Virtual training

How Do Virtual Customer Experiences Support Personalization?

team@cloudshare.com

Mar 10, 2022 - 6 min read

The key to increasing the lifetime value of a customer is to help them use your software, or product, to its full potential. Generic virtual training or high-level, webinar-style product training produced over Zoom for anyone and everyone simply isn’t enough.

You and your team need to make the most out of virtual customer experiences.

No more sending an email through MailChimp with five generic product videos and calling it an onboarding process. Customer delight begins with fulfillment. And, in software, fulfillment begins with training.

The Impact of a Personalized Virtual Customer Experience

A personalized customer experience goes a long way in engaging your customers or clients from the start. Everyone learns differently. Some folks might require virtual instructor-led training (VILT) while others may prefer to go through a course of personalized video content.

A virtual classroom, for instance, potentially reduces instruction time by as much as 60% and costs 50% less than physical training. Although the use of in-person training plummeted to 9%, there was a subsequent 53% increase in virtual instructor-led training. 

Using a platform like CloudShare allows you to give your customer base options throughout each stage of the customer journey.

The communication shouldn’t end once you have a credit card on file.

It should evolve. 

Today’s consumers are more aware than ever. It’s so easy to see right through a cookie-cutter onboarding process, or any generic and automated communication. It usually goes like this:

1. Prospect requests a demo
2. Sales rep or product marketer provides demo
3. Sales rep enrolls prospect in post demo nurturing sequence
4. Prospect signs up, or starts a product trial
5. They’re enrolled in yet another sequence with some generic testimonials, or product use cases
6. Customer uses the software for a week or two
7. Customer stops using software because they aren’t seeing the value

Companies spend so much time and money on automation, they often don’t think about how this can potentially take away from the customer experience.

Sure, it’s not sustainable for some companies to nurture each lead as if the prospect was an investor considering joining the next round. However, companies devoted to a personalized client experience will see much lower churn and more consistent growth.

Customers can be your biggest advocate. The more you help someone and make their lives easier, the more they will be willing to share their experience with peers in their industry – or even within their own office.

This is especially true when trying to build a community of users. The more educated your end-user is on your product, the better they can explain its benefits to others. For example, when someone asks a social media peer group for software or product recommendations fitting your company description you want your users to chime in and say how they can’t imagine doing their job without your software.

Leveraging Personalized Virtual Training to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Offering personalized customer experience from the moment someone is interested in your product is a huge competitive advantage—and becomes even more of an advantage as you continue that personalization through training.

CloudShare allows you to optimize and personalize customer training:

1. It provides you and your team with more options for training styles
2. CloudShare gives you the option to make real-time adjustments
3. Customization for each customer
4. Increased focus on the customer, or in this case the learner

Virtual Training Options Through CloudShare

CloudShare is centered around the virtual training experience. The old saying “you get what you give” can certainly be applied to customer experience. There’s software for everything these days. All are designed to solve problems or make your experience more efficient.

While most software companies have a great product they don’t do a great job of engaging the customer to get the most out of their software. This leads to churn, and a lower lifetime value of a customer (LTV) – which isn’t a recipe for success.

Customers leverage CloudShare to create the best possible customer experience. This starts long before the user becomes a customer. Whether your company solves a problem or presents someone with an opportunity, you need to show, not tell. In order to show, you need to have different options for your educational resources. It’s not enough to just create a high-level demo. Get into the weeds.

The most successful software companies often have academies with a detailed curriculum with courses, certifications, and knowledge bases. These courses show the end-user how to solve pain points. This is much more effective than pointing someone to a blog with some high-level benefits. In addition to VILT, CloudShare also helps companies offer more virtual instructor-led training. While your course offerings will have an instructor, these VILTs offer more personalization and the same benefits as sitting in a classroom. Have a question during your training or course work? Raise your hand and have it answered right away rather than emailing support.

The Problem With the Set It and Forget It Mindset

Automation is designed to make things more efficient. It’s not designed for personalization, customer engagement, or onboarding. Sure, there may be some things you can automate throughout these processes, but you can create real value and a strong foundation through customer engagement. It can be tempting to automate your onboarding process or your support knowledge base. However, these are great opportunities for you and your team to engage the customer and continue building the customer relationship.

Virtual customer training provides unparalleled insights. It gives you the opportunity to see firsthand where users are getting stuck or misinterpreting your training processes. Not only can you provide immediate help to keep the customer on the right track, you can also notice small issues with your training materials before they create larger issues. Through virtual instructor-led training, you might notice half of your customers aren’t grasping something you thought was obvious.

Take advantage of the time you get with your customers. It makes everything better. Don’t just send them an automated onboarding email with 10 links to resources once a sales rep moves the deal to closed-won.

The more you learn about your end-users the more informed your future decisions will be. Customer experience is the key to creating long-term relationships. These relationships equal more predictable MRR and allow you to scale more quickly through your first-hand engagements with your current customer base.

Customization = Improved Virtual Customer Experiences

CloudShare users value customization. It’s one of the most important aspects of being able to effectively communicate with your end-users. You can spot a template, or a canned email from a mile away. Customized messaging gives you a greater chance for engagement. Think about all of the templated cold emails or product highlight emails you get each day. You probably just scroll right past them.

However, every once in a while someone takes the time to do the research. They address you by the name you go by, not a personalization token. The message also addresses a pain point or an opportunity specific to what you see every single day. It’s not an overarching general message designed to cast a wide net where a 1% conversion rate would be an incredible success.

CloudShare helps you communicate with your end customers the way they want to be communicated with. Gone are the days of customer engagement ending once the deal is won. If anything, the conversation should begin when the deal is won. A zoom call with a templated slide deck with your customer’s logo isn’t enough. Not even close.

Design Processes for the Individual

There’s a good chance everyone using your software isn’t using it for the same reason. Your customers have different roles at different companies, and they certainly all won’t have the same learning styles. The head of IT will care about how your software integrates with everything else in the company tech stack while your leadership team only cares about how to gather the right data to make more data-driven decisions. CloudShare helps you engage both.

Leveraging CloudShare software allows you to create different learning tracks for different job functions. It also allows you to regularly check in on progress and get ahead of small issues or hiccups before they turn into a cancellation request.

Arm the right people with the right tools to help them do exactly what your sales rep promised them the software would do. Take the extra time to communicate with them one on one, and provide them with personalized training throughout the engagement, not just at the beginning of the relationship. If you know a customer responds better to a one-on-one video, then don’t send them a blog article.

Solve For The Customer, Not The Software

The best way to engage your customers virtually is exactly the way you would do it in person. You shouldn’t feel limited to a software’s capabilities. CloudShare has been helping companies gain competitive advantages from the start by providing the tools necessary to provide a personalized virtual training option that is just as good, if not better than training offered in person.

Virtual training isn’t going anywhere. Don’t get left behind. This is your opportunity to revolutionize customer training for your company. Let us help you get there.