What is customer training?

Customer training is training a company provides to its customers so they can set up, use and get value from its product or service. Also called customer education, it is most common in software companies, where it includes onboarding courses, help videos, webinars and certification programs.

Reviewed by Clark Quinn, Chief Learning Strategist Updated October 28, 2026

Example

A company that sells project management software sees the same support tickets from new accounts again and again: how to import existing projects and how to set user permissions. The customer education team builds a short onboarding course for new account admins. It has four videos of a few minutes each, a knowledge check after the permissions lesson and links to the matching help articles. New admins get the course in their welcome email and see it on the in-app home screen.

Customer success managers can see which accounts have finished the course. When an admin stops halfway, the account’s success manager offers a short live session. Over the next quarter, the team watches whether onboarding tickets go down and adds a lesson on the next most common question.

How it works

Customer training starts at or before the sale and continues for as long as the customer uses the product. Who the training is for decides what it covers.

Who it is for

• Admins and implementers: the people who set up the product, connect it to other systems and manage users.
• End users: the people who use the product every day and need to know the tasks their role involves.
• Partners and resellers: companies that sell, implement or support the product for their own clients.
• Prospects: people evaluating the product, through public tutorials, courses and webinars.

Common formats

• Self-paced courses in a customer academy, often grouped into a learning path for each role
• Short how-to videos and articles in the help center
• In-app guides and tooltips that appear when a customer first uses a feature
• Live webinars and onboarding sessions for new accounts
• Certification programs that test and recognize product expertise

Where it is delivered

Many companies run customer training on a customer-facing LMS, sometimes called an extended enterprise LMS, separate from the one used for employees. A customer LMS supports self-registration, company branding and access for large numbers of external learners. Smaller programs often start with videos embedded in the help center and add an LMS once they need progress tracking or certification.

How it is measured

Completion rates show whether customers take the training. The more useful measures are business ones: how quickly new accounts start using the product, which features trained customers adopt, how many support tickets they raise, and whether they renew or expand.

Customer training vs employee training

The methods overlap, but the goals and conditions are different.

• Goal: employee training builds the skills people need to do their job. Customer training helps customers adopt the product, get results from it and keep using it.
• Motivation: employees are often required to finish training. Customers are not, so customer training has to be short, easy to find and clearly useful.
• Audience: employee training reaches a known group inside one organization. Customer training reaches many organizations, roles and skill levels, often in several languages.
• Measurement: employee training is tracked through completion and job performance. Customer training is tracked through product usage, support volume, renewals and expansion.

Best practices

• Teach the tasks customers want to complete, in the order they need them, instead of walking through the feature list.
• Put training where customers already are: the help center, the product itself and onboarding emails.
• Keep each lesson short enough to finish in one sitting, and let customers skip what they already know.
• Give admins and end users separate paths, because they do different jobs in the product.
• Review support tickets regularly to find the next topic that deserves a lesson.

Why it matters for L&D teams

• Same skills, new audience. Instructional design, video production and LMS administration apply directly to customer programs, and L&D teams are often asked to help set them up.
• Fewer repeat questions. Training that answers common setup and how-to questions before customers ask them reduces repeat support tickets.
• Content can be shared. Product training built for support and sales teams can often be adapted for customers, and customer content can help onboard new employees.
• Products keep changing. Software products change often, so customer training needs formats that are quick to update when a screen or workflow changes.