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Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training sessions?

We’re a fairly complex SaaS and are considering building a training centre to supplement our support portal.

What are some common incentives that we can use to entice our customers to complete training sessions. I realize that offering them money is the obvious one, although I haven’t heard of anyone ever doing that.

( 9 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by nniroclax on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @04:57PM (#29898645)
I recently went through the ClickUp onboarding and clicked skip on all the onboarding tutorials that popped up. After avoiding them, they hit me with an incentive of $10 towards my subscription, so I did land up watching them. So I guess it worked.
Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by zkirill on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @07:39PM (#29900683)
Would you have behaved differently if the dollar amount was lower? Or if the coupon was a % discount applied evenly to all products?
Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by charcircuit on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @04:04AM (#29889181)
>I haven’t heard of anyone ever doing that.

Coinbase essentially does this. They have you go through a presentation for some token to learn about it and then you are rewarded like $5 worth of that token which technically you could just cash out.

Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by e9 on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @03:34AM (#29889013)
- By offering money I assume you mean discounts to your software or maybe access to some private events or something

- Badges of honor and maybe some community status for social validation (think StackOverflow or Hacker News)

Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by zkirill on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @03:52AM (#29889117)
I meant literal money as a mental exercise. In my mind, if you literally couldn’t pay your customer to complete your training program, then you have bigger problems.

Badges of honour is a good point, especially if there is a community portal.

Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by mtmail on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @04:12AM (#29889233)
Can you restrict some features until the training is finished?
Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by brudgers on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @01:01PM (#29895117)
Are your customers asking for this?

If not, what are they asking for?

Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by zkirill on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @07:37PM (#29900655)
Yes, consistently.

I know it will be used but want to ensure max ROI before we sink resources into building and maintaining it.

Re:Ask HN: How to incentivize customers to complete training... by brudgers on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @10:08PM (#29901793)
Ask the customers to pay for it before you build it. If it is high value for them, they will.