Churn.
This is a word that almost all SaaS companies dread. If you didn’t already know, the term ‘churn’ is used in SaaS circles to describe losing customers.
Depending on the business in consideration, there can be a number of factors behind customer churn. However, as many top industry articles note, one of the most pressing reasons behind customer churn is bad onboarding.
When we talk about onboarding for SaaS customers, the customer training initiative, which is usually aimed at helping the customer with smooth adoption of the SaaS solution, plays an influential role.
The training aspect of the customer onboarding process is the tool that helps customers make the journey from paying for your product to achieving ‘success’ with your product.
In this article, we will be discussing the steps SaaS businesses can follow to create a holistic and engaging training experience that reduces churn and improves the quality of their customer onboarding process.
Let us begin:
Create Training Content Thoughtfully
Unlike physical products, many SaaS products are complex and involve a significant learning curve. If this is the case, your training must reflect that with the training content.
Instead of text based PPT presentations, your training must utilise a combination of text, videos, audio lessons, and infographics to create an entertaining, engaging, and easy to consume training content. Not to forget, the use of multimedia can make it easier to explain (and understand) complex concepts.
With that said, creating content for training SaaS customers requires additional diligence. You must think about the possible support situations that may arise in the future, and address all such situations in your training. This is the only way to make your training truly impactful for your customers. It is also a good idea to add an element of storytelling to your training content.
To create such content, you can employ an elearning authoring tool that allows the creation of engaging and professional grade training content. To find the right authoring software for your needs, it is important to conduct an eLearning authoring tools comparison to find one that offers the features and abilities that are relevant to your specific use case scenario.
Don’t Just Distribute, Track The Results
Creating great training content is just the first step of the process of providing any kind of training. The next step is to master distribution. Thankfully, there are SaaS solutions designed to make your job easier.
Popularly known as learning management systems (LMS), these cloud based solutions allow businesses to store and distribute training content with efficiency. Learning management systems also come loaded with a variety of features designed to make your training experience more engaging.
However, one LMS feature that deserves a special mention is the ability to track learner progress. If done right, tracking learner progress can help you uncover incredible insights that can guide decisions that improve the effectiveness of your training program.
Besides this, with a LMS, you can also provide your customers with on-demand access to the training content even after they have completed the training.
The training material will contain the answers to most of the queries that may arise after the customer starts using your product. When this happens, they can simply look up the relevant information within the LMS, without having to request and wait for support.
This will not just make for a more positive customer experience, it will also take some stress off the shoulders of your support executives.
Communicate Benefits Effectively
This step is often overlooked by companies. However, unless you explain to your customer the importance of the training, along with the exact training outcomes they can expect after investing their time, you will not be able to engage them with your training.
On the other hand, a customer that understands how the training will benefit them and will enable them to make the most of the product they are purchasing will be more interested and invested during the training.
Pay Attention To Feedback
Feedback from your learners will enable you to understand how effectively your customers are able to use your product after going through the training.
Problems identified with this feedback will highlight issues in one of the following two areas:
- Your Product: Feedback may reveal that there are certain features of your product that can be designed better. Acting on this feedback usually leads to the roll out of a more user friendly version of your product, and a higher approval of the same among customers.
Think about how you would feel if you suggested a change in a SaaS product that you use and they actually acted on your suggestion. Delighted, right? You can expect a similar reaction from your happy customers.
With that said, the ultimate call to roll out new updates should be taken with utmost diligence.
- Your Training Experience: Feedback may also reveal areas where your training is falling short. It is extremely important to pay attention to this feedback because the objective of your training initiative is to create a delightful customer experience. If the customers are finding faults with the training experience itself, it is a pressing issue that must be addressed pronto.
Focus On Creating A Community
Developing a community around your SaaS product is perhaps the most effective marketing tactic you can employ. When done right, this community will not just communicate the credibility and utility of your product, but will also add an element of social learning to your customer training experience.
The community portal can act as a forum where users and trainers can discuss issues and troubleshooting steps.
Another hidden benefit of creating a community is that the association with the community will become an additional reason for customers to stick to your product, further reducing churn.
Conclusion
The importance of customer training in reducing churn and retaining customers is not unknown to any SaaS business. However, many businesses fail to properly implement a training program that actually helps consumers achieve ‘success’ with their product. We hope that the information shared in this article will help you make positive changes to your customer training and onboarding process.
