Looking for a powerful way to expand your cloud services offerings—while also strengthening your customer ties and increasing your company’s revenue? Consider training.
Why is training so important? Mainly because today’s cloud offerings are packed with rich sets of features and solutions—so rich, in fact, that many users merely skim the surface, implementing only a few familiar applications. When consumption levels are so low, customers fail to get their full money’s worth. That’s not good for them, and it’s not good for their service providers, either.
For example, our company, TechQuarters, found that among customers of Microsoft’s Office 365 Enterprise E1 plan, about half used only email. This meant many of the powerful Office 365 features these customers had purchased—including file storage, online conferencing, Skype, Yammer, videos and more—were essentially sitting on the shelf unused. When we probed further, we discovered that many of these customers simply didn’t know how to use these solutions.
We know that training correlates with usage. So to address this challenge, earlier this year we launched our 365 Cloud Academy training program and Web portal. Our goal is simple: to train our customers so that they can utilize all their cloud workloads at the highest possible levels. Ultimately, we want our customers to gain the maximum benefits from the services they’ve already purchased. Further, we believe that’s good for both their businesses and ours.
Custom Training
However, different types of clients need different types of training. That’s why we decided that 365 Cloud Academy should offer training in a choice of formats and price points. The offerings now include live on-site training, training by remote conferencing, customized online videos, and more generic programs. That way, we can accommodate customers of different sizes, skill levels, needs and budgets.
In general, today’s users want their online training short and sweet. So we now offer nearly 50 webinars, each only about 10 minutes long. We also offer 100 or so videos, and these are each just 30 to 60 seconds long.
To be sure, live, on-site training can be much longer. In fact, a full half-day is typical for our groups of 10 or 15 trainees. But for busy C-level executives who may need only a high-level overview, we limit the training sessions to about 30 minutes. In either case, our focus is on being concise, informative and relevant.
There’s a logical progression to the training, too. We start our trainees on Office 365 basics: Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and Skype. Once they have those applications under their belts, we move them on to more advanced and specialized features, including OneNote, Yammer and Sway.
Customer response has been good. About half the customers who initially take our live training then go on to take one of our subscription training services, typically for either six or 12 months. “Without this training, I would never have used Yammer,” says Adam Drew, financial controller at The JM Group, a U.K. recruiting firm and one of our clients. Sol Varela, project assistant at consulting firm Validius (another of our clients), says, “Thanks to the 365 Cloud Academy, I can now get the most out of One Drive. Brilliant!”
We’ve found that training works. It helps customers get productive and make the most of their investment in the Microsoft cloud. Training also moves our business closer to our customers while delivering a new and fast-growing revenue stream. We have also found that the program not only drives our own customers to adopt Office 365, but also other Microsoft partners are teaming up with us to deliver our training package to their clients. It’s a really quick win for them, and a hassle-free way to deliver an add-on service that drives their clients’ consumption while making the partner some low-energy cash in return.
Looking for a new win-win? Look into training.
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Chris Dunning is CEO of TechQuarters Ltd., a cloud-computing consulting firm and Microsoft Gold Partner based in London, U.K. For more information on 365 Cloud Academy, write: tellmemore@365cloudacademy.com