Has anyone stopped charging customers for training? If so, what was the impact?
We are revising our education pricing and want to stop charging for the intro classes. I'm curious if anyone has stopped charging.
I'm interested to know if more customers took the classes or if there was any other impact.
Thanks
Best Answers
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Hi Claire,
I can't speak about the Client impact, but I can speak about another impact: Once there is no longer revenue backing up the curriculum development then once there is the next cost cut in your company your curriculum development headcount will be at risk, and most likely get significantly impacted as there is no revenue against the development costs. I have seen this happening in a model where Education did no longer generate revenue, and we were no longer able to update all courses, then we had to develop fewer courses and with the next cost-cutting the statement was: "oh, you develop less? So you need less hc...". My recommendation from this experience: make sure you generate revenue so that your CurrDevelopment is covered.
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One such outcome I'd anticipate is that training material becomes devalued and as a result, many customers won't fully engage in it as they didn't pay for it. Consequently, product adoption may be impacted, churn and contraction may ensue. Paying for training and even better face to face training represents and investment and one with many associated returns.
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Answers
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Thank you Andrew. Thanks for the reminder about the budget implications. I've been pretty single mindedly looking at customer impact. Education is a cost center so I'm not too worried about that, but it's good to have on the radar.
Claire
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Claire - The main change we encountered was a shift in the means of delivery. Customers shifted away from in-class instructor led training to remote/virtual training. Those delivery models do entail different costs.
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What is the purpose of providing training for free? What do you think you are going to gain by providing free training - what's the intended outcome? One of the things I talk about frequently with members is what I call "the fallacy of free." We should talk, as moving from fee-based training to free training is ill-advised, for far too many reasons to cite in this platform. I am the Research VP for the Education Services practice, here at TSIA. Reach out to your TSIA Customer Success Manager, if you know who it is, and he or she can get us connected, or conversely I can reach your CSM and ask him or her to set up time for us to connect.
Maria
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Years ago at another company we stopped charging and it had the exact repercussions that @AlexanderZiegler mentioned above. Be careful!
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