Six Ways Measure the Success of Customer Training
Key takeaways:
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Customer Experience (CX) experts know that educated customers are more likely to renew subscriptions, make repeat purchases, and become vocal brand advocates. They also know that comprehensive, targeted customer training makes a huge impact on customer sentiment, increasing customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores by 26.2%.
At Litmos, we’re often asked how to tell whether customer training programs are working. Leaders in CX, L&D, Operations, and Professional Services, are also keen to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of customer training to key decision makers (especially when training budgets are on the line).
The truth is that monitoring completion rates isn’t enough to illustrate the business impact of customer education (CE). To measure the value of customer training, your team needs to identify and prioritize training Key Progress Indicators (KPIs) that align with overall business goals. Choosing the right KPIs to track for your customer training program can help you measure both learner progress and the impact of customer training on critical business objectives.
In this article, we’ll explore which KPIs best demonstrate the business value of your customer training. We’ll also outline which tools are most helpful for measuring customer training success within your Learning Management System (LMS). Want a play-by-play guide to building better customer education programs? Check out the Litmos Customer Training Playbook!
Defining customer training success
What does success truly look like when it comes to training customers? It’s a question that many businesses grapple with, especially as they debate how to allocate L&D and CX budgets. Before investing significant resources into customer training and customer education programs, leaders across your organization need to identify which business goals their training will address, and which training metrics reflect the progress towards those goals.
It’s tempting to highlight course completion rates to measure the success of customer training. But it takes more than this superficial metric to demonstrate the business impact of customer education and build a business for training buy-in.
Align customer training KPIs with business goals
To accurately assess the effectiveness of customer training, you have to monitor the KPIs that most critically impact your business goals. Let’s unpack which KPIs matter most when monitoring and demonstrating the success of your customer training:
1. Measure ROI to demonstrate the value of customer training
This one is popular for a reason. Any business function looking to demonstrate its value will need to understand how the cost of investing in that function compares to the revenue it produces. Measuring and monitoring the ROI of your customer training initiatives will ensure that leadership understands the business impact of customer education.
2. Monitor support ticket volume to predict customer churn
If your business goal is to lower customer churn, your company needs to monitor customer support ticket volume. A well-designed customer training program should lead to a decrease in the number of support tickets, as customers become more adept at using your product and less likely to rely on your company’s customer support representatives. By tracking how many support requests are made before and after training, you can see whether the cost of support has decreased, and gauge overall customer self-sufficiency. This data can be a powerful indicator of whether your training helps customers to solve their own issues.
3. Monitor CSAT and Net Promoter Scores to improve customer loyalty
If your business wants to increase customer retention, word-of-mouth referrals, and upsell opportunities, you need customers loyal enough to become vocal brand advocates. This starts with customer education. The best way to see whether your customer education program has built trust and loyalty with your customer base, is to gather quantifiable customer feedback through Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. This will help your company rate customer satisfaction and the likelihood of customers recommending your business to others, respectively. Monitoring customer sentiment with CSAT and NPS surveys before and after customer training can help your team link its training efforts to better customer satisfaction and increased customer referral rates.
4. Measure product adoption to shape your road map
If your business wants to fine-tune its product road map or improve product or feature adoption, keep an eye on product usage KPIs before and after customer training. By monitoring how frequently and in what manner customers engage with specific product features (and the training focused on those features), you can assess if your customer training initiatives promote feature adoption or increased product use. This data can also help product teams identify underutilized features, and address gaps that training may be able to address.
5. Measure customer churn to understand retention
If your business wants to reduce customer churn, it’s important to measure churn rates before and after the launch of customer training initiatives. This will provide leadership with a comprehensive view of training’s impact on customer retention. When churn goes down post-training, that may indicate that your customer training program cultivates customer loyalty.
6. Measure TTV to predict recurring revenue
If your business wants to increase recurring revenue through customer training, Time to Value (TTV) is a key performance indicator that must be measured. This KPI reflects how long it takes customers to achieve a specific goal or utilize a new feature. When comparing TTV before and after the launch of a customer education program, a decrease in TTV indicates that your training has helped customers reduce the time it takes to confidently and efficiently use your product. This points to training’s role in building a level of customer trust that can lead to recurring revenue and growth.
Learning measurement challenges
Measuring the value of customer training can be challenging, but it’s not insurmountable. One of the primary hurdles is the lack of clear, actionable metrics that directly link training outcomes to business performance. To overcome this, you need to identify specific customer behaviors that your team can track post-training. The list of KPIs above can be used to monitor certain trends like how many customers use new features, how many support tickets your CX team receives in a given period, or how long it takes for the average customer to apply a newly learned skill. These KPIs can provide concrete insights into how your training impacts both customer success and your business outcomes.
Customer feedback is another invaluable tool for refining customer training programs and improving engagement. Gathering learner feedback through the CSAT and NPS surveys mentioned above is a great way to quantify the impact of customer training. However, qualitative feedback such as open-ended survey questions, interviews, and focus groups can also provide important insights about your customer training, and its impact on your customer base.
Tools for measuring customer training
One of the most powerful tools in your customer education arsenal is your LMS. Using your LMS for customer training is an efficient and affordable way to create, deliver, and measure e-learning beyond your employee base. Known for its intuitive interface and seamless integrations, Litmos is a flexible, scalable, and customizable solution that everyone in your organization can easily leverage to drive external training revenue.
To align business and learning goals, your organization needs to take a holistic approach to customer training by ensuring visibility into customer training to every stakeholder who needs it: from sales and CX teams, to product and engineering leaders. Using your LMS cross-functionally can do this, while highlighting customer priorities and pain points that may otherwise go unnoticed by non-customer facing functions in your organization.
Using an LMS for customer training
Whether through customizable reports and real-time analytics dashboards, global visualizations, or SSO capabilities, using the right mix of LMS tools and features can surface customer training insights that will help your team identify trends, uncover opportunities, and find areas for improvement, leading to more effective and impactful customer training initiatives. The following LMS features and capabilities can streamline customer training:
1. Customizable and automated reporting
Get actionable customer training insights from your LMS with Litmos reporting and analytics features. Pre-formatted and customizable reports are available on demand through Litmos, and the LMS also allows admins to schedule report delivery for consistent, automatic training progress updates. Managers and admins customize dashboard widgets to view real-time learner data, allowing for easy and instant access to real-time learner data, so that timely issues can be addressed and trainers can adapt quickly to meet the needs of different customers.
2. Global visualizations
Knowing where your learners are and how they learn can help you make your training more engaging and effective. World map visualizations show Litmos admins and managers where users are logging in from, popular learning times, and platform usage patterns. This functionality is particularly helpful for organizations with a geographically dispersed customer base.
3. Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities
To ensure a seamless experience with your LMS, Litmos offers single-sign on (SSO) capabilities that give users access to critical learning analytics and reporting tools without the need for separate login credentials. Reducing login friction with SSO allows administrators, managers, and learners to focus on learning goals, instead of logistical or technical hiccups.
Impactful customer training starts with aligned goals
Creating effective and high-value customer education initiatives starts with aligning training and business goals. Working cross-functionally to identify these goals is a critical first step can’t be skipped, and requires collaboration and regular communication with key stakeholders across the enterprise.
Once you know how your training goals can contribute to overarching business objectives, you’ll have a clear picture of what to measure, whether its customer retention, churn, TTV, customer sentiment, or product adoption. This strategic alignment makes measuring success more efficient, while giving your team the data they need to advocate for continued investment in customer education.
For more strategic customer education insights, tips for creating a frictionless customer training experience, and best practices for measuring success, download the Litmos Customer Training Playbook. This valuable resource is built to help leaders in CX, L&D, Operations, and Professional Services, drive real business results with effective customer training. Download your free copy today!
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