External training is the backbone of any customer expansion strategy, but many organizations face challenges deploying it externally. The 2024 state of learning report found legacy learning solutions often lack flexibility, making it harder to reach external audiences, track progress, or measure effectiveness. This can seriously hinder adoption and reduce usage rates—the very metrics your customer expansion strategy depends on.
What’s more, innovative customer experience teams are solving this by integrating training with customer service systems. Imagine a support agent who can instantly access a customer’s training history and certifications. With this data, they can resolve issues faster, share tutorials, or assign relevant training, equipping customers for long-term success while strengthening relationships.
The numbers speak for themselves. We’ve compiled seven compelling stats that show why training is the key to hitting customer expansion goals, reducing churn, and driving meaningful results.
1. Fully engaged customers represent a 23% premium in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer.
Source: Gallup
Quality customer training creates a partnership where their success depends on an ongoing relationship with your services. For your team, it's a long-term investment that can maximize the value of your product, leading to greater satisfaction and loyalty. Over time, their confidence in your product will make them more receptive to upsells, cross-sells, and re-sells. Eventually, they’ll need much less hands-on assistance, freeing up your support and account teams to give more personalized support to new customers. This helps recover the costs of your initial customer education investment.
Revenue-positive customer training starts with minimizing overhead to launch your program. For example, the average course can take an average of 18-155 hours to develop. Any opportunities you can find to speed up course creation will help you reduce support ticket volume, increase your NPS score, and increase customer retention.
What to try: AI-powered course builder, course selling
2. 30% of businesses report a budget increase after adopting revenue-positive training.
Source: The state of learning
Many enterprises are cutting back on budgets, but the state of learning report shows that over a quarter of businesses are eager to invest in learning as a revenue-generating engine. So, how do you leverage this newfound confidence in your team to inspire even more customer engagement? By integrating your customer’s data with your customer training data.
Here are some ways to scale your customer expansion with data integration:
- More personalized upsell recommendations from sales, customer success, and support with synced data from your CRM and LMS.
- Identify customer trends and opportunities for upselling, churn risks, or knowledge gaps.
- Save time by setting up automatic course enrollments based on CRM data and automatic reports on training impact.
With insights from both streams, you’ll be able to scale and grow the lifetime value of each customer.
What to try: LMS CRM integration
3. Reduced onboarding costs of $2.4 million.
Source: Forrester
When you develop your customer onboarding training, the benefits extend to both employees and partners. When research firm Forrester evaluated the total economic impact of Absorb LMS, they noted the savings generated from shared learning among employees, customers, and partners. The reported savings of $2.4 million contributed to the overall revenue-positive impact of investing in Absorb LMS.
Both with new employees and customers, the best way to grow their commitment to your product during onboarding is to segment your learners based on their roles. This saves time and money by decreasing the time it takes to create productive users of your product. From there, you can set up a role-based personalized dashboard experience that filters only the most relevant content to achieve their goals. For example, a director of product development will likely have very different needs than a junior developer.
Creating a scalable onboarding process while customizing the dashboard with recommendations for specific roles or functions allows customers and partners to onboard quickly, saving time and money on engagement-related expenses.
What to try: Personalized learning paths
4. TrueCommerce achieved a 90% completion rate for key self-paced customer service courses.
Source: TrueCommerce
With such a significant investment in customer expansion, you’ll want reassurance that learners will be engaged enough to complete self-paced courses. TrueCommerce’s supply chain management platform has successfully migrated thousands of customers through self-paced training. How did they do it? Their trick is to give your learners some early wins through a rapid onboarding program. Over time, you can develop a content library to build on their initial knowledge foundation.
Self-paced content requires two major elements: relevant topics and automated reminders. To determine which content should be prioritized, identifying your customers’ pain points in your current training will give you a blueprint for creating content they will buy into. To keep them on track, set up automated progress reminders to keep users engaged in your product.
What to try: Automated progress reminders
5. Companies with a strong learning culture have a 57% higher rate of retention.
Source: LinkedIn Learning
Customer expansion is built right into product training. When your program adds tremendous value to your customers' learning culture, you directly contribute to their retention goals. Their trust in how your product is delivered gives your sales enablement team leverage to promote more use cases for your product.
To nurture your customer account for upselling, choose an LMS that prioritizes engaging learning experiences. Gamification is proven to boost performance by granting independence to learners, providing them with opportunities to master skills, and instilling a sense of purpose. When they can earn badges or certificates that validate their knowledge within your organization, it builds credibility and authority in their careers, making them more likely to stay with your customer’s organization.
Your support team can also become a retention and engagement resource for your customers. Consider a customer with many frontline workers and high employee churn. After an LMS CRM integration, your support team can promote newly relevant content (e.g., changes to legal policies), identify less engaged employees, and track various other metrics that are useful for making larger decisions about their workforce.
What to try: Gamified dashboards, polls, and leaderboards
6. Incremental profit of $1.1 million from externally-monetized coursework in Absorb LMS.
Source: Forrester
Sometimes, customer expansion goals justify a price tag on training. The more time and money your customers spend learning your product, the higher their customer lifetime value will be. If training for your product is in high demand, monetizing your product education is the natural next step.
There are three main signs you could monetize your courses:
- Your customers regularly request training in forums and surveys
- Complexities about your product are creating barriers to adoption
- Your current training is successful and could be packaged into a scalable, paid offering
Does this sound like you? It might be time to explore product training as a way to generate revenue.
What to try: Integrated LMS eCommerce module
7. Dura-Line’s enhanced training resulted in over 13,000 completed mini-courses.
Source: UserEvidence
Engaged customers are loyal, but with lower attention spans and less time than ever for training, traditional modules can limit a training initiative's impact. A customer-first learning platform prioritizes exciting learning experiences, relevant content, and efficiency. Microlearning ticks off this list and more, ensuring your customers are motivated to improve their skills.
What to try: Microlearning
Customer expansion in your LMS is cost-effective and critical
Customer expansion is about growing revenue and engagement from existing customers through upselling, cross-selling, renewals, and increased product adoption. When you show how your other product can scale with your customers’ growth, you increase the lifetime value of your customers, boost retention, and drive sustainable business growth. How do you get started? With external training, personalized experiences, and improved customer service.
Your customer’s reliance on your product presents both an opportunity and a risk. Without quality training, they might struggle to see a long-term relationship with your brand. With the right strategy, an LMS can secure and even grow the value of your relationship over time.
Next step: Watch Customer education strategies for improved retention and support
