Virtual training

All You Need to Know to Measure Customer Training ROI

liran

Dec 01, 2021 - 5 min read
Measure Customer Training ROI

For software companies, customer training is no longer just for explaining complex technical products. Every software company can benefit from using customer training platforms to deliver exceptional experiences across every touchpoint on the buyer/customer journey.

In an increasingly remote and hybrid working world, virtual training can be used to highlight key features and illustrate use cases in a sales demo or POC. It can also be used as part of customer onboarding and ongoing education to make sure your customers gain the maximum value from your products—which is essential for driving customer loyalty and retention.

But how do you know if your investment has been a success? Measuring ROI on training investments can be difficult. Let’s explore how to measure ROI so that you get more from customer training tools.

Why customer training ROI matters

In the current subscription economy, there’s often an abundance of choice. Whether you’re looking for project management apps, automated marketing platforms, or HR software, there will be a wide selection of vendors and products to choose from. Even though technology spend is increasing—as digital transformation helps businesses navigate current challenges, from remote working to pandemic recovery—there’s more scrutiny than ever over how that money is invested. This is true for customer training solutions too.

It’s very much a results game. So being able to measure and monitor ROI is crucial in ensuring your solution is living up to its promise. For software companies looking for customer training solutions, measuring ROI must be part of the plan. For this, you need visibility over key data metrics that show you how your training programs are performing. And the main barriers to success are:

1) Identifying which metrics are important

2) Transforming the data into insights

Here’s how to solve these.

Training ROI metrics to look out for

So, what data should you be looking at to understand customer training ROI? Here’s our guide to customer training best practices for measuring ROI. We are going to break this down into three areas:

  • Audience profile
  • Engagement
  • User satisfaction

Remember it’s not all about the bottom line. It’s about the value that technology brings to a wide range of outcomes from customer experience to employee satisfaction.

Audience profile

It’s best to first understand who is using your products. This includes looking at individual users but also the organizations these individuals belong to.

For an accurate picture of individual users, look at the basic demographic details available, (age, role, etc.) geographic distribution, and, of course, the number of participants. Then for the organizations, look at the companies that participated in the training, their size, their industry, the number of participants per company, and the number of returning users per company.

The profile of users going through training programs is important for ROI because it tells you exactly who makes up your current customer base and how that has changed since the investment.

When it comes to calculating ROI, you need to have a complete picture. Customer retention may look good, but which customers are renewing? How much does that user tend to spend on licenses? Small organizations with 100s of users? Large organizations with 1000s of users? Does this fit with the growth strategy?

Or you may want to analyze the ROI for specific demographics, for instance, different regions, as it may be a business priority to grow in a particular region, and you would need to pin down that information to calculate ROI in a meaningful way.

Engagement

It’s not just about how many people take part. You want to know how people are interacting and engaging with your training programs.

The important metric here is the time spent in sessions. Look at drop-off rates too, i.e., when do users exit or lose interest in a training session? And traffic distribution across products or features will show you what is popular with users.

These metrics will show you how engaged users are, how they use the platform, what is working, and what is not working. Another great avenue for analysis is communications and interactions between users, including those between instructors and trainees. How many assistance requests take place, and how long do these take to be resolved?

Engagement gives us valuable insights for ROI, because engaged users tend to mean happy customers. Happy customers lead to more renewals, upselling, and advocacy. But engagement also gives us crucial data around value enhancement. Is training leading to “value moments”? These are where a user discovers a feature or a cool trick that not only helps them achieve better outcomes at work but turns them into a super user or encourages them to advocate your software to others.

Measuring feature usage in training and how this translates to user activity on the product itself is also great for painting a broad picture of how effective training is. Educating customers about premium features in training can lead to more subscriptions to premium licenses.

User satisfaction

Acquiring new customers costs five times more than retaining existing customers and reducing customer churn rate by 5% can increase profits by 125%.

Training is a great way to keep customers happy and boost customer retention. First, by providing great training experiences and, second, by showing them how to achieve unique business goals using your software. So, you really want to measure the impact of training experiences on customer satisfaction.

Carrying out surveys at the end of training sessions is a great way to measure how valuable users are finding training. Allow for direct grading or rating of sections of training. Feedback, where sentiment analysis is used, can also prove useful for understanding the impact of your training programs and how effective the technology is.

In the end, ROI is a numbers game

Now you should have a comprehensive picture of the performance of your training programs. Let’s look at how this affects the bottom line.

How you calculate ROI depends on your organization’s objectives. One approach is to compare your performance data to industry benchmarks or previous results. These expectations should be set out beforehand and agreed on by all stakeholders.

One way to calculate ROI is to measure Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) with Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), also known as the LTV:CAC ratio. This is essentially the ratio between the financial value you gain from a customer and how much it costs to acquire them.

The metrics we covered in this blog will be useful for painting a full picture of Customer Lifetime Value. There are many areas that indicate a return on investment.

These include:

  • Overall revenue – Has revenue increased due to the investment?
  • Upsells – Has there been an upturn in upsells since the investment?
  • Feature adoption – Has the investment in training led to an increase in customers paying more for premium features or for an upgraded license or subscription?
  • Service team workloads – Has it reduced the workload that customer service teams have had to deal with? Has the quality of these requests changed, meaning there is less work?
  • Customer retention – Are customers renewing in greater numbers?

Analytics makes the difference

With the technology available today, organizations can gain insights from all corners of their business. Advanced analytics shines a light on how an organization operates, how its teams work, and how its customers interact and engage with products and services.

For software companies, there’s no excuse for ignoring the advantage of mining this data. It can help show what works and what doesn’t and allows you to improve your training programs accordingly. And it is the only way to take the data from your programs and turn it into customer training ROI insights.

There are many customer education solutions available, but they are not all created equally. If you want to be able to accurately monitor and measure the ROI of your customer training, you need a solution that has advanced analytics built-in.

Introducing CloudShare

CloudShare’s next-generation customer training platform lets you breathe life into training experiences for all participants. Whether it’s instructor-led or self-paced, CloudShare offer the best hands-on customer training solution for the enterprise. Not only will CloudShare help you improve customer education outcomes but, with built-in analytics, it makes it simple to measure and monitor ROI.

Everything you need for effective customer education:

  • Powerful granular analytics for valuable insights
  • Intuitive dashboards and extensive engagement metrics
  • Seamless, smooth, and engaging user experiences
  • Quick and easy to spin up complex sandboxed environments
  • Intuitive UI for admins and instructors to build and manage classes

To learn more about how to measure ROI of training and customer training best practices, contact the team at CloudShare today.