Top 8 Key Elements of a Smart Extended Enterprise Learning Solution
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Extended Enterprise Learning (EE) is any training effort aimed at people other than your employees to influence measurable behavior change. Every industry globally uses some form of EE learning, and they all share a fundamental challenge. Extended business users are voluntary users and therefore should be treated differently – better than employees.
All extended enterprise objects are voluntary but to varying degrees. You can ask your staff to participate in training, but you cannot force EE learners to do anything. Organizations need to get learners to want to see the content voluntarily, pay for it, and come back again and again. Therefore, professionals in the field of extended corporate learning need to have equal skills in business, marketing, and success measurement and traditional learning technology skill sets.
Extended corporate learning comes in many forms. Here are eight top examples of how you can use extensive business training to gain a competitive advantage.
What is an Extended Enterprise LMS?
Extended enterprise learning is a training system aimed at people who are not your employees
A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software application for managing, documenting, tracking, reporting, and delivering courses or training programs using e-education technology. Colleges, universities, school districts, and schools use LMS to offer online courses and augment on-campus courses. Corporate training departments use LMS to provide online training, as well as to automate employee registration and record keeping.
Extended enterprise learning is a training system aimed at people who are not your employees, such as distribution partners, sales representatives, franchisees, service technicians, and customers using products and services. The goal is to influence measurable behavior change by providing customers and external employees with a training program specific to your products and services. This is a separate training platform from your existing LMS for your internal staff.
The extensible enterprise management system can reach multiple audiences through the same platform and provide them with a specialized training experience based on their product usage. This is a great opportunity for an additional training course for people who are not your direct employee but need to be certified to work with your company's product. With an extended enterprise LMS, you have the opportunity to have a company-specific LMS and another extended LMS so that external employees and customers are more familiar with your products or services.
An LMS facilitates Extended Businesses to keep track of all your users, your content, and the relationship between the two.
Read more: Top 8 Features to Look for in an Extended Enterprise LMS
What Makes A Smart Extended Enterprise Learning Solution?
Standard LMS solutions have great features to help you manage and deliver your training, but not all LMS providers are created equal. For extensive corporate training, there are specific features you should consider in your search to aid in training a wide range of audiences. These 8 features will help you effectively manage and deliver extensive corporate training courses to diverse learner groups.
1. Customer Training Academy
You can measure ROI by comparing customers’ purchasing and usage behavior
Over the past few years, customer learning has evolved into a strategic sales, support, and marketing tool. If you have a product or service that requires any level of customer expertise, you're better off measurably training your customers. A learning management system branded as a “customer academy” is considered the mainstay of a customer learning system providing eLearning, tutorials, videos and social learning can be created once and reused countless times.
Knowing if your customers are trained or not gives you the ability to measure return on investment by comparing their purchasing and usage behavior. Organizations with formal customer acquisition programs enjoy higher customer satisfaction, reduced support calls, increased customer renewal rates, upselling, and upselling.
2. Channel Partner Training and Certification
Manufacturers, software vendors, insurance companies, investment brokers and telecommunications companies typically have global partners independently to resell and warrant their product lines and provide value-added support and services locally.
These global partners represent competing product lines from competing organizations. The best organization to train and certify its partners on their products and services and provide timely performance support will win the mind wars. Across every industry, organizations that train and certify their channel partners see significant increases in channel sales, sales complexity, and end-customer satisfaction.
Make sure your extensible enterprise LMS platform offers course-sharing features. It will allow you to share content to different sub-platforms with just a few clicks of a button. Courses on all platforms are automatically updated as soon as edits are made to the main course. You won't have to rebuild your course for each different platform and update them manually every time you make a change. This will save administrators a lot of time and allow them to focus more on creating the most effective training program.
4. Integration
Integration with other software platforms, such as CRM systems, can simplify and streamline your processes and help ensure your learners are assigned the proper training. For example, for new customers added to Salesforce, you can automatically add them to the customer training sub-platform in your LMS. This eliminates the need for admins to enrol users in these courses manually and helps ensure assigned customers attend relevant training sooner.
5. Reporting and analysis
Track everything of your learning system with reporting and analysis
Make sure your LMS has advanced reporting capabilities to track learner progress, training performance and to generate insights about your different backgrounds. You also want to make sure you can automate these reports by scheduling them to go directly to your team's inbox so everyone on your team can quickly see what's going on with each object.
6. White-Labeling
You want to be able to customize the look and feel of each sub-platform to match your unique audience and brand. An expanded enterprise LMS will give businesses white-labeling options ranging from logos, custom colors and email notifications to a personalized login page to give their learners a more personalized and engaging experience.
7. Multilingual interface
Your extended audience could be in many parts of the world and speak different languages. Make sure your LMS supports multiple languages and that each sub-platform can have its own one. Even if your extended audience can only speak one language, an LMS that supports various languages will be helpful as your business grows into other regions.
8. Public Training
They are governments at all levels and non-governmental bodies such as medical and educational associations whose mission is to educate the public on various topics. First responders, families of veterans, new business owners, unemployed workers, and traffic violators are all examples of publics that need training and are not always free. Selling courses to these audiences is common and is an amazing income generator given the high number of users often associated with public initiatives.
Historically, this training has been delivered by either in-person instructors or paper submissions but switched to an extended enterprise LMS as the preferred delivery method because of its low distribution costs and ability to measure effectiveness and change in behavior.
Conclusion
Supporting the training needs of a wide range of audiences can be difficult and complex. If not done right, your expanding audience won't receive the training they need to drive revenue for your organization or use your product or service effectively. You must develop a strategy for implementing and delivering enterprise-wide training for the highest possible training effectiveness and impact.
Every audience is different. Learning styles and training resources may vary between groups. They have their own training needs, so that a one-size-fits-all solution won't work well. It is essential that you define who your audience is and research on each group to assess their learning requirements.
Training your extended audience will significantly benefit you in terms of profitability if done properly. You'll be able to drive additional revenue for your business and minimize the risk of customers leaving you for competitors. However, training multiple audiences under a single training platform can be challenging. An extended enterprise LMS should be considered if you plan to train numerous audiences. It can address the above challenge by providing different environments with tailored branding and content to deliver tailored training courses based on the needs of each audience. Groove Technology uses an extensible enterprise LMS platform that will allow you to deliver effective training to both your partners and customers so your business can run like a well-oiled machine.
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