Fast-track your training programs with Customer training portals

Customer attention is vital to business success, especially during difficult economic times. That’s when successful companies shift into high gear with training programs that strengthen customer ties, accelerate product adoption and boost profitability. While we at Expertus examined how to align customer learning with business goals to create powerful marketing strategies that fill classrooms and increase training revenues, we explored ways of fast-tracking training programs in a slow economy. One important way is to improve the effectiveness of the customer training Portal or Website.

It’s clear in this age of the Internet that anything a training organization is doing online is better than anything it does offline. Accessing a learning management system (LMS) in real time through a Website or portal is by far the easiest way. Studies have clearly shown that it’s inadvisable for customer trainees to access the LMS directly. That’s because most LMSs are usually very cumbersome and difficult for people who aren’t experts in using it. Improving the effectiveness of learning portals or Websites is not that difficult. The one key that’s probably more important than anything else on the site is that it isn’t about the colors, it isn’t about the content that’s there—it’s about search functionality. It’s important that customers with questions can quickly and easily find the answer—and not to the first page of a 30-page white paper, or the beginning of a video. Can the customer seeking knowledge search the white paper, the video, the audio, the slides, the classroom materials and whatever else by using one federated search engine? It’s vitally important to focus on the user experience. LMSs aren’t really geared to this, so organizations have to find a better way. Relying on the IT organization to build something is one approach, but training organizations typically are not the principal concern of IT staffs. The best way to do this is by focusing on search and the user experience. And the best way to do that is by learning portal development that takes these issues into account.

If your organization is thinking about developing a learning portal or if you are interested in increasing the training efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.

Reduce your training costs with blended learning

In a recent survey by Expertus, it was found that the most important strategy that learning organizations are exploring to reduce the cost of training delivery is to migrate instructor-led training either to ‘blended learning’ or to look into elearning development. The benefits here are obvious – cost reductions in travel, facilities, equipment, and trainers.

However, organizations should not focus only on cost reduction. They must also work to leverage the other benefits of blended and elearning development such as, availability, reusability, efficiency, and above all, scalability.

Elearning can be available 24/7, but the organizations don’t have to offer their entire content as classic elearning modules. Properly designed and broken down into small pieces to use, e-learning can be used when there is a need for time-of-need training, alerts, or performance support. Organizations should consider looking at smaller learning modules, although it might demand some training content conversion into reference materials, lists, diagrams, stories, or lessons learned.

A great deal of value can be secured if certain information is made available quickly, and in an easy-to-digest form. One option might be to implement some training outside the LMS. If you can not configure the LMS to access the content quickly and easily, then put the developed content outside. Eliminating the requirement to track it will make it easier for learners to access and absorb the content faster.

For more details on this and for more ways of increasing your training efficiency, please download our recent webinar recording or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at http://www.trainingefficiency.com/.

If your organization is thinking about repurposing your ILT content into ELearning, creating content without compromise or if you’re interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure, contact me.

Make your LMS speak business

Measuring the impact of learning on business performance is one of the long sought goals of many learning organizations for years together. Most of us also agree at the point that the integration of e-learning with other enterprise systems is the way to go, to achieve this goal. But what is that which is hindering in achieving this?

When training executives were surveyed recently, we found that 64 percent of respondents felt their learning technologies did not effectively interact with other applications, such as CRMs.

Since the 1960s, when mainframe online systems first hit the market, Software applications of all kinds have needed to speak with one another. Today, companies want to take advantage of their learning technologies to get quantifiable business results and learning business intelligence through the integration of LMS, e-learning, CRM, HRMS, portals and business intelligence software.

Ultimately, what is that which is hindering the effective communication of learning technologies and other enterprise software systems? The answer: business processes and learning initiatives are not aligned.

To enable the software systems speak the same language there are quite a number of protocols, tools and technologies available on the market today. But at last, to achieve communication between systems, it takes two other things.

1. Evaluate your learning proposals vis-à-vis your business objectives and current processes. With that assessment, a long-term strategic plan can be put in place to build communication channels for software systems and various groups of employees.
2. Depending on that plan, acquire, maintain or upgrade your technology infrastructure.

With this approach your learning tools are enabled to be completely utilized and your learning technologies do a lot of talking that everybody hears.

If your organization is grappling with LMS integration issues or if you’re interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure and your overall training efficiency, contact me.

Effective training administration

First of all, we can probably all agree that decentralized training administration is inefficient.

It becomes a problem when there are multiple administrators in multiple groups completing the same tasks or transactions, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration needs or course description details. But often these variations are driven by lack of bandwidth or minimal training.

Take as an example the process of uploading courses to an LMS. If an organization has various people doing this, it’s common to see different administrators using different course-naming schemes and course descriptions.

So, centralization of learning support and learning operations management is critical, which goes without saying.

On the flipside, it’s not a good idea to develop inflexible processes that don’t adapt to the needs of your customers, the business units. Be careful about trying to eliminate customized support that they’ve grown accustomed to. Dissatisfaction quickly rises when executives feel their needs and interests are not heard, considered, and acted upon.

Establishing a decentralized approach to customer training support is that business units have enough control over employee learning and can tailor all aspects of learning to the specific needs of their employees.  Long term, you get ever closer to the elusive goal of aligning learning with business objectives.

To learn more about the concept of Centralized Services and Decentralized Processes, download the white paper.

For more information on this topic and the nine ways to trim operational expense, please download the recent webinar or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at http://www.trainingefficiency.com/.

If your organization wants to increase the training efficiency in terms of your learning technology or training processes, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com

Measurements: One of the Toughest Challenges in Training

We come across many learning executives who still struggle to obtain meaningful metrics that would support decision making and exhibit the business impact of the investment made in training. In fact, in our most recent training challenges survey, 78% of respondents said the biggest weakness in their current reporting was providing information to support business planning and strategy.

Some of the other major obstacles encountered are data accuracy, lack of data, data standardization, time constraints, and data access.

A lot of companies look to their LMS to solve their learning measurement challenge. But, our survey found that 84% of respondents were dissatisfied with their training reporting.  Respondents cited limited standardized reporting, learning technology integration issues, customization requirements, and usability as the primary areas of dissatisfaction.

It is not fair to blame all measurement problems on LMS technology. In our first Learning Intelligence Forum, learning executives were concerned about the difficulties of measuring informal learning, the need to efficiently correlate performance and learning, and the technical challenges involved in pulling data from multiple sources, such as HR and CRM systems.

We believe efficient, effective, and meaningful metrics are essential for successful training operations management.  And we believe there’s a dearth of information and resources about this important topic. By facilitating discussions, gathering market data, sharing our experiences, and offering informational resources, we hope to do our part in moving the industry forward.

I’d love to hear from you about your training measurement programs or if you don’t have one our learning strategy consultants can help you build one.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com

Consolidate & Centralize Your Learning Technologies

When you consolidate and reduce the number of your company’s learning systems, a cumulative positive effect is spread across the entire training organization.

There will be fewer system support requirements, less maintenance, fewer patches, fewer resource requirements, fixes and upgrades. In addition, you’ll need fewer people with technology skill sets, which helps to reduce support costs. The bonus benefit is your reporting will become easier, which will lead to better learning measurements.

In our experience, there are two main challenges to the consolidation and centralization of learning technology:
1. Deciding what to do with legacy data
2. How to meet the functional requirements of varying business units

With regard to legacy data, there are several options. Assuming you have the ability to keep your legacy systems, you can migrate users to new systems and build data integration into your stable legacy systems. Users can still access the data, but you won’t have to go through a big data migration effort, which can be time consuming and expensive.

If you have to go through a data migration effort, which is usually accompanied by a significant amount of data clean up, it makes sense to conduct a data audit and do some systems analysis up front.

The second big challenge is how to meet the functional requirements of various groups across your organization. More and more training departments are leveraging newer technologies and approaches by building LMS functionality OUTSIDE of their LMS, in the form of portals and widgets. This approach allows you to customize to the needs of those diverse business units and significantly improve the user experience.
For more tips, check out our recent webinar recording or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at www.TrainingEfficiency.com.

If your organization is considering an LMS consolidation or if you’re interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com