Virtual training

The Secret to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences With Google Cloud

liran

Sep 10, 2021 - 4 min read

For companies that need to demo software or provide customer education through training environments, using platforms like Google Cloud Labs is an attractive option. With a Google Cloud sandbox environment, you get access to a scalable platform where your customers can log in remotely and experience your company’s software.

However, despite the many benefits of using GCP labs as the foundation for your customer education strategy, it does not provide you with a complete solution. You will still need to invest heavily in your customer sales cloud demo or training environment. Building this kind of platform in Google Cloud Labs is not necessarily the easiest project.

The challenge of creating virtual experiences in public clouds

Building a customer education or sales environment in a public cloud is a challenging process. You cannot simply spin up an environment in the Google Cloud Lab platform and invite your customers. Instead, you will need to build much of the environment from the ground up – requiring in-depth knowledge of how to use the Google Cloud Sandbox and infrastructure.

Think about it like building a house.

A platform like Google Cloud Labs provides you with the land on which you can build your home. That is a good start, but you still need to dig the foundations, source the materials, and put up the walls yourself. If you do this on your own, you will need to carry out the following:

• A house needs a strong and sturdy set of foundations on which to build. If this isn’t done correctly, you are going to come into trouble sooner rather than later. Likewise, you need to design the architecture of your training environment from scratch.

• A house is ultimately a place to live in rather than just walls and a roof. You need to have all the necessary skills in construction, plumbing, electrics, and interior design if your house is going to be livable. Likewise, if your training environment is going to help you achieve your training objectives, then you will need to build a whole host of features and functionality yourself (from instructor tools such as over-the-shoulder-view, or interactive functionality like in-app video conferencing, class chat, and so on).

• Then there’s security. Are you building a private home or a public free-for-all? Can anyone walk in and stay the night? You don’t just need doors but a way to control who can walk in, settle down on the couch, and make themselves at home. For your training environment, you need to design, implement, and maintain security and access controls (defining who can and cannot enter the environment, what they can do and how long they can use it for).

What is more, if you build a virtual experience in the public cloud yourself, you will need to adapt to the ever-changing nature of these platforms. An update to Google Cloud Labs could break your virtual experience or require a heavy rework.

You need more than “just” infrastructure

If you are hoping to deliver customer education and sales demos for your software over the cloud, you need access to more than ‘just’ the underlying infrastructure that the public cloud offers. With a solution like CloudShare, you not only get access to the public cloud infrastructure, but you also get a template to deploy your training or sales cloud demo environment.

Turning back to our analogy of building a home, if GCP labs are like the land, a solution like CloudShare is like a pre-fab house that is ready for you to use and modify as you need. Rather than building the house yourself, you get an environment which is 90% ready for you to deliver your training or sales demos.

Using CloudShare to build your customer education and sales environments in the cloud makes the process a lot more straightforward by:

• Saving you time

Building your virtual experiences on the Google Cloud is perfectly possible. However, it will take your engineers many weeks to design and build the environment. Is that really the best use of your resources?

• Providing out-of-the-box functionality dedicated for training success 

Although your internal teams could probably build a customer experience environment in the Google Cloud, they may not be experts in creating this kind of functionality. By using an out-of-the-box template for customer experiences like CloudShare, you get an environment of exceptional quality right away.

• Making it easy to use

CloudShare’s virtual experience environments in the Google Cloud are easy to use and your sales team and instructors do not need extensive technical skills to create sophisticated training or sales environments.

• Saving costs on your Google Cloud licenses

With CloudShare, you do not need to replace your existing Google Cloud Labs license. We are able to build our template “homes” on your existing “land” without any additional licensing cost from Google.

• Maintaining a platform that is secure, stable, and always up to date

Because we provide virtual experiences across most major public clouds (GCP, Azure, AWS), we invest heavily in ensuring that our platform is up to date and will not be disrupted by any changes in Google Cloud Labs infrastructure.

Keep learning: How does a cloud demo work?

A winning recipe: Combine GCP’s exceptional scale, security and flexibility with CloudShare’s customer experiences 

Google Cloud Labs provide so many benefits to businesses that wish to demonstrate their products or offer customer training online. Using Google Cloud gives you exceptional scale, security and flexibility. However, the infrastructure provided by Google does not, on its own, offer you a comprehensive training platform.

And that is where CloudShare’s virtual experience platform for training and sales cloud demo helps. Without needing to replace your existing Google Cloud licenses, you get access to a fully-featured training and sales demo environment that is easy to use and adapted to your business.

To learn how CloudShare lets you deliver exceptional virtual experiences, read about the solution or request a demo today.