Software-as-a-service is, for all intents and purposes, a buyer’s market. Unless you’re fortunate enough to operate in an incredibly focused niche, your customers have the luxury of nearly infinite choice where vendors are concerned.
That’s why your business must do everything in its power to retain them.
And for many companies, this begins with effective customer training — the art of optimizing your customer onboarding process while ensuring you have access to both the right customer training platform and the right data.
So, how can you use the data you have to make better decisions when it comes to customer training? It starts with having access to the right analytics.
Why Are Customer Training Analytics Important?
Like it or not, SaaS customer training is a data-driven process. Analytics are essential not just to its overall success, but also in demonstrating the value of your customer training program to leadership. They also provide your team with invaluable insight into customer needs, preferences, and behavior.
That insight can, in turn, be combined with other customer analytics to help your company better understand both its customers and the market in which it operates. This has a knock-on effect across the entire sales cycle, from creating better marketing collateral to hosting more compelling product demonstrations. Beyond this, there are other reasons you should track your customer training analytics, as well:
- Identifying knowledge or skill gaps that aren’t properly addressed in your onboarding process.
- Optimize training content by determining what works and what doesn’t.
- Measuring how and why customers engage with your training materials.
- Identifying customers that excel at using your software and who might feasibly become super users or advocates.
- Provide personalized learning paths and guidance to both current and prospective customers.
- Updating both training and your products to keep pace with evolving customer needs.
Key Metrics and KPIs to Track for Your Customer Training Strategy
Software businesses have something of an advantage over other companies when it comes to customer training. Virtual environments allow them to collect an enormous volume of data about how people engage with their products during both demos and onboarding. Coupled with the increasing prominence of data science as a professional discipline, we’re likely to see the depth and breadth of what customer training programs can measure increase by leagues.
For the immediate future, however, there still exists a number of metrics and key performance indicators with a great deal of relevance where training is concerned:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measured through direct customer feedback, most commonly by asking customers to rate their overall satisfaction with their training on a scale from 1-5.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): In a similar vein to CSAT, NPS asks a customer how likely they’d be to recommend your software to a friend on a scale of 1-10.
- Retention/Churn: Although not directly tied to customer training, these closely-related metrics can prove invaluable in demonstrating your program’s ROI.
- Customer Acquisition Cost: How much it costs to acquire a new customer. Effective training can considerably lower your CAC.
- Completion Rate: The percentage of customers who’ve completed your onboarding. A low completion rate indicates something is very wrong.
- Usage Details and Trends: This is technically a category of metrics, and includes participation time, drop-off rates, and geographical distribution. It also assesses how people engage with your training, including the elements they interact with, how they interact with those elements, and where they drop off.
- Behavior Patterns: Are there any common threads with regards to how your customers engage with your training? Do people tend to drop off in large numbers at a specific point in the onboarding process?
- Support Tickets: How frequently do your customers request help from your support team when using your software? Too many helpdesk tickets could be an indication that there’s something lacking in your training.
Quantifying Customer Training ROI: Linking Training Initiatives to Business Success
By tracking metrics such as sale value, retention and churn, and customer acquisition cost, your team can at least estimate the value of your customer training. But what about when it comes time to actually demonstrate a concrete return on investment? That’s arguably one of your team’s most significant challenges — even with a wealth of training data, the answer isn’t always clear cut.
That’s where integration comes in. By wrapping your customer training data into your customer relationship management platform, you not only add an extra layer of context to each metric, but you can also measure trends related to sales and training over time — in other words, you can definitively show the impact your training has had on overall performance.
There are other benefits to that integration, as well. By linking customer training metrics with analytics data from the rest of the customer journey, you empower your business’s sales and marketing team with far greater knowledge of their audience. You also gain a holistic view of the entire customer journey, allowing you to further optimize everything from product demos to ongoing customer support.
If you’re interested in reading a bit more on the topic, check out 5 Reasons to Integrate Your Customer Training Data With Your CRM.
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