Customer Success refers to the efforts, strategies, and methodologies that business employ to help ensure their customers achieve their desired results in using its products or services. To be effective, Customer Success strategies should always focus on relationship management and seek to align company and client goals directed toward mutually beneficial outcomes. Executed properly, Customer Success programs usually lead to a reduction in customer churn, along with an increase in upsell opportunities.
Customer Success v. Customer Service
Unfortunately, many businesses confuse the concept of Customer Success with Customer Service. While Customer Service is, of course, essential, it tends to be reactive in nature and is designed to deal with customer issues after they have arisen. In contrast, Customer Success refers to proactive efforts and programs that help ensure your customers are deriving the greatest possible value from your products and services while optimizing their overall experience with your brand. The additional value that Customer Success programs can bring is in helping your organization to better understand and improve the overall Customer Experience.
eLearning for Customer Training and Success
eLearning refers to the use of electronic technologies (the Internet, primarily) to drive and support all types of learning programs, including training-based Customer Success programs. In years past, organizations that wanted to implement customer training programs relied heavily on in-person, classroom-based training sessions. But more recently, as cloud-based technologies have continued to evolve, eLearning has emerged as the preferred approach to the training and education aspect of a Customer Success program.
In addition to making customer training more convenient and flexible, eLearning eliminates many of the costs associated with classroom-based training, such as travel, venue and on-site instructor fees, catering, and the printing and distribution of training materials.
Any company that is exploring the use of eLearning for customer training can expect the following benefits:
Increased Revenue
Offering client training can help to protect the company revenues by minimizing customer churn and increasing your opportunities for product upselling and cross-selling. In addition, effective customer training can help create new sales opportunities through happy customers and word-of-mouth advertising.
Improved Retention
Providing your clients with the knowledge and training they need to fully leverage your product or service helps to streamline product adoption and ensures they will derive the greatest possible value. This will have a direct and positive impact on your ability to retain the customer.
Enhanced Collaboration
Including customer training as an element of your Customer Success program improved communication between your company and its clients and creates a platform for communication regarding product features, benefits, and opportunities for potential enhancements. This communication can also lead to ideas that create new markets and revenue streams for your company.
Learning Management Systems for Customer Training and Success Programs
The core technology that supports all types of eLearning programs, including customer training, is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. An LMS is the application that is used to build, deliver, manage, and track eLearning-based customer training programs. While some companies choose to “stand up” an LMS on their own servers (self-hosted) most companies today choose to work with a third-party cloud LMS provider to access the features and capacity they need.
One of the primary features an LMS can provide for customer training is a detailed and robust analytics engine. The ongoing capture and review of this data can help your Customer Success team understand the level of engagement you are getting from your customer base and determine the level to which your clients understand your products and services and leverage them to their full value.
LMS Portals for Customer Success Analytics and Training
LMS Portals provides our clients and partners with a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows you to launch and manage multiple, private eLearning environments (portals) to support customer training and success programs. Each portal you launch includes its own analytics engine to gauge customer engagement, progress, and success. You can further leverage the platform to conduct customer surveys and drive communication and collaboration.
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