Ensuring customer happiness is critical for any business. Customer success is a relatively new business strategy through which companies achieve their goals by providing the greatest possible experience for their clients and ensuring they receive the expected benefits from your company and its offerings. As more and more businesses move to subscription-based offerings, it becomes increasingly critical for businesses to offer programs that support their clients after they have made a purchase in order to protect your revenue streams and enjoy the powerful benefits of referrals and client testimonials.
The Importance of Customer Success for Businesses
The success of most every business is tied to the success of their customers and the value those organizations believe they are deriving from your offerings. When customers succeed (derive the expected value) with your product, they will continue to use it, thus creating larger and more stable revenue streams for your business. An effective customer success program combines people, processes, and technology. And it captures critical data to track results and allow for informed decisions regarding your program.
Unlike customer service and account management programs, which are reactive in nature, customer success takes a proactive approach to ensure customer happiness and create value in the customer-vendor relationship. It identifies problems, as well as opportunities, through effective interactions to gain an understanding of the customer experience and support users on their journey with your products. Each customer success team member focuses on the clients’ experience with your organization to ensure the greatest chance for a long-term mutually beneficial relationship.
The Role of Training in Customer Success
One of the primary components of a customer success program is in offering comprehensive training programs. These programs are designed to ensure that your customers have access to the information they will need to derive the greatest possible value from your company’s offerings and make the most of their investment.
These days, customer training is a branch of online learning, or “eLearning” and falls under (what is increasingly referred to as) the extended enterprise. Customer training program are comprised of content and courses designed to help users as they work with your products. Customer training is particularly valuable for organizations that sell products that have any amount of complexity or for products that may provide “hidden value” that users need to know about.
Learning Management System for Customer Training and Success
The core technology that supports any type of eLearning program, including customer training, is a learning management system, or “LMS”. An LMS is a software application that is used to build, deliver, and track eLearning programs.
LMS technology is not new to the business world as it has been historically used internally for employee training. However, two relatively recent developments in LMS delivery and architecture have made it well-suited for customer training and success programs.
Cloud-Based Delivery
While some companies choose to “stand up” their own LMS on-premises (self-hosted), they tend to be larger organizations that have the resources (both financial and labor) to support this approach.
A cloud-based LMS eliminates the need for a large, up-front capital investment as the LMS infrastructure is provided and supported by a third-party vendor. This approach allows you to get up-and-running quickly and access the features and capacity you need on a subscription basis.
Multi-Tenant Architecture
A relatively new offering in the LMS arena is the availability of multi-tenant architecture. While a single tenant architecture uses dedicated software and hardware resources for one training audience, a multi-tenant LMS allows you to “spin up” a customized instance of the application for each of your clients. This allows for a private, branded training experience for each customer while isolating supporting LMS resources to that customer only.
LMS Portals for Customer Success and Training
LMS Portals offers a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows our clients and partners to launch private eLearning environments (portals) for each of their unique training audiences, on-demand. Using our platform, you can quickly and easily “spin up” the eLearning environments to support each of your customers in order to offer them a private, branded online learning experience. And each portal offers its own user onboarding system, messaging tools, analytics engine, and more.
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