Strategies for growing your customer training program

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An effective customer training program is important not only for efficiency, but it also provides meaning for everyone involved through a sense of progress and purpose, which are necessary qualities for customer retention.?

In a recent Totango webinar, Online learning strategies to grow your customer training program , Kristin Lisson, Director of Customer Enablement & Training at Totango, discussed this with Celeena Mohammed, Customer Success Operations Specialist at Citylitics, and Stephanie Keiko Kong, Edu Tech Operations Consultant at Yoga Ed.

So how do you develop an effective training process?

First of all, how do you define training? Training means different things to different people.?

Kristin breaks it down into four categories based on focus areas:

• Enablement: Discovering and testing new resources, tactics, or strategies (focused on the why)
• Performance Support: Getting help in your moment of need (focused on the context)
• Training: Increasing knowledge and skills, and putting them into practice (focused on the role)
• Development: Enhancing knowledge, skills, and abilities for purposes of individual growth (focused on the person)

Effective training happens on an everyday basis. As Stephanie put it, “When am I done with training? The answer is never.” She highlights that the cadence of training has to keep up (or exceed) the cadence of progress. So with an ever growing and adapting business, the training never stops.

Totango’s training program, Creator Campus, provides role-based training, so users can hone their skills and explore what interests them beyond their current role.

If the training never stops, how do you know when it’s effective?

There are two ways that we measure training effectiveness:

• Results: Can people do something better or in less time than before?
• Sentiment: Do the people involved feel better equipped than before?

Stephanie says that some team members approached her with concern, saying, “I think I did something wrong. That was too easy.” That’s one way to know training is working. You may just be making significant progress with efficiency measures!?

As Celeena says, “As your workflow gets easier, you can count that as a success.”

This will allow your CS teams to focus on tasks that matter the most.

How much time are you allocating to training?

For Celeena, it’s approximately one month—not just for training, but also for feedback, questions, and making sure CS reps have the resources they need.

For Stephanie, she’s a fan of ongoing remote training. She says: Break things down. Have checkpoints in between.?

Totango recognizes that touchpoints are important for a sense of progress, which is why we celebrate course completion with badges that our customers can earn and share with their teams and social networks. We call this “a confetti moment.”

Training can help define your role in your company, which drives your sense of purpose. Connecting productivity to purpose makes people feel seen, happier, and more fulfilled. That is certainly something worth celebrating.?

Want to learn the latest CS industry trends??

You can catch the full Online learning strategies to grow your customer training program here .

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