marketing-color-colors-wheel.jpgWe recently released an eBook, “How to Create a Customer Training Strategy,” where we shared some of our recommendations and best practices to create a successful customer training strategy. In this post, we will be discussing the first two steps: recognizing the need for training in the context of your organization and evaluating how you can meet those needs.

It’s hard to create a customer training course if you don’t fully understand its necessity in the context of your organization. If you are unsure of the exact purpose and value of your training course, odds are, your customers won’t perceive value in it either.

In order to gain a clear picture of your organization’s specific customer training needs, try talking to several different departments within your organization. Collect as much information as you can about internal training needs and expectations, and use that as part of the groundwork for your strategy.

Once you have figured out the internal needs for customer training, it’s time to consider the external needs. In other words, what are the customers interested in learning? What are the gaps in knowledge that your training should fill? It’s a waste of resources to create a training course about a topic that most of your customers already understand, so do your research and find out exactly which product adoption issues customers are having most often. Use that knowledge to create a training course tailored to your customer’s unique needs, blending with it the information you collected about your company’s training expectations. Together, those pools of information will be a solid foundation for you to build your training strategy.

It’s also important that customer training strategists understand the roads available to them to meet their training goals. If you identified a specific need that your training should fulfill, then your next step is to figure out exactly how to get there.

Here are some questions to consider:

  • What technology do you need to accomplish these goals?
  • Will you need an LMS, Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT), or a webinar platform?
  • How much is it going to cost?
  • How much staff-power will you need to make it happen?
  • Does your organization have the resources to successfully meet the needs of the launch?
  • Does your organization have the resources (or a point-person) to maintain and update the course after the initial launch?

Want to learn more about how to create a customer training strategy? Download the full ebook for free!

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