Creating a Winning Customer Training Plan - Part I - The Analysis Phase & Info Gathering

The Problem

Every company wants its customers to be successful, unless, of course, it hates its customers. Hey! It is possible! The world is a fascinating place.

But not every company understands how to meet customers’ needs for information and education on its service. The more complicated and sophisticated the service, the more incentive the company has to build a comprehensive digital library of lessons and an engaging, rich online community. 

A company may be tempted to bypass this solution and opt for a hands-on, customer success team dependent approach. In this approach, the success team handles all matters related to customers. The company may also rely on a support team that handles questions with a more hands-off approach via a digital platform - like Zendesk, for example.  Although effective, these two approaches, without additional supplementation, fall short of addressing the entirety of the customers' world of needs. They can also become prohibitively expensive as the customer base grows or the product becomes increasingly complicated.

Supplementing these teams with an eLearning solution will reduce company costs, enables it to scale its onboarding process, empower customers to be more independent, and provide them unlimited just-in-time access to pertinent information.

The Plan

I will write a series of articles on what it takes to build a robust and viable customer-centered digital learning solution.  Such a project requires two essential elements: strategy and content. The existence and success of one are impossible without the other. However, as priorities go, the strategy must come first. A clear path to a clear goal provides the foundation necessary to inform and shape the design, development, and evaluation of the educational content.

The first essential component of the strategy is analysis. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of the need and addressing it head-on. Next is gathering the right resources and tools to design, develop and deliver the content. The last step in this first iteration is evaluating both the effectiveness of the framework and the impact of the lessons on customer adoption and use of the product.  I will cover all aspects of this series.

Assumptions

Before I go on, I write these articles under the assumption that the company has a service to offer, including SaaS products.  I also assume that you, the reader, are somehow stuck...err... put in charge of either customer training, support, or customer success. Whichever one, you must learn, understand, eat, inhale and embrace the ADDIE model of Instructional Design and design thinking. Although the methods considered here use a more rapid approach, it is heavily influenced by these two solid models, and therefore, you should at least be familiar with them.

All right, brave souls.  Forward we marcheth!

Analysis (Part I): Gathering Input From The Various Teams

This first article focuses on one of the foundational blocks of instructional design, the analysis phase. Analysis requires input from multiple sources, including the company, the customer success and customer support teams ( if you have them), the customers. Other internal and external stakeholders have influence or interact with the customers using the product to a more limited extent.

Every group has something important to contribute and brings a perspective you must consider when analyzing the scope and depth of what you need to address in an eLearning solution. In addition to input from people, you need metrics! Stats! Numbers! The numbers will help you refine and distill the most value from the information provided by the teams.

Customer Success and Support.

The customer success and support team(s) has stalker-like knowledge of the customers, and more importantly, pain points and opportunities for improvement. I reference products in this writing, but this line of questioning also applies to services. Some important questions to ask members of this group include:

1. What metrics about the customers does the company track? You should have access to simple information such as the size of the customer (if it is a business) and how many individuals at a customer company can access or use the product/service.
2. Are they able to classify the customer base into different levels and categories based on customer adoption and usage of the products/services?
3. What are trends in customer questions?  Trends include things like most frequently asked questions, repeat customer questions regarding specific aspects of the product/service that the customers find challenging, and customers questions around issues that indicate high-level usage of the product or, on the other hand, questions that indicate a lack of fundamental knowledge of the product.
4. Can the teams identify an expert or super users?
5. Is there any prerequisite knowledge the customers must have to be successful in using the product or service?
6. What is the overall impression and reaction of customers to the product, including likes and dislikes?
7. What are some pain points for the customers?
8. How do customers handle feature releases or upgrades to the service or product? 
9. What process do they use to onboard customers? How long does onboarding take?
10. How often do they communicate with customers?
11. What is the average number of inquiries made by customers in a given period?
12. What is the churn rate, and what reasons do customers provide for leaving?

This information will not only help you decide what subjects to cover in your eLearning solution, but it will also influence how you cover the content. For example, let's say one of the product's features requires a complicated setup that the customer must endure. The success team is hurricane-ed daily by a fierce wind of questions around this feature. The level of demand for information tells you that this is one subject you must cover. On the other hand, you notice that customers hardly ever use a feature, even though you think it would make a big difference in their work. Investigating why customers are less inclined to use the feature will help you find ways to encourage its use. These two examples are at the extremes of the spectrum. Most answers will reveal nuanced needs that require attention.

The depth of the problem and the complication informs how you deliver the content:

1. Is this a topic best suited for microlearning modules because you can break it up into concrete, stand-alone pieces? 
2. It is best covered in a live session because the customers will gain greater benefit if they can ask questions in real-time, hear questions from other customers, and interact and get to know other customers? 
3. Perhaps it is a topic that requires an in-person session- let's say, a crash course on software and its functionality, given in one day. Maybe you are training an entire team from a customer company?

Don’t worry. You will get a chance to define this scope as you talk directly to the customers and understand their needs and preferences.

Other Teams - Sales, Marketing, Consultants, Product Development.

Talking to other teams in the company is really about getting a feel for the customer persona. There may be some characteristics unique to your customer base.

1. Do customers ask many questions? 
2. Are they more difficult or less difficult than a typical user? 
3. How easy or difficult was it to convince them of the product’s importance? 
4. What were they concerned about the most? 
5. Is this product necessary or a nice-to-have?
6. Is it made for use by teams, individuals, or both? 

The answers to these questions help you further shape your approach to the design and development phases. For example, what if you discover, for whatever reason, that most customers were not as enthusiastic about adopting the software as the company would like (i.e., they don’t understand value). Why? What did the sales or marketing teams say to convince the customer otherwise? Is this a problem that comprehensive education could solve? What if the sales team exaggerates the software’s ease of use, and upon discovery to the contrary, the customer is turned off from the product.

In the end, you will have much information to sort through. Organize the information in a way that resembles the customer’s journey with the company. Start with information gathered from marketing and sales. Can you group the information by subject areas? Problems? Do you see any trends coming up? Are there places in the customer’s journey from marketing to sales where customers could benefit from additional education? 

We are not yet going to worry about whether we can address all of the issues. We only want to map out everything to see the scope.

In the next article, I will cover how to gather and organize input from customers.