The Vanguard and the Canary

[The New Role of Training in the Subscription Economy]

Subscription Business Customer Success organizations are always looking for meaningful ways to regularly interact with their customers. To take a pulse, to get a feel, to look for early signs of churn, renewal, and upsell. Typically this is done by a CSM with a phone call, a survey, or an invite to an event.

Keeping your finger on the pulse of the customer doesn't have to be annoying - it can be natural, beneficial and even welcomed by the customer.

But there is a more natural way to interact with the customer in an on-going meaningful way that also provides value to the customer while keeping a finger constantly on that pulse; Training. Not the usual bulky training courses one might see or even expect during the initial stages of the relationship – implementation, on-boarding, etc. – but rather, after all this, when the customer is up to speed and functioning as normal. This is when training can produce lead measures of churn/renewal as well as upsell opportunities. How? Design it that way!

You’ve got to start with the data you want then work back toward the customer experience to drive the behavior to produce it – not the other way around.

Start by knowing your customers. By this I mean profiles and personas. Most companies spend significant time and money defining, understanding and learning the profiles and personas of potential customers but those profiles and personas are not the day-to-day users of your product. They are the decision makers and check writers. And in a subscription model where nurturing the customer is key to renewal and renewals are paramount, you have to figure out each profile and at least few personas of your day-to-day customer users. From these profiles and personas design the on-going training content such as feature releases (not the entire release), underused features, interesting topics, etc. – to target and be immediately relevant to individual profiles, easily consumable (accessible, obvious, attainable), and incent and drive the consumption (gamification, tangible rewards, pings, etc.).

Drive the behavior of consuming training to drive the behavior of using your product/feature. Enlist your Marketing team to help with the former.

You must also design or configure your Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver training in this granular way, support driving behavior (drive the behavior of consuming training to drive the behavior of using your product/feature), and extract meaningful, predictive, and actionable metrics.  For example, CompanyXYZ has been our customer for a few years and in that time we have been regularly assigning small 3-9 minute training modules to the various profiles within CompanyXYZ and they have been regularly consuming them. If there is a sudden drop off in training consumption by a particular profile, Finance Users for example, this drop off is a very early warning that something might be wrong. How so?

If behavior changes, it means something. 

Because, while CompanyXYZ continues to use our product – let’s say they need to – the Finance team (the primary owners of our product) may have decided that they want to look for a replacement. And in a relationship, one of the earliest indicators of leaving is divesting one’s time. In this case, the attitude of the Finance Users might be “Stop investing time learning a system that I likely will not be using in 6 months.” By the same token, if the Finance Users of CompanyXYZ are suddenly consuming a small training module on a feature they do not currently have, this may be an early indicator of an upsell opportunity. Further, if the Reporting Users across all customer companies consumed and gave high ratings to the “New Reporting Feature” training module but there is no indication of the new feature actually being used, that is an early indicator to the Product and Marketing teams that something is amiss and possibly warrants a call-to-action for CSMs or Support.

The lead measures and indicators are endless - design for them.

The indicators are endless. With a little creativity, forethought in design, and a bit of help from Marketing (on the “driving behavior” side), training can serve not only as the Vanguard of Customer Success but as its Canary as well.