​Webinar Presented by Adam Avramescu and Linda Schwaber-Cohen

We've been training customers since we've had products that required training, but recently, the idea of onboarding training has been getting more and more attention. So today, I'm providing a summary of the webinar hosted by Skilljar and presented by Adam Avramescu and Linda Schwaber-Cohen from January 2019 called "New Formula for Customer Onboarding."

With the rise of subscription-based businesses, companies need to make sure their products are effectively adopted by their customers. Customer onboarding is such a critical investment, because if customers don't adopt the product, they don't renew and can end up costing more to acquire and support than the revenue they generated. 
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Adam and Linda started the webinar with a few observations about what some companies are doing wrong when it comes to onboarding.

For example, you wouldn't want to give end users and administrative users the same kind of training. Either the end users will be overwhelmed with too much detail about setting things up, or your admins will not be getting enough training for their jobs.

The second mistake is equating account onboarding and user onboarding. Yes, there are tasks that need to be done when you obtain a new account. But these are not the same as the more frequent new user onboarding every time a new person joins a team that uses your product. 
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The third mistake Adam and Linda discussed is that onboarding should be owned by one team. The truth is that onboarding is a journey for the customer, and you'll have team members supporting different parts of that journey from marketing, sales, and customer success.

Of course, your onboarding strategy won't be perfect overnight. Adam and Linda recommend defining which onboarding archetypes you have in your company, and which are the highest priority for optimizing. They also recommend shadowing a customer onboarding to see if you are using the wrong approach or the wrong archetype. Get started with the most impactful thing and lay the foundation for measuring your success.
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For those who didn't get a chance to view the webinar live, you can access the recording here. If you get the chance, it's an hour well-spent if you are thinking about improving your customer onboarding strategy.

​Let me know if you need help building content for your on-demand onboarding strategy.

I started this blog in hopes that I could help companies who want to reduce time spent on customer training and support tickets and improve customer acquisition and retention metrics by providing on-demand customer education content.

Along the way, I've found a number of resources from vendors who serve similar companies. I'd like to bring a number of those resources together for you in one place. 

Three of these sources of applicable information are LMS (learning management system) companies. All three of them have resources dedicated to creating educational content that goes beyond how to use their systems into the broader realm of how to get a job done - the job of scaling your customer education content so that customers can be successful with your product. Their tools are but one part of getting the job of educating your customers done.  A couple of my favorite resources for each source are linked.

Skilljar
Skilljar is an "online training platform for customer onboarding and success,"* and has published a number of helpful short ebooks, case studies, and worksheets available on their Resources page.
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Building a Business Case for Customer Training
​How to Measure the ROI of Customer Training
​The Three Stages of Customer Training Development
*https://www.skilljar.com/

Learndot
Learndot is "the LMS for software customer training,"* developed by ServiceRocket. They also have a number of resources, including customer stories and webinars, as well as their Guide for Building a Strategic Enterprise Software Training Business. In addition to these resources, the ServiceRocket blog has helpful articles on advice and processes related to starting your customer education program.

5 Steps for Implementing Your First Customer Training Program
Create a Customer Education Program Focused on Customer Success
*​http://learndot.com/

Schoolkeep
Schoolkeep is a cloud-based LMS that "provides the tools you need to create online courses and optimize your training operations, no matter how small or large your learner base."* They also have a number of resources with a number of articles available in the Customer Education Use Case area of their Resources page.

Why Proactive Customer Education Is More Effective Than Reactive Support - this article is actually on the SalesForce blog, but was written by Julee Ho, who was head of Product Marketing at Schoolkeep at the time of the article (July 2016).

The 5 Point Checklist to Kickstart Your Customer Education Program
8 Ways Training Automatic Helps You Attract, Onboard and Retain Customers

Schoolkeep has done an excellent job of connecting related articles, so once you get started on one of their articles, you may find several others you want to read as well.

*​https://www.schoolkeep.com/

Springboard Solutions Consulting
I'd also like to mention my new friend Donna Webber of Springboard Solutions Consulting, whose expertise is in Customer Success and Enablement and developing an overall strategy for your customer training program. She's published a few articles on LinkedIn that are also good resources when thinking about whether you want to invest more in customer training offerings. 

Five Ways Customer Education Impacts Your Bottom Line
​Why Training as a Service is Good for Your Customers 
Why Training as a Service is Good for Your Company

Final Thoughts
Of course, don't miss my previous guest author, Adam Avramescu, who wrote Why You Should Invest in Customer Education in 2017 (And Your Customers Will Thank You).

Though I've included resources from three different LMS companies (and I'm sure there are others for this use case), I haven't created content specific to any of them as of this writing. I do know enough to see that they have different audiences and different capabilities, so can't necessarily recommend one product over the other. It really depends on what your budget is and what you'd like to get from the system.

As the trends for customer success and scaling customer training efforts grow, more and more resources and solutions will become available. I've only included a small sampling here. There are meetup groups, professional organizations like CEDma, and tons of other resources out there to help you. 

Please leave additional recommendations in the comments section.

My Expertise
Once you've decided to invest in on-demand customer training or online help, you'll need someone to help develop or repurpose your existing content. My expertise is in creating clear, concise, and engaging instructional content to support software customer success. 

​​This week, I'd like to review THE handbook for Customer Success, published by Gainsight in 2016.

With any experience in a subscription economy, you probably know that "you can't...sustain real growth if customers are leaking out...at a high rate." (p. 5-6). The book begins with how Salesforce created the template for the subscription economy and what it takes for your recurring revenue business to succeed. It's a simple formula:

          new customer acquisition + high retention + positive upsell results

In other words, customers must remain your customers AND buy more stuff from you in order for your business to succeed.

This first chapter of the book also gets into the history of SaaS and why you need to manage or at least nurture the installed base of customers. It describes how Customer Success is all three of the following: an organization, a discipline, and a philosophy.

Chapter two gets into strategies, defining where Customer Success fits into a new high-level organization chart. It defines the activities of the new group and the metrics for defining success. I'm particularly interested in how training fits under the Customer Success leadership, rather than sales or support. Customer Success would have onboarding, professional services, classic customer success, customer support, and training team members reporting to the VP of Customer Success. Later in the book, there's even an argument for Sales Consulting to fall under Customer Success, because the Customer Success leader "has to live with the sales decisions" (p 196).

The rest of the chapter talks about what Customer Success is NOT, provides a thorough definition of what Customer Success IS, and explains it's cross-functional impact on the entire company.

Chapter three points out the differences between high touch, low touch, and tech touch Customer Success strategies, based on a company's customer value and number of customers. To put it simply, lower value customers (that may be more likely to scale to millions of customers) require more low- or tech-touch models for success like self-serve documentation and on demand training, while companies with higher value customers "can afford to throw some bodies at their customers..." (p. 50) and provide a higher touch strategy.

The second part of the book presents the 10 laws of Customer Success. These laws were commissioned based on Bessemer Venture Partner's success with their 2010 Ten Laws of Cloud Computing, also known as the 10 Laws of SaaS. The Customer Success laws were authored by ten different experts, and each law is graded for relevance to specific scenarios, including B2B SaaS, Subscription-based, Pay-as-You-Go, B2C, and traditional models. The chapter for each law provides the author's explanation of the law, as well as an executive summary and additional commentary on how the law applies to high touch, low touch, and tech touch models. 

The laws are:

1. Sell to the Right Customer by Ted Purcell, Senior VP of Sales and Customer Success at Clarizen
2. The Natural Tendency for Customers and Vendors is to Drift Apart by Karen Pisha, Senior VP of Customer Success, Code42
3. Customers Expect You to Make Them Wildly Successful by Nello Franco, Senior VP of Customer Success, Talend
4. Relentlessly Monitor and Manage Customer Health by Dan Steinman, Chief Customer Officer, Gainsight
5. You Can No Longer Build Loyalty Through Personal Relationships by Bernie Kasser, Senior VP of Customer Success and Services, Mixpanel
6. Product is Your Only Scalable Differentiator by Kirsten Maas Helvey, Senior VP of Client Success, Cornerstone
7. Obsessively Improve Time-to-Value by Diane Gordon, Chief Customer Officer, Brainshark
8. Deeply Understand Your Customer Metrics by Kathleen Lord, VP of Sales and Customer Success, Intacct
9. Drive Customer Success Through Hard Metrics by Jon Herstein, Senior VP of Customer Success, Box
10. It's a Top-Down Company-Wide Commitment by Nick Mehta, Chief Executive Officer, Gainsight

Part Three of the book goes into more detail on the role of the Chief Customer Officer (or other variants of the top Customer Success job) and where and how the role fits into the overall organization. It also talks about technology that can help manage the "plethora of customer information" (p. 199) and possible coming changes to this new and constantly evolving landscape.

The book is an excellent example of a company (Gainsight) providing education on the broader industry, rather than just their specific product. It talks about Gainsight as a tool very little, but the book can be an excellent guide as you restructure your organization and practices for incorporating a Customer Success philosophy.