Customer Training 101: A Complete Guide for SaaS Companies

Picture this, your company just released a major product update with powerful new features that transform how customers manage their workflows. But despite your product's capabilities, you notice a concerning pattern of customers sticking to basic features.

Support tickets are piling up with questions about your new features, and your customer success team is conducting break-less and repetitive training sessions.

As SaaS tools grow increasingly sophisticated with features that revolve around AI, automation, and complex workflows, the gap between a product's potential value and its actual utilization widens.

This is where customer training becomes critical. Basic onboarding and documentation portals simply do not work and need a modern twist to drive scalable training programs that transform customers into power users.

In this blog, we’ll explore everything you need to know about customer training.

What is Customer Training?

Customer training is a strategic initiative that combines self-service and structured educational content, and expertise-driven guidance to help customers achieve their business objectives with your product. It moves beyond product education to focus on enabling customers to equip your product for their specific needs and goals.

For instance, when training users on a marketing automation platform, effective customer training teaches them to design sophisticated automation workflows based on industry best practices, leverage advanced segmentation strategies, and make data-driven decisions using analytics.

When customers use the platform to its fullest potential, they maximize the chances of getting a better ROI they might otherwise miss out on.

“ Customer Training is like teaching your friend how to play a new game so that they can enjoy it and play it correctly. You tell them to follow the path that would be better for them.” - Vivian Toledo, Head of Customer Success

Why Customer Training is Critical for Business Success

SaaS tools have become a necessity for operating a business. In 2024, medium-sized companies use around 103 SaaS tools on average, a 29% increase from 2023. Meanwhile, enterprise companies use around 158 SaaS tools on average.

If you are one of these tools, you must stand out in providing quality customer training or risk being replaced. When customers invest in your solution, they're not just buying software – they're buying the promise of better business outcomes.

Customers who don't know how to properly use your product will struggle to derive their desired outcome from it, no matter how intuitive your UI is or how well-documented your features are.

The situation becomes more complex as your product evolves. Every new feature or improvement you release represents an opportunity for your customers to achieve better results. However, if customers aren't properly trained on these updates, your product development investments don't translate into customer value.

Customer training provides your customers with everything they need to get started with your product immediately and realize the value of it as fast as possible. This sets the foundation that helps both your customers and you achieve your business goals.

Customer Training vs Customer Onboarding vs Customer Support: What’s the Difference?

While these three functions all aim to help customers succeed with your product, they each play distinct roles in the customer journey. Understanding these differences is crucial for building a comprehensive customer training strategy.

Here’s how these three functions differ across key aspects:

Let's take a CRM platform as an example to understand these differences better:

In customer training, you'd create structured programs teaching sales teams advanced pipeline optimization, and strategic use of automation rules to reduce the sales cycle.

For onboarding, the focus would be on importing the existing customer database, setting up basic sales stages, and creating standard reports.

Support would handle specific issues like fixing a broken integration or irresponsive automation triggers.

The Different Types of Customer Training Programs

Just as schools provide various learning formats - from libraries to classrooms to specialized courses, customer training programs come in different types. Customer training programs can be classified into: Help Centers, Virtual Instructor-led Training, On-demand Training, and Certification Programs.

Help Center

A help Center or knowledge base is like a well-organized, 24/7 library where customers can find answers to their questions independently.

What it includes: Being the place where customers go to solve issues, a help center contains content of all levels – from basic setup information and FAQs to advanced API documentation and use-case-driven information. These contents evolve with your product, ensuring users always have access to the latest information.

Contents inside a help center usually have different formats to cater to different customer preferences. These include:

• Basic text articles
• Product documentation (Interactive and non-interactive)
• Videos

Help centers are ideal for customers who:

• Value 24/7 self-service
• Need reference materials during and after implementation

Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT)

VILT is like online classes where expert instructors teach customers about various aspects of your product. VILT sessions are live learning experiences that help customers clarify all queries with experts on the spot.

What it includes: VILT sessions are usually tailored to specific user groups or use cases, enabling different customer segments to use your product more effectively. VILT is also great for teaching customers how to use the new features.

VILT is ideal for customers who:

• Need live, structured training for detailed learning.
• Value interactive learning and direct expert access
• Want customized training for specific workflows

To know more about VILTs and what it takes to run them, check out our podcast with Dan Braithwaite, Senior Director of Product Training at Mediaocean.

On-demand Training

On-demand Training is like scheduling a one-on-one tutoring session, providing personalized guidance when customers need it.

What it includes: These are custom training sessions conducted by Customer Success Managers, focused on specific needs or challenges. Sessions can range from product training to live problem-solving.

On-demand Training is ideal for:

• Need training on specific features or workflows
• Have unique use cases requiring personalized attention
• Are implementing new workflows

Certification Programs

Certification programs are like earning specialized diplomas that validate users' product expertise. A Learning Management System (LMS) software offers these structured certification courses.

What it includes: A certification program offers structured learning paths, quizzes, and final assessments. Programs often include different levels of certification, helping customers advance from basic users to master users.

Certification programs are ideal for customers who:

• Want to validate their teams' product expertise
• Value formal recognition of skills

Building a Comprehensive Program

While each type of training program serves specific needs, an effective customer training strategy typically incorporates all to varying degrees. This multi-angle approach ensures you can support customers with different learning styles, address varying levels of complexity, and provide consistent yet flexible learning experiences.

Benefits of Customer Training for Customers and Companies

For Customers

1. Product Mastery:

Customer training helps customers understand your product better and enables them to activate advanced usage. As customers learn how features interconnect and complement each other, they can build sophisticated workflows that address their complex business needs.

For instance, in marketing automation platforms, trained customers can design complex, multi-touch campaigns by understanding how automation rules and segmentation integrate to deliver personalized customer experiences.

2. Self-sufficiency

Trained customers develop the ability to solve problems and implement solutions independently. They understand product behavior well enough to troubleshoot issues, can identify the root causes of problems, and know where to find relevant documentation.

This independence reduces friction in daily usage and enables teams to implement new features or workflows without constant support. When issues arise, they can often resolve them through self-service resources, maintaining their productivity.

3. Increased Productivity

Trained users work more efficiently with your product, streamlining their daily operations. They know shortcuts, efficient workflows, and best practices that help them complete tasks faster.

This expertise eliminates time wasted on workarounds or inefficient processes, letting teams focus on their core work rather than figuring out how to use the tool.

For Companies

1. Increased Scalability

Customer training programs provide a sustainable foundation for long-term growth. By creating structured learning paths and self-service resources, you can maintain consistent customer success quality for your expanding customer base without necessarily needing to scale your team.

As your product evolves with new features and capabilities, your training infrastructure ensures that customers are trained at scale to increase the feature usage.

2. Reduced Support Burden

Well-trained customers significantly decrease support volume through two key mechanisms. First, they can resolve common issues independently using self-service resources. Second, their understanding of the product helps them prevent many potential problems through proper implementation.

When they do need support, their queries are more specific and easier to resolve because they understand product terminology and basic troubleshooting steps. This shift not only reduces support costs but also frees up your support team to focus on complex, high-value customer challenges that drive better outcomes.

3. Increased Product Advocacy

Trained customers are often highly satisfied, becoming loyal advocates for your product. In the B2B SaaS world, where purchase decisions often rely heavily on peer recommendations, these loyal advocates are invaluable.

Their positive word-of-mouth carries particular weight because it comes from a place of genuine success using the product. This can often influence buying decisions within their professional networks helping you reduce customer acquisition costs and shorten sales cycles.

Key Components of a Customer Training Program

A customer training program needs a few essential elements to work at its maximum efficiency. Understanding these elements will help you form a strong foundation for your customer training efforts. I’ve compiled four such essential elements, and let’s take a look at them.

Training Content

Your training content forms the basis for how you’re going to educate your customers. These contents can be divided into three basic formats: Help articles, step-by-step guides, and videos.

1. Help Articles:

Help articles form the backbone of your training content. They explain your product's features, workflows, and use cases in a clear, written format. They're particularly effective for detailed technical information and processes that users might need to reference repeatedly.

Help articles also serve as excellent troubleshooting resources, allowing users to quickly find solutions to common issues.

Users also turn to help articles when they want to understand the different nuances of features. For instance, when setting up complex configurations or using new features, well-written help articles provide the detailed information users need.

2. Step-by-step Guides:

Step-by-step guides (or product documentation) walk users through specific processes in your product, breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps. These guides come in two formats: traditional written guides and interactive guides.

Traditional step-by-step guides use screenshots and clear instructions to help users complete tasks. They're particularly useful for processes that need careful attention to detail or require users to understand each step of a workflow.

Interactive guides take this a step further. Here, instead of just reading about steps, users actively perform them with guidance like making customers click the correct button at each step. This makes learning more engaging and helps users retain information better as they're actually doing the tasks rather than just reading about them.

3. Videos:

Video content brings your product to life, showing how everything works in real time. The best part about videos is that they are dynamic and can be used for all sorts of purposes.

When a customer wants to learn how to use your email automation feature, a quick 3-minute video can show them exactly where to click and what settings to configure.

For more complex scenarios, workflow videos can walk through complete processes like setting up a multi-step automation sequence and creating advanced reporting dashboards out of these automation sequences. This helps you show the relationship between different parts of your product.

If you’re confused as to which type of content to go for while strategizing, look at your product. The more technical or higher the learning curve your product has, the more diverse your content needs to be. For simple-to-use products, videos and product documentation should be enough.

Training Team

While different customer training teams might prefer wearing different hats, understanding these roles helps you cover all essential training functions in your team.

Training Platforms and Tools

Just as different types of training programs serve different learning needs, various platforms and tools are essential for creating and delivering effective training. Let's explore the core technology stack that powers modern customer training:

1. Knowledge Base Platform:

Building on our earlier discussion of help centers, this platform hosts all your self-service content - from basic how-to guides to advanced technical documentation.

What sets a knowledge base apart is its ability to provide instant, searchable answers when customers need them. Unlike scheduled training sessions, it adapts to your customers' schedules and learning preferences.

A robust knowledge base platform should offer:

• An intuitive content organization that grows with your product
• Powerful search functionality that understands user intent
• Content feedback systems to measure article effectiveness
• Analytics to track what content users need most
• Version control to maintain content accuracy as your product evolves

2. Learning Management System (LMS):

An LMS is designed to create and manage structured learning experiences. It helps you provide systematic training paths with varying difficulties through courses and assessments.

It lets you create role-specific paths, ensuring relevant and quality training is given to different segments across your customer base.

An LMS platform should offer:

• Customizable learning paths for different user roles
• Progress tracking and certification management
• Assessment capabilities for knowledge validation
• User management features for enterprise customers
• Detailed analytics for tracking learning effectiveness

3. Video Authoring Tools:

Remember how we discussed video content bringing your product to life? A video authoring tool makes this possible. They help you create everything from quick feature demonstrations to comprehensive tutorial series.

They combine screen recording and editing features to create studio-quality training content that makes complex features easier to understand.

A modern video authoring tool contains features like:

• Voice-over options (both manual and AI-generated)
• Closed captioning for accessibility
• Analytics to understand viewer engagement
• Easy distribution to both the knowledge base and LMS

4. In-app Guidance Tools

An in-app guidance tool creates interactive walkthroughs within your product interface. It bridges the gap between training and actual product usage.

It reduces the friction with product usage and is an important part of customer onboarding where you want to minimize the time-to-value of customers.

These tools enhance the learning experience by:

• Creating interactive product tours for new users
• Providing contextual help exactly when needed
• Announcing and explaining new features
• Gathering real-time feedback on user experience

5. Product Analytics Tools

A product analytics tool provides insights into how customers interact with your product. It helps you to refine your training strategy by identifying which features need more focus and how training initiatives affect product adoption. This data-driven approach ensures your training program evolves proactively.

Key features of a product analytics tool:

• User behavior tracking
• Feature adoption metrics
• Customer segmentation capabilities
• Usage pattern analysis.

Training Analytics

Understanding the effectiveness of your customer training program starts with tracking the right metrics. While you might be tempted to track everything possible, focusing on key metrics from each training platform gives you actionable insights without data overload.

By measuring these metrics consistently, you can understand what's working, what needs improvement, and how your training program impacts customer success. Let's look at the essential metrics you should track from each platform in your training tech stack.

Impact on Customer Success:

1. Better Onboarding Journey Experience:

It measures how smoothly customers move through their initial product setup and onboarding phase. Onboarding marks the first interaction a customer has with your product and a customer training program lets you offer customers all the necessary and relevant resources to make the first impression as smooth as possible.

How to measure:

The onboarding journey experience can be measured through the completion of various key milestones like:

• In-app user guidance checklist completion
• Opening all of your onboarding email sequence
• Completing a specific task in your product
• Daily logins in the first week
• Increase in positive ratings of your onboarding resources in the knowledge hub

2. Decreased Time to Value (TTV):

TTV indicates the speed at which customers achieve their first meaningful outcomes with your product. These outcomes can differ with varying customer segments. So,  training is important to provide personalized paths to let customers implement key features and workflows instead of letting them figure things out through trial and error.

How to measure:

Define different value outcomes as events and track these events through your product analytics tool. Then, measure the time customers take to trigger this event after onboarding is completed.

3. Increased Product Adoption:

Product adoption shows you how deeply customers have integrated your product into their workflows. To reach this stage of product consumption, customers have to find value in it consistently by using all of the relevant features and workflows.

Customer training helps customers see this value through the timely delivery of personalized training content, without which customers might feel lost or not get the full value. Timely delivery also means that customers are not overwhelmed with information which can also drive them away from using your product.

How to measure:

( New Active Users / Total Signups ) X 100

4. Improved Customer Health Score:

It combines various customer metrics to gauge overall customer satisfaction, and their likelihood of retaining, churning, and upselling/cross-selling. Strong health scores often reflect effective training and support systems.

Customer training impacts multiple key success metrics used to measure customer health scores - From improved product usage and reduced support tickets to higher satisfaction scores and increased expansion rates.

How to measure:

Step 1: Select key metrics that indicate customer health. Common metrics include product usage frequency, customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and support ticket volume.

Step 2: Create a standardized scoring system by converting different metric ranges into consistent health scores. For instance, customers rating CSAT between "2" and "4" might receive a health score of 5.

Step 3: Calculate the final customer health score by averaging all individual health scores. Simply divide the sum of all health scores by the number of metrics tracked.

Provide World Class Customer Training for your Customers with Trainn

Creating an effective customer training program requires the right tools and platform. Trainn offers everything you need to build, deliver, and measure customer training programs that drive product adoption and customer success.

1. Create engaging customer training videos, interactive product documentation, and help articles – without design dependency.
2. Build a Knowledge Base and offer self-service support.
3. Launch a dedicated LMS Academy with personalized courses, quizzes, and certifications.
4. Use learner-level analytics to measure the performance of your customer training program.

Try out Trainn and all of its features completely free for the first 14 days. No credit card is required.