Customers and internal teams all agree, your Customer Education courses are great. But why aren’t customers buying? Likely, they bought just a few seats with their initial purchase or think they know enough to implement and use your product without any training.
In the world of cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) is commonplace. SaaS is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is centrally hosted and licensed on a subscription basis. SaaS Options are now available for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), desktop as a service (DaaS), and many others, to run your business.
What can Customer Education borrow from the SaaS model to better enable customers?
While these “as a service” offerings provide value over time, the current state of Customer Education is mostly event-based. The training model is built around the initial software deployment, and most people consider Customer Education only as a class they take after Professional Services finishes their implementation. However, this approach is no longer relevant with SaaS software.
The value of software depends on people using it, every day across the customer lifecycle. While the initial team might be trained with the software rollout, what happens when there is turnover? How do users learn ongoing new features? As your product evolves, are customers using the new features? Do you give later users as much attention as the initial group? These are critical gasps that need to be addressed.
Enter Training as a Service (TaaS). TaaS sustains product value over time, by enabling our customers throughout their lifecycle, with self-paced and/or instructor led training offerings. Providing ongoing training updates maintains productivity and best practices. Our industry shows that well-trained customers are are 10 - 20% more likely to renew and buy two to four times more software. See my Five Ways Customer Education Impacts Your Bottom Line blog for more details. TaaS allows all users to be well-trained, by accessing the content they need when they need it, and also helps new team members quickly ramp up.
Let’s see how TaaS helps your customers gain better value from your software.
Your customers have high turnover on their teams. In some industries, high turnover is an ongoing challenge, which means that software adoption and value decrease over time. TaaS guarantees that new team members continue to be successful with your software. ServiceRocket provides an instructor-led subscription, which is ideal for large, global, enterprise customers. Instructor Led Training is important when rolling out enterprise-wide tools like Confluence, JIRA, and Workplace. ServiceRocket’s TaaS solution includes weekly live online classes at the same time for the same customer. Classes are small and interactive, and focus on the specific customer’s implementation. As the new systems and processes roll out across global teams, users are quickly ramped up with the perpetual classes. TaaS is also great for enabling up your large system integrators.
Your customers are smart and can figure it out on their own. When I was at Jaspersoft, I heard this all the time; maybe this is more prevalent in the open source arena. Yet, even smart users benefit from learning best practices and key product functionality. Survey results by IDC show that well-trained teams are more successful on their IT projects. "Without doubt, well-trained teams improve IT performance." The IDC study goes on to indicate, “Projects that met most or all of their objectives provided each team member with 40% more training than projects that failed or only partly succeeded.” See the factors impacting project success blow.
Source: IDC Report
Gartner Research identified in its study, The Justification of IT Training, that “companies spending less than 13 percent of their ERP project costs on training are three times more likely to fall short of their business and project goals than organizations spending 17 percent or more.”
Gartner also estimated in the same research that each hour of effective training is worth five hours to the employing organization. This is attributed to well-trained users reaching the required skill level in a quarter of the time, needing less support from peers and help desks, and spending less time correcting errors.
We owe it to our customers to provide Training as a Service to sustain their productivity across their lifecycle. Stay tuned for my next blog on Why Training as a Service is Good for Your Company.
Have you implemented a TaaS solution? I’d love to hear how it’s going.
Need help implementing a TaaS solution? Springboard Solutions is here to guide your journey.
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