Creating “Customer Stickiness” Through Training: Don’t Hold Out on Customer Training

We believe customer training is one of the mostuntapped keys to unlocking bottom-line business results—from increased client retentionto improved profitability. Even more, we contend most companies today cannot afford to ignore customer training any longer. We’ll use this pieceto show you how we arrive at these bold conclusions, leveraging real-lifeexamples and recent data.

About customer relationships

First and foremost, we assume that if you arereading this, the need for investment in customer relationship management overallgoes without saying. There has always been much ado about customer relationships,and for good reason. Companies—including Mindflash—are introducing senior management roles with “customersuccess” titles. Others are ramping up loyalty programs. And yet, the Call CenterExecutive Report indicated that 68 percent of businesses planned to increasetheir customer management spending last year alone. But customer training hasremained a largely untapped frontier in driving revenue and bolsteringretention—items on the agenda of every C-suite executive we know. 

Recent research from Brandon Hallshows us that slightly more than half (54 percent) of organizations are doingsome sort of training for customers or even business partners. This gives us some early clues of what worksand what doesn’t in maximizing business outcomes. It also begs the question: what of the other (approximately) half ofthe business population? The common barriers to entry we hear often arelack of time, lack of budget, and lack of knowledge of resources available toget the customer and partner training process started.

Bluebeam’scustomer training story

Certainly these werefactors at play when Pasadena, California-based Bluebeam Software, which develops and sells software for PDF creation, editing, and collaboration, sought a solutionto more effectively train its customers—their resellers and distributors. Realizing that the best way to sell a product is to effectively show it,the company has long invested in training for its resellers across the countryso they can become influential and knowledgeable product experts.

The problem was, as Bluebeam grew, live training sessions and evenhour-long webinars were increasingly hard to schedule among the large number ofresellers. Salespeople often couldn’t find time to travel and the hour-long training-callrequests were becoming difficult to schedule. Additionally, there weren’talways enough demonstration meeting rooms to accommodate the training in atimely fashion.

So in 2011, Bluebeam sought out an on-demand training platform aimed atits resellers and distributors, eventually implementing the Mindflash solution becauseof the on-demand platform and the built-in reporting functionality.

Two key customer-training moments

AsBluebeam quickly discovered, your customers wantto hear from you when you deliver quality information that will maximize their resultsusing your solution and ultimately make their work lives easier. In fact, webelieve companies should communicate with their customers and partners earlyand often, and specifically during two key moments:

• When they first adopt your product or service. Seasoned HR professionals often say they can predict the tenure of a newemployee by examining their first weeks on the job. If the onboarding processis done, and done right, new employees feel immediately valued and engaged,propelling productivity from the start. If not—if they show up and no businesscards are ordered and their computer isn’t ready—they will likely re-thinktheir decision. The same goes for yourcustomers. They may have gone through a lengthy selection process beforelanding on your solution or have fought through budget hurdles. Theirexperience with the platform immediately after signing on is critical to theirlong-term retention.

The same certainly holds for resellers anddistributors. For Bluebeam, the company’s goal was to get their resellerpartners excited to go through the training. So the company decided to approachits new online learning program primarily through video content, and segmentedthe content across three levels of expertise. Tier 1 training is a crash courseoverview consisting of “everything you need to know to sell the product.” Tier2 of their online program provides information on applying the software intodistinct industry verticals based upon their common workflows, while Tier 3delivers an in-depth training on how to use the software so that they have theskills to demonstrate the product. Equipping customers and partners within-depth knowledge when they see the substantial benefits is critical to theirearly adoption and complete integration of your solution in their ongoingbusiness practices.

• When there are key updates to share. While it is incredibly important to engage yourcustomers during the adoption of your products and services, it is imperativeto continue the education and engagement for long-term customer retention. Yourtraining program is an extension of your company building a relationship withyour customer, a key piece to customer retention. For Bluebeam, the companyissues a new major version of their solution every year, which includespowerful new features for their customers. Bluebeam revises their trainingprogram each year to demonstrate the new features and discuss the key sellingpoints of the recent release to reengage their customers on an annual basis.Bluebeam has even created a Refresher Tier within their online training programso that those who have completed the training in the past can see what is newwithout completing the entire training all over again. This prompts partners totake another look at the solution each year, keeps the solution top-of-mind,and continues to provide valuable information to make partners’ jobs easier.  

Three leading business impacts

In our combined decades of experience focused ontraining and customer success, we’ve seen substantial bottom-line businessimpacts. The three most common that we observe are:

1. The ability toscale without the wheels falling off the bus. Optimizing business processes, training included, is critical forgrowing companies that need to scale both quickly and effectively. While Bluebeam offers live classroom trainings as part of its training program,since the personal touch is critical for building relationships with its partners,adopting the eLearning software brought needed flexibility to the company’sexisting training program. Bluebeam can now train more people faster and more consistentlywhile also saving staff countless hours previously spent scheduling meetingsand tracking completions. And if you’ve walked the halls or worked in anygrowing startup or small business, time is about as valuable as gold.

2. Increasedsales. When theonline training process was successfully implemented at Bluebeamin 2011, the company used Mindflash’s eLearningsoftware to deploy an online training system designed to help its resellersbecome influential and knowledgeable product experts. On average, Bluebeampartner companies with representatives who completed Tier 1 training have doubled their annual revenue for Bluebeam’s solutions. Resellersthat have gone on to complete the company’s most advanced Tier 3 trainingexperienced a 400-percent increase inproduct sales versus partners who have not completed any of the online trainingprograms.

3. Improved customer retention. Theoverwhelming majority (93 percent) of companies responding to a TrainingIndustry survey reported that they saw increased customer satisfaction—and 88percent reported increased customer retention—as a result of customer training.In their book Leading on the Edge ofChaos, Emmet Murphy and Mark Murphy estimate that just a two-percent increase incustomer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10 percent.

How to dive into customer training

With the whenand why of customer training in place, it’s time to explore how a successfulprogram is implemented within the realities of fast-growing companies such asMindflash, Bluebeam, and countless others. First, this is certainly not a casewhere any customer training is better than none. Poorly planned customertraining can show you don’t have your house in order, aren’t listening to yourcustomers’ needs, and don’t value their time. That’s why, based on theexperiences of hundreds of Mindflash customers, including Bluebeam, we’resharing key best practices to get you going:

1. Talk to your customers! What do they want to better understandabout your product or service? Only with a good understanding of your audiencecan you create compelling training content for them.

2. Test the content ahead of time. First, send it to a beta group ofsubject matter experts and engaged customers. Then, improve it based on theirinitial comments before launching it publicly. While Bluebeam staff spent about 200 hours upfront creatingthe video-based trainings, the program is basically running itself with verylittle overhead and they are seeing the time and savings benefits only growover time.

3. Plan and resource for laterupdates. In rapidly changing markets, trainingcontent can get outdated quickly. Investment here will ensure that your coursesremain valuable and impactful to your customers. Bluebeam’straining staff has just updated the modules, which the company expects willhelp increase participation across the board.

4. Try carrots. Try sticks. Offer formal certifications,continuing professional education credits, etc. to customers completing yourtraining. In some cases, you can require that customers pass training coursesbefore gaining access to your phone support, or to advanced features. As an incentive, Bluebeam awards gift cards, electronics, and otherprizes to resellers for completing various phases of the curriculum. Thatstrategy has helped immensely in getting the new training program off theground, Courdy says. “People say, ‘I can do this on my own schedule and I get agift card afterward? That works for me.’” Bluebeam has launched a certificationprogram for their reseller partners in 2015 to formalize the education processand give them direct benefits for their investment in the training program.Along with customer training, the new certification program has become one ofthe three foundational pillars that Bluebeam uses to review reseller engagementand success.

5. Tie training outcomes tobottom-line business results. Meaning, don’t report the total number oftraining hours completed to your CEO. She doesn’t care. What will get herattention (and potentially more resources for next year’s training program) arehard stats on customer satisfaction, retention and expansion rates, and supportcosts among trained vs. non-trained customers.

Perhaps the greatest value that comes from this level of engagement isthe “stickiness” it creates with customers, often translating into hard-dollar metrics suchas engagement, retention, and revenue—and making customer training an important,available, and frankly affordable strategy to gain some competitive advantage. Thetruth is that without effective customer training, your customers may neverunlock your solution’s full value for their specific situation. And that puts boththeir retention and your revenue at risk.