Automate Training: Scale Your Business Through Training Automation

Automation has become a real buzzword throughout the business world over the past few years. It’s an often misunderstood term, however. Moreover, the use of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and bots have yet to impact the overall corporate landscape.

That’s starting to change, however. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are beginning to look for new ways to streamline productivity, give their teams more meaningful work, and both organize and motivate their increasingly distributed workforces. That’s making automated training – and other business processes that can help streamline time-consuming workflows – new appeal.

Plus, it allows even small companies to offer training to their customers and prospective users. Education from the outset means these people are more prepared to make the most of a product. That, in turn, means they’re happier sticking with companies for longer.

Today, many companies are realizing that there are tangible and measurable benefits to using automation, especially where e-learning is concerned. Smoothing the onboarding process with a high-quality learning management system (LMS) benefits employees and customers.

But how does the idea of automation fit in with something as specific and individual as learning? Can it replace human-led delivery? Will learning itself be bot-led? What does this mean not only for employee training but also for customer training?

Today, we’re going to try and answer those questions. We will first consider why it’s essential for B2B SaaS companies to automate their customer training. Then, we’ll look at seven best-practice approaches to give you and your training programs the edge.

Why Is it Important for B2B SaaS Companies to Automate Customer Training?

We can’t tell you the number of nervous prospects who have told us they’ve “always done it this way.” Yes, it’s alarming to embark on a new type of process automation, especially since it will require you and your team to learn new skills at the outset.

That said, it is hard to overstate the benefits of automated functionality to your onboarding process for upskilling employees and users and providing the best, most adaptable learning experience. Here are just a few of the most important perks to expect.

Higher User Success Rate

When people wait for an in-person instructor to answer their questions, you create a significant learning bottleneck that doesn’t do anyone any favors. Offering on-demand, 24/7, automated training can substantially increase accessibility to training materials.

Instead, you want customers, new hires, and existing employees to be able to access training courses about current and new features and initiatives at their own pace. This leads to significant cost savings and reduces time-consuming tasks compared to instructor-led training.

More Employee Advocates

An automation platform can help you reduce the number of repetitive tasks for your existing team and provide new employees with a chance to shine. Et voilà: your entire workforce is happier.

When you treat your employees better, they like you better. That means they’re likelier to talk about how great it is to work at your company – to their friends and family, on social media, and internally. That means better brand recognition and an increased likelihood of hiring the best talent.

More Customer Advocates

Similarly, you want your customers to advocate for you. Quality training materials help make that more likely. Not only do they feel supported, but they’re also able to get more from your SaaS systems. Therefore, they see higher performance of their KPIs and attribute it to you.

Better Use of Team Time

Constantly responding to notifications, performing repetitive tasks, and searching for information on how to run routine algorithms is really, really annoying. Automated learning systems that help reduce these scenarios make everyone feel better.

Reduced Churn

In addition to using your team’s time more efficiently, automation helps your customers use their time more effectively. This reduces frustration and despair on their part, which obviously means they’ll like you more. Such outcomes indicate they’re less likely to bounce and more likely to sign up for upsells and cross-sells.

Pre-Qualified Prospects

When you offer automated training to people before they sign up to work with you, you build trust. Plus, once people start using your product, they’ll get more out of it faster. That once again increases their likelihood of sticking with you.

If you want to see these benefits, it’s time to automate e-learning across every aspect of your business.

Nowhere is it more important, though, than with customer training.

7 Best Practices for Automating Your Customer E-Learning 

These best practices are critical to maximizing customer training to reduce churn, increase word-of-mouth marketing, and upsell your current users. While the following list is not exhaustive, it’s a great place to start.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the number of suggestions. Instead, absorb them and then implement them one at a time. If you need help, that’s okay … more on that later. For now, get reading.

1. Automate Learner Communications

Backend processes – like booking people onto a learning platform – are a great way to implement automation effectively. Unfortunately, that’s not a common approach at companies, either for their customers or their employees.

Typically, whenever someone books a training course, the learning and development team spends a lot of their time on planning, admin, and outbound communications.

For example, they must contact attendees and tutors to confirm details like start times, course durations, learning materials needed, etc. Not to mention giving feedback and scheduling subsequence emails throughout the course. From the user end, a non-automated process means they have to try and “catch” the human responsible for their training whenever they need something, which is a pain.

Automating such aspects of a training program allows your users to focus on better activities than these.

2. Automate Your Training Record Management

Managing training process records can be time-consuming for learning and development teams, but they’re essential to get right. Not only are accurate training records used for internal monitoring, but they’re also vital during external audits for online learning accreditation.

Automation features make tracking specific training outcomes and qualification expiry dates so much easier. At the same time, they reduce the amount of time spent on manual data entry and mitigate the risk of compliance breaches.

3. Automate Certification

Certificates play an essential part in the training process.

They are crucial as proof of training and provide customers and course participants with something that validates successful completion.

Imagine being able to provide your trainees with personalized certificates the moment they complete a module or unit. Today, that’s possible. You can customize and present course completion certificates, including course name, trainee name, and completion date.

Plus, the training software will automatically email it to the recipient. That means it happens without input from your training staff, freeing them to engage in higher-value tasks.

4. Map Process Flows

Before automating a process to save your team time, you must consider exactly how the process works. To do that, you should work closely with those responsible for it currently.

Engaging with them has the additional benefit of showing that you want to remove a pain point from their role and that their input is valued. This is true for customers as well as employees.

The more granular you can make the process breakdown, the better. That way, you can parse which processes call for automation and which still require the human element. Once you’ve mapped it out, you can rely on IT teams to deploy an automated version of the workflow.

5. Start Small & Scale

Automated training can be very effective if appropriately planned and reviewed continuously, but don’t try to automate everything simultaneously. You’ll spread your IT resources too thin and make it impossible to decipher which variables are making a difference.

The first step in automating any training initiative is to focus on the parts of your programs that take the most time but require the least complexity. Some features of apps, modules, quizzes, templates, and training content are more complex than others.

Shoot for more specific aspects, which are ideal for automation. Then, once a training management process is automated, you can take the time to review feedback from your customers.

6. Aim For Business-Wide Rollout

Understanding automation across every part of your software is an important consideration. It helps bring different features and components together through a single dashboard, which will benefit your training.

When it’s finally time to introduce a new feature you’ve been working on for years (or perhaps to do a beta release with an opportunity for user feedback), you want to ensure you introduce it with intention. Educate people on its use and then request their thoughts, making adjustments as necessary.

Where possible, introduce batches of new features and fixes using the update model rather than continuously tinkering, which is a bad user experience. 

7. Feedback With Automation

The final main challenge in training people is understanding the everyday struggles of students on a particular course or topic. By automating the analysis of trainee progress, it’s a lot easier to tackle this issue.

How? Incorporating digital quizzes and tests into your course structure allows you to apply an RPA to monitor the results and draw conclusions. A bot will analyze and report findings directly to you, allowing you to address and adjust your course material to meet students’ needs.

Increase Your Visibility and Accessibility With Smart Training Strategies

Automation in corporate training continues to grow. As new technologies and methodologies emerge, terms like “RPA” and “bot” are gaining broader recognition. Along with that comes a greater understanding of their utility and benefits.

As automation’s use cases become more visible, its deployment alongside e-learning will become ever more popular. We can expect to witness new ways of using it popping up every year – and the most successful businesses are the ones who will stay on top of those trends as they arise.

While the above best practices may be new to many training providers, they nevertheless demonstrate the growing relevance of automation. They also show that it is a simple way of driving more value.

Moreover, automation is designed to empower employees rather than replace them. Similarly, it can enable your users to get more out of your system rather than replace you, so you needn’t fear integrating it into every aspect of your business processes today.

Need more information about how automated training materials can help you reduce the in-person load on your team, promote scalability, and lead to greater-than-ever digital transformation? We’re here for you.

Raven360 Is Here to Help

At Raven360, we know how important it is for you to give your employees, partners, users, and prospects the information they need to find success. That’s why we work so hard to stay at the cutting edge of corporate training practices, including automated training via our proprietary LMS – which we are happy to share with you.

Although automation requires careful delivery, with the right plan in place, it can be rolled out successfully. That’s where an expert in corporate and customer training comes in. We would love to show you how Raven360’s cutting-edge platform can help you do just that.

How can your training programs take your success, profit margin, and brand image to the next level? Get in touch for a demo today!