A successful customer onboarding experience will meet several goals:
- It will help your customers become competent in your product
- It will put them on a road towards achieving success with your product
- It will decrease future support requests
As a customer trainer, you want to achieve these goals in the least amount of time possible. Training time takes up resources from your company as well as from your customer. It is in both your customer's and your company's best interest to make the onboarding experience as efficient and painless as possible.
This article is going to explain to you how to do that with ScreenSteps.
This article is for B2B software vendors who are selling customer software that requires extensive onboarding. If your customer onboarding process takes more than 2 days then you would benefit from what is described below. Some examples of product categories that can benefit from this are EMR, ERP, CRM, LMS, Analytics, or other highly customizable software solutions.
Most trainers we speak with are dealing with the following challenges:
- Lengthy implementation times because of extended training time
- Many repeat trainings because of forgotten information or participants that were absent at the initial training
- Many support requests after the training
Following the process outlined below will help you achieve the following improvements:
- Lower total training time
- Shorter post-training support time
- Fewer post-training questions
- More successful product adoption
If you look at the symptoms outlined above (too many follow-up questions, lengthy training time, etc.) they all stem from the problem that in your training you are probably requiring your customers to memorize a lot of information. When you remove the need for memorization you will improve all of your metrics.
To implement Zero-Memorization training, you will use ScreenSteps to do the following:
- Create and deliver pre-training event courses to help establish a basic understanding before your training event
- Prepare and deliver scenario-based knowledge base articles that will be used during the training event
- Support users post-training by referring them to existing knowledge base articles or creating new ones for them to reference
Zero-Memorization training looks different than traditional training. In typical training sessions, the instructor will present information. They may have different learning activities, but the instructor is in charge of delivering the majority of the information. The learner is mostly just listening and asking questions. This type of training fosters low retention rates leading to repeat training sessions and many post-training questions.
In Zero-Memorization, the instructor does the following:
- They introduce the learner to the ScreenSteps knowledge base
- They explain the task that the learner will need to complete. They don't stop to teach them every step. They just help the learner clearly understand the purpose of the task
- They then ask the learner to complete the task by following the ScreenSteps guide
- As the learner progresses through the task, the instructor can coach them if they get stuck at any point
This training approach creates the following results:
- The learner is more engaged in the learning process
- The learner is learning how to help themselves when they need to perform this same task in the future
- The learner feels no pressure to memorize any information
At the end of the training, the learner has retained more information (because they were actively performing actions during the training), and they are better able to answer their own questions. The result is a training event that eliminates follow up questions.
Capture Scenarios
The most important thing to do is to document scenarios instead of features. For example, if we were training someone on a CRM system having a guide for creating a new contact would not be useful. A better guide would capture the actual scenario the learner might find themselves in. The scenario might be, "It is Tuesday afternoon, and a person calls in requesting information be emailed to them about your business insurance plans. They would also like to schedule a call with one of your sales reps." A guide that showed exactly how to do that will be much more useful in Zero-Memorization training than one that simply shows them how to create a new contact in the CRM.
Prepare to be Agile
As you implement a Zero-Memorization training, you will find that processes will often be revised and improved. Your training guides need to keep up to date with those changes. Prepare yourself to be agile and adapt to these changes quickly. Some of our customers have a second team member at the training whose primary purpose is to update the guides as they notice modifications that need to be made. The ScreenSteps authoring tools give you the ability to make these rapid changes on the fly and respond instantly to needs that are discovered during a training event.
Here are a few things to be aware of that could sabotage your Zero-Memorization training event:
- Guides that are not specific enough
- Guides that don't account for the different paths a learner may need to take through a process
- Not relying on the guides during the training event
- Not referencing the guides to answer any follow-up questions
ScreenSteps is billed based on your total number of monthly active users. This includes your content authors and everyone who is using the knowledge base and courses before, during, and after the training event.
The ScreenSteps service has several plans: Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. You can see detailed plan features here: ScreenSteps Plans.
ScreenSteps can be paid for on a monthly or yearly basis. Yearly plans receive a discount.
To receive an exact quote, contact [email protected], and let them know how many people you will be training on a monthly basis. If you have a unique situation, our team can work with you to find a pricing plan that matches how you will be using ScreenSteps.
You will probably also want some initial coaching from our team. Depending on the size of your project we find that between 3 and 10 hours of coaching is usually sufficient. During the coaching session our team will:
- Help you develop a style guide for creating your content
- Coach you on how to run a Zero-Memorization training event
- Review your content, offering suggestions to increase clarity and effectiveness
Coaching is billed at an hourly rate and is handled remotely via a Zoom video call.
Technical support for ScreenSteps is included with your subscription fee at no additional charge.
To get started you will need to do the following:
- Create a ScreenSteps account.
- Set up a call with our team to discuss what your training goals are, when your event is, etc.
- Our team will then help you determine what existing content needs to be imported, what content needs to be modified, and what content needs to be created
- As your team continues to create content, our team will review it regularly, offering suggestions for improvements
- Our team will then schedule a training call to review how to host the Zero-Memorization training event
Zero-Memorization training will improve the results your organization and your customers can achieve. By adopting this process you will help your training team deliver more consistent results, at a lower cost, and with fewer post-training support requests.
Contact a member of our team to learn more about how you can get better training results in less time with ScreenSteps and Zero-Memorization training.