking and Analytics

After deploying training content to users, it’s important to closely track what training content your customers are consuming. This includes how often they complete training, hit milestones, and even how long they watch training videos.

However, it’s often what content customers don’t consume that provides the most valuable insights. By monitoring what content customers don’t consume, you can stop creating that type of content, and focus your time and resources developing training on topics that customers do need more information on.

By using an LMS to develop your customer training program, you can create in-depth, customized reports on many other things, including:

What impact training is having on specific business objectives
How much time a customer is spending on any given course
What content was accessed by customers (and which content is unnecessary)
Which materials are being sent to customers that increase engagement and retention
Where in a course customers are getting stuck or confused
How many attempts it took for a customer to pass a quiz or exam
What skill gaps customers have, and where additional training is needed
Data visualization to help administrators identify patterns and trends

With these advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, you can monitor the direct impact on business objectives that your training is having, and make any necessary adjustments or improvements.

Why Choose Raven360 for Your Customer Training Program

Raven360 is an enterprise-grade, scalable platform that helps fast-growing companies with high-complexity products painlessly train employees, customers, and partners.

Raven360’s secure, cloud-based platform allows you to onboard faster, train better, and retain more customers with these powerful features:

Upload content of any format: Raven360 supports PDF, video files, Google docs, HTML packages, SCORM packages and more. You can author your own material from within the platform or bring in outside content.
Seamlessly integrate with your existing tools: Integrate with Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box to access everything you already have from one single dashboard, at the right time.
Always up-to-date: Upload your training material once and users will always have access to the latest version and you won’t have to update your docs on multiple platforms.
Accessible anywhere, on any device, 24/7: Allow users to access training on the go and at their own pace. Raven360 works on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Users can even access content while offline.
Dynamic learning experiences: Go from open classrooms where users can access all the material at once to pre-defined learning paths where you dictate how the content is consumed. Manage how you feed your content to increase knowledge retention.
Self-paced labs: Learners can access a virtual machine instance of your software on their browsers —no downloads, no installs. They get hands-on experience using your tech, without compromising real data or breaking stuff.
Generate extra revenue: Sell subscription-based trainings through a simple e-commerce platform.
Keep sensitive information secure: Assign individual and group level access to your content. Prevent confidential information from leaving the platform or landing on the wrong hands, with industry-leading security.