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Do you provide technical training to your customers?
If you don’t, you should. By incorporating technical training techniques at various stages of the customer journey, you can inspire unprecedented satisfaction and loyalty in both customers and genuine excitement in prospects.
According to Thought Industries’ State of Customer Education 2024, organizations that invest in training experience a 56% improvement in customer onboarding processes and a 21% increase in customer lifetime value.
The benefits of technical training are many and varied, and this article explains how you can unlock them for your organization.
How Technical Training Enhances Onboarding and Implementation
You want onboarding to be as swift, smooth, and streamlined as possible. After all, the faster new users learn how your software works, the faster they can become satisfied, recurring customers. Offering technical training at multiple milestones along the customer journey goes a long way toward accomplishing this.
Ideally, by the time a prospect is ready to become a customer, they already have a good idea of how to use your software. Onboarding becomes less about teaching them the basics and more about helping them seamlessly deploy,implement, and become proficient in using your software. That means both higher product adoption and reduced time to value across the board.
How Technical Training Reduces Customer Support Costs
Approximately 69% of customers attempt to resolve their issues independently before contacting customer service. Imagine if those customers already had the necessary knowledge to troubleshoot successfully. That’s exactly what technical training enables.
If customers have deeper knowledge of your software and its inner workings, they’re far less likely to call your helpdesk about minor issues. Not only does this reduce support costs, but it also leaves your team free to focus on more complex cases.
How Technical Training Drives Seat Expansion
A technical training program can also promote license expansion by inspiring customers to give more employees access to your software and to adopt new features and services.
Imagine two customers who’ve both installed the same software. One was given access to -detailed technical training from the moment they first engaged with the vendor to the moment they finalized the sale. The other went through only a brief onboarding process.
Because they received such comprehensive training, the first customer has deep knowledge of the software’s functionality, features, and benefits. This means they’ll likely be much more willing to purchase more seats or adopt more value-added services. You can also use technical training as a sales tool in its own right, promoting new features, updates, and offers to your customers.
Lastly, technical training has the potential to create more product champions. These highly knowledgeable customers can serve as advocates for your software both within their own organization and with peers across their industry. In other words, these customers are not only expanding their own seat count, but also helping your company expand.
The Impact of Technical Training on Customer Retention
It’s no surprise that technical training and development has a positive impact on customer retention. A customer who knows how to get the most out of a product is going to be a great deal more satisfied than one who struggles to use basic features. And a customer who has access to ongoing technical education is much more likely to make a long-term commitment to the vendor that provides it.
Internal technical training programs also play a part in retention. The more your employees know about how your software works, the better they’ll be able to convey that knowledge to prospects and customers. And that’s something they must be able to do — there’s nothing more likely to sour a customer relationship than an account manager or support professional who has no idea how their own company’s product works.
Prepare for the Era of AI with Technical Training
Technical training is no longer a value-add or a nice-to-have. It’s becoming a cornerstone of every successful software company’s commercial strategy, both for customers and employees. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of artificial intelligence.
Generative AI (GenAI) has made the past few years some of the most disruptive in recent memory. But despite how much this revolutionary technology has already changed the world, many businesses aren’t yet using it to its full potential. Their people simply lack the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.
In Teaching Smarter: How to Provide Winning Technical Training for Generative AI, you’ll learn everything you need to know about training your employees to get the best out of GenAI. Also check out 5 Best Practices for Technical Training to get an idea of what to focus on when developing your program.
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