The days of “grow at all costs” are over, and companies are embracing a sustainable-growth mindset. It’s unprecedented but needed to happen.

Leading companies that were once known for their focus on growth, including Salesforce, Facebook, and Amazon, are now turning their attention to efficiency.

This search for efficiency is compelling companies to reassess their business model and make the most of what they already have. It’s the “do-more-with-less” narrative shining the spotlight on customer retention and lifetime value.

Leadership teams are asking themselves: How can we keep our existing customers happy and grow from within?

The answer: Empowering them with the resources and support they need to consistently realize product value.

Companies can do that by delivering digital learning experiences that meet the evolving needs and preferences of today’s B2B customers while following the model that B2C companies have already started.

Here’s how to do that.

Personalize the Learning Experience

Go to Amazon and you’re greeted with recommendations based on past purchases. Log into Netflix and you’ll see content suggestions based on what you watched last.

Personalization is omnipresent in B2C, and it’s time for B2B businesses to follow suit. With 80% of buyers saying personalization makes their purchase experience better, this is a non-negotiable.

But it’s not just the path to purchase buyers expect tailor-made for them. The pre-and post-sale experience has to be equally bespoke, including product training and education.

That means delivering contextually relevant content that addresses customers’ unique needs and challenges. For example, when a new customer kicks off the onboarding process, they should have access to resources that apply to their product use case and goals.

Similarly, customer success managers (CSMs) must intimately understand the outcome expected by each customer and tailor their interactions accordingly.

Make Learning Available 24/7/365

On-demand anything isn’t new, but the pandemic did entrench this “always-on” attitude into society.

Want to learn how to play the guitar? There’s a YouTube video for that. Need to brush up on your negotiation skills before an interview? MasterClass awaits. Instant (or as close to it as possible) is now the expectation…of everything.

That expectation goes against every page of the modern business playbook. Even Jeff Bezos once said, “Seek instant gratification—or the elusive promise of it—and chances are you’ll find a crowd there ahead of you.”

Despite the counterintuitiveness of the instant-gratification era, your customers aren’t waiting around thinking, “Good things come to those who wait.” They’re certainly not waiting for their CSM when they have a question or challenge.

They want accessible and convenient answers. The B2B companies investing the most in the customer experience will deliver on that with a digital academy that makes learning available 24/7/365.

Forward-thinking companies will take it one step further by embedding their self-serve customer academy into their website and product to ensure customers don’t have to jump through hoops to get their hands on the content they need.

Fully Embrace Digital

The rise of all things technology has changed the customer experience. Chatbots, for example, have made it possible to connect with businesses in real-time (even if it’s a robot). Customers no longer have to wait on hold or send an email to get support. Digital training takes that a step further by giving customers an extra layer of self-service support via online courses, quizzes, learning paths, forums, and more.

These aren’t set-it-and-forget-it tactics, though. Launching a chatbot or customer academy is a great first step, but companies truly revolutionizing the customer experience in today’s economy will use these channels behind the scenes, too.

In the context of customer training, that means using insights from your digital customer academy—powered by a learning platform—to monitor training’s reach and ensure every customer receives the learning they need to succeed.

At the same time, it surfaces insights about which content is popular, where customers are most engaged and stuck, and which content needs to be updated for optimal completion rates and scores.

All this goes into delivering the absolute best customer experience in today’s economy.

The New Normal is Personal and Available 24/7

In an era where customers expect instant, personal, and always-on support, businesses must prioritize the highest level of customer centricity.

That means delivering a learning experience that’s relevant to each customer’s unique product needs and challenges, making resources—blogs, webinars, videos, learning paths, and more—accessible at the drop of a hat (ideally embedded directly within an app or website), and using customer-sourced feedback and insights to continually improve.

The companies that embrace this new paradigm now will navigate these shifting expectations and come out ahead.