In a world where SaaS has become the dominant business model, software companies must double down on their efforts to ensure their customers’ success. That’s because a huge part of the SaaS model is based on subscription renewal, meaning that not only do you have to sell a great product, you’ve got to ensure that customers are maximizing the value of that product by knowing how to use and apply your product in order to achieve their business goals.
This is where customer training becomes a critical business driver. It helps software companies build a strong relationship throughout the customer lifecycle and empowers customers with the product knowledge and skills they need in order to succeed.
Customer Empowerment through Training
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
You’ve heard this old proverb, right? So, let’s take this and apply it to the world of customer training.
If you’re a SaaS business, once you close a deal with a new customer, that’s not the end of the story; actually, it’s the beginning. This is when your customer success team must kick it into high gear and start transferring knowledge over to the customer in order to empower them to succeed.
These are the three major building blocks of customer success that your team should be working on at all times:
- Relationship-building – Create open lines of communication with your customer, establish loyalty and trust, and always be on top of managing your accounts.
- Technical success – Make sure that your product is in fact working for the customer, and give immediate support for any bugs.
- Customer empowerment – Set your customer up for success, and help them use your product to its full potential in order to achieve their business goals. Remember, even if the product is working, if the customer is missing their goals, then this account is going to be a flop.
Customer training is the most critical driver of empowerment, because, like the proverb states, teaching is the key to long-term success.
Customer Training as a Growth Driver
Customer education programs have become a necessity, and software companies are making significant investments to scale and improve the quality of their training. This is a wise move, as customer education has been shown to impact many of the KPIs that SaaS companies live and die by – like revenue, retention, customer satisfaction and lifetime value.
Take a look at some impressive figures from a recent Forrester report. Companies with a solid customer education program in place were able to improve revenue by 18%, increase retention by 21.8%, increase customer satisfaction by 34.3%, and improve the customer’s lifetime value by 20.9%. At the same time, they succeeded in reducing their support costs by 17.9%.
Customer training and empowerment is a critical part of customer success. SaaS companies that are ready to take an approach which provides hands-on training to customers in the right format at the right time will see a much greater ROI on their efforts and will truly be able to transform their customer education program into a growth driver.
Time to Step Up Your Training Game
Every SaaS company needs to offer a variety of training options for its customers. Each person learns differently, and can have different training needs at different stages in their relationship. The question is, how can you create an impactful customer education program that will empower your customers?
Quite simply, it’s by stepping up your training game.
It’s time to focus on continually empowering your customers by creating hands-on, product-centric training experiences that can be delivered in any format and at any time to best fit their specific needs.
We are excited and proud to partner with some of the world’s leading software companies to transform how they drive growth and retention through customer empowerment. I invite you to learn more about Strigo’s Software Training Platform and how you can scale and improve your training in order to ensure your customers’ success.
Customer training is the “golden ticket” in the age of SaaS. It presents a huge opportunity to empower your customers and we’re happy to be your partner.
