Customer training should be a cornerstone of your company’s go-to-market strategy. You need to make certain that prospects understand not only how to use your software, but also how to gain value from it. Your software’s adoption and renewal rates both depend on it — as does long-term revenue.
But strategy alone is only part of a successful customer training plan. You also need a way to measure and monitor your training efforts. Let’s talk about what’s involved in customer training analytics — starting with a brief deep dive on why they’re important.
The Value of Analytics for Customer Training Programs
Measure, monitor, optimize. You’ll often see this advice topping any list of customer training best practices, and with very good reason. SaaS customer training is entirely data-driven. Without analytics, you’re essentially flying blind.
You’ll have no way of measuring the impact of your customer training program, nor will you be able to demonstrate its value to leadership. Moreover, you’ll miss out on a number of invaluable insights about the preferences, behavior and needs of your customers. These are insights that can not only help you generate more revenue, but also create more compelling marketing collateral, as well.
Other benefits of customer training analytics include:
- Eliminating gaps or bottlenecks in your onboarding process.
- Identifying training materials that don’t work, and determining why.
- Ensuring your products keep pace with evolving customer needs and preferences.
- Finding opportunities to streamline or optimize your customer training.
- Notifying your sales and customer success teams about potential advocates as well as customers amenable to upselling or cross-selling.
Key Metrics for Evaluating Online Customer Training
As a software company, your training (presumably) takes place entirely within a virtual environment. As a result, there are scores of different metrics and KPIs your organization can potentially track as part of its customer training efforts. Which ones you track depend largely on your industry and use case.
With that said, there are some metrics which are valuable no matter what your software does.
- Customer Satisfaction lets you determine if there are significant usability or design issues with your customer training. Net Promoter Score serves a similar purpose.
- Retention and Churn can help demonstrate the impact of your customer training strategy alongside customer acquisition cost.
- Usage Details and Trends gives you a clear idea of how people engage with your training, including bottlenecks and quit points.
- Completion rate shows you how many people go through your full onboarding process from beginning to end.
- Support tickets allow you to determine how effectively your training onboards customers — a large number of tickets could indicate that you aren’t giving people enough guidance.
- Customer demographics help you refine your understanding of your software’s target audience.
Best Practices for Measuring Customer Training Effectiveness
Now that you have a general idea of what metrics you should track, let’s talk about how you should track them. Some of our recommended best practices for customer training analytics include:
- Make sure your training program is built on a clearly-defined goal, and that all metrics in some way allow you to measure progress towards that goal.
- Monitor and assess your training in real-time, continuously adapting and improving it based on what you learn.
- Allow training participants to submit feedback on your program directly to your team. This not only helps you identify problems with your training program, but may also improve activation and adoption by showing prospects you’ll actually listen to them.
- Where possible, leverage training analytics to provide participants with insights on their progress and areas where they can still improve.
What Tools Should You Use to Measure Your Customer Training?
Some of the top vendors for customer training analytics include:
- Absorb: This powerful learning management system not only features robust analytics functionality, but also allows a company to deploy intuitive, personalized and comprehensive learning portals for customers and prospects.
- Docebo: Docebo’s AI-driven Learn platform combines analytics with a comprehensive portfolio of modern software training products, including Learning Impact — a powerful content management tool with built-in reporting and analytics functionality.
- FullStory: With FullStory, a business can establish a single source of truth for user experience analytics. Their platform, which is focused exclusively on the onboarding process, integrates with the majority of training solutions on the market.
- Heap: Product activation — also known as the “aha!” moment at which users truly engage with your software — is incredibly important. Heap helps you understand not only when this moment happens, but also why.
- CloudShare: Last but certainly not least, there’s CloudShare. As one of the world’s top product experience vendors, our platform offers an incredibly advanced selection of analytics tools for tracking both resource usage and customer behavior. It also integrates readily with most learning management systems, providing you with even more options for assessing, tweaking and optimizing your training.
Don’t just take our word for it though when you can book a demo and see for yourself what CloudShare can do.
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