You may have the best customer training program in the world – but is it costing you money or making you money? Profitability is becoming an increasingly important part of customer education, with many organizations planning to grow and monetize their programs this year. Below, we will explore how the right customer training software will help you boost your profitability and make the leap from your customer education being a cost center to a profit center.
Managing training as a business with the right customer training software
When you choose to monetize your training, you are not just running a training program, but instead running a business by turning it into a profit center. Your customers want to know that they are getting the maximum value from your products and services, and your role is to help them achieve this – but more and more organizations are understanding the importance of monetizing these programs.
With the right customer training software in place, you can easily make the switch to monetizing your training. In fact, while 43% of organizations currently monetize their training content, a further 22% plan to start within the next year, demonstrating the growing interest in high-quality, well-organized customer education programs that maximize profitability.
Moving customer training from a cost center to a profit center
Many organizations offering customer training programs are seen as cost centers. They may offer this training for free or below cost price – and while this is very noble, it doesn’t always make business sense. Instead of pouring budget into customer training, today’s businesses are realizing that they can design profitable programs, which benefits your organization.
Monetizing customer education programs isn’t as complicated as it might initially sound. Corporate customers are not price sensitive, and will pay a premium for the benefit of upskilling their people without having to create training content from scratch.
Also, you are providing training not just to individuals, but to entire departments (such as the sales team or the HR team), or even entire organizations. You also know your audience and what they need to know about your products, so you can tailor your training to their exact needs and be certain that they are relevant to your entire customer base. This gives you a captive audience of learners who already use your products and would benefit from your customer training.
Using customer training software, such as a Training Management System, to maximize profitability
More than 60% of organizations offering customer education have increased their investment in these programs in the last year. A Training Management System (TMS) such as Training Orchestra is the perfect customer training software for optimizing your investment and maximizing the profitability of your program. A TMS integrates with your existing learning technologies such as the Learning Management System (LMS) to take care of your training scheduling, resource management and instructor collaboration, which can become very complex very quickly when it comes to managing customer training.
Training Orchestra allows you to manage your classroom or virtual classroom customer training sessions and assign resources, trainers and venues for easy scheduling. In addition, you can manage your training budget and keep an eye on profitability across your entire program for more control over costs, as well as the ability to spot which sessions are proving the most profitable so you know where to invest your budget and efforts.
How to manage public and private courses
When you’re setting up your customer education program, you can choose between public or private courses (or both). Public courses have open enrollment, allowing any of your customers to register and learn alongside other attendees. The cost per person for public courses will usually be lower to reflect the fact that it isn’t tailored to their specific needs, but it allows you to train multiple customers simultaneously to maximize efficiency.
For more specialist training, you may also wish to offer private courses. Often, an organization will pay a flat fee for a set number of attendees, who will be the only people at the training session. Private courses can be customized to their specific needs, and the group size will often be smaller, ensuring that each attendee receives more attention from the trainer or presenter.
Managing costs and driving profitability
A must-have for your customer training software is the ability to track and manage your costs and budget. You may wish to break this down in a number of ways, such as by session, by customer or even by trainer. For example, with the right customer training software, you may find that certain presenters lead more profitable sessions, which can help you with future scheduling.
The user-friendly, color-coded Training Orchestra user interface gives you an at-a-glance overview of your profitability across your entire customer training program, helping you decide where to invest your precious training budget to maximize revenue and profitability. Unpopular courses can be discontinued or redesigned, while you can choose to schedule more of your most profitable courses to optimize your monetization opportunities.
Solving complexities
A Training Management System is the ideal customer training software for solving the complexities of customer education. For instance, Training Orchestra’s smart training scheduling system spots errors and clashes immediately, ensuring you can manage multiple complex streams of training sessions with no issues for best-practice customer training.
Additionally, it can be especially challenging to find the right trainers and resources for your customer training sessions. Training Orchestra’s filtering system ensures that you can quickly pinpoint the most appropriate trainer with the right skills and availability to present each session, ensuring you maximize customer satisfaction rates and keep customers coming back for more training.
Measuring profitability with your customer training software
Just 57% of organizations measure the impact of their customer education – so what about the other 43%?
Profitability is a great measure of your program’s impact, as you can identify which courses (and trainers, and topics, and formats) are bringing in money, along with finding ways to streamline your offering by adapting courses that aren’t resonating.
For instance, if you are considering adjusting the balance between your ILT and vILT courses, you can generate customer training reports to find out which are more profitable. Do your customers prefer to access training online or do they prefer structured in-person workshops? Do you have one superstar trainer whose sessions sell out within hours? Is one topic capturing your customers’ imaginations? Your customers will vote with their wallets, so leveraging your customer training software to access this all-important data will enable you to invest where it counts to maximize your profitability.
Ready to start maximizing profit with your customer training program?
Book a demo today to discover how Training Orchestra’s Training Management System can help!
About Training Orchestra
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For over 20 years, Training Orchestra has been helping 600+ organizations worldwide to automate and optimize their ILT and vILT customer training operations, addressing the complexities often found in: session scheduling, resource management, instructor collaboration, cost tracking and reporting. As a complement to your LMS, LXP and learning technologies, Training Orchestra’s Training Resource Management System can replace all XLS spreadsheets and manual tasks, so you can better manage training as a business.
