Starting a Customer Education Program: Taking Your Training to Them

When you need to deliver product training, are you reaching your customers where they are? As technologies and products advance, the need to train your customers and partners on your products is increasingly important. Whether partners need to learn how the AI in your latest model works, understand what vehicles need synthetic oil, or know the difference in TV picture quality, L&D departments are becoming increasingly more involved in developing training content that extends beyond internal employee education. Creating, sharing, and maintaining product training is critical, but managing this content becomes time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially when you’re working with multiple companies using different LMSs. When creating a customer education program, you not only need a strategy for handling different system behaviors and learner experiences, you also need to consider:

Is your content compatible with each LMS?
Is it possible for the various systems to communicate?
Is there a single source of truth for reporting and versions?
How do you know whether your customer training is effective?

Explore the technical considerations for distributing training across multiple systems, including learner access, content delivery, course version control, and reporting. Leave with new insights into implementing a customer training plan to effectively expand the reach of their product training and measure results.

1. Starting a customer education
program
Tammy Rutherford
Managing Director
Starting a Customer
Education Program:
Kicking it up a Notch
Tammy Rutherford
Rustici Software

2. About Rustici Software
eLearning technology experts
since 2002
We help connect content and platforms across
the eLearning ecosystem, leveraging our
expertise in SCORM, xAPI, cmi5, LTI and AICC.
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3. Reaching your external customers
Lagniappe: Giving your customers a little something extra
●Who are they?
●Why invest?
●How to reach these audiences

4. Starting a customer
or partner training
program?

5. Product Training
Partners/ Customers/ End Users
Employees

6. Who are your external customers?
Partner training
●Channel partners
●Distributors
●Franchisees
●Resellers
Customer education
●Clients
●End users
●Members

7. What to offer- the ingredients
●Sales enablement tools
●User training
●Technical support training
●Product certifications

9. “If all of your vendors, customers, clients, and other non-employee partners are
trained using the same playbook and have the same knowledge as someone
who works at your company, it’ll lead to better outcomes.”
- Training Magazine

10. The technical considerations

11. Ecosystem

12. Client
Portal
Internal LMS
The reality
Distributor
LMS
Reseller
LMS
Customer
LMS
Customer
LMS
Customer
LMS
Reseller
LMS
Distributor
LMS

13. The details matter
Access &
Permissions
Content
Maintenance &
Administration
Visibility &
Reporting

14. Access, permissions and experience
●Who should take your courses?
○Licensing
○Disable access
●Where will learners take your course? (your LMS or mine? )
○Content compatibility
○SSO / Authentication

15. Content maintenance
●How frequently do changes and updates happen?
●Who is responsible for maintaining your content?
●
How critical is it for users to access the most current version?
●How do you ensure that 3rd parties are actually using the
correct version?

16. Reporting
●Do you want to track usage?
●What data do you need to see?
●Do you need to provide reports to your external users?
ROI- measuring the impact of your external education programs

17. You have options

18. Options for reaching external audiences

19. Share
content

20. Deliver
content
Learner
Learner
Learner

21. Distribute
content

22. Let’s review
Share files Direct delivery Distributed model
Access
●Client LMS required
●On/Off access

✅
❌

❌
✅

✅
✅
Accuracy
●Easy to maintain?

❌

✅

✅
Reporting
●Client visibility
●Your visibility

yes
❌

❌
✅

✅
✅
Tooling required Authoring tool

LMS CDS tool; LCMS;
Dispatch service

23. Putting it all together- real world scenario
Internal Teams
Dealer/ Subsidiary
Academies
Dealer Platforms
On demand training library; Product Support; Certified Technician Training Programs
Real talk- How Alarm.com does it

24. Benefits of a content distribution tool
●Access & consistency - Deliver reliable information in their workflow.
●Accuracy - Always serve the latest version.
●Reduced overhead - Lessen the burden for customers’ LMS admins.
●Visibility - Centralized reporting to track and measure results.

25. Customer education results
Companies with formal customer education programs saw:
●35% - Increase in average customer lifetime value*
●15.5% - Decrease in support costs*
●56% - Say efforts are effective or highly effective.**







*Source: “Drive Business Success Through Customer Education”, Forrester Consulting, May 2024
**Source: Brandon Hall Group, New Research Uncovers Hidden Opportunities in Extended Enterprise Learning, 2020.

26. Have questions?
Ask me anything!
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