Remote Training: Tips, Software, and Best Practices (Ultimate Guide)

Travel bans are forcing companies around the globe to adopt remote training in record numbers.

Product training sessions, customer training events, and reseller trainings are being postponed or cancelled entirely because of this sudden disruption.

The organizations who wish to avoid interruption in their day-to-day operations are attempting to offer this education 100% remotely.

The reality is, though, simply having access to G Suite, Slack, and video conferencing won’t cut it. Your stakeholders need a more comprehensive solution.

This is an opportunity for your organization to develop an on-demand, remote training strategy that considers the entire digital learning experience--including content, reporting and analytics, gamification, security and more.

Developing product experts out of customers, employees, and partners is one of the most profitable things a business can do.

In fact, the organizations watching their retention rates skyrocket and churn rates fall all have one thing in common: they have placed training at the heart of their culture.

And for organizations with complex products - developing and implementing a remote training strategy is easier than you may think.

Read on and see why! 

Contents

• What is Remote Training?
• The Benefits of Remote Training & Virtual Learning
• Highly measurable
• Accessible anytime, anywhere
• Lower costs
• Increased productivity and efficiency
• Interactivity and gamification
• Security
• Easy to get started
• How to Get Started With a Corporate Training Platform
• Investigate the vendor & platform
• Develop an implementation plan
• Delivering Remote Training & On-demand Learning More Effectively
• Understand your learners better than they understand themselves
• Create a seamless on-boarding process
• Launch product training alongside product updates
• Add gamification to the mix
• Launch frequent content iterations based on reporting & analytics
• Launching a Successful Virtual Corporate Event or Conference
• Have a unique hook
• Warm up your audience with pre-event offers
• Leverage influencers’ networks for promotion
• Automate, automate, automate!
• Remote Training Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What Exactly is Remote Training?

In its simplest terms - remote training is the process of instructing, teaching, or coaching in a virtual environment - one that does not require students to be physically present. 

Remote training methods vary, but they traditionally consist of online courses, webinars, on-demand learning, and instructor-led online trainings.

The Benefits of Remote Training

We've covered the importance of training and development previously, but the benefits of remote training and development go even further.

In summary:

Cost efficiency and flexibility are two of the biggest benefits of training remotely. 

In fact, the cost savings alone make this an incredibly attractive option for many organizations, which is why so many organizations now use enterprise learning management systems. 

Here are a few other benefits of remote training and virtual learning: 

1. Highly measurable

The goal of any product training is to create product experts.

Product expertise means increased retention, more referrals, easier cross-sells and up-sells, and brand loyalty.  The way you develop product experts is through more productive and efficient training.

But how do you measure that?

With remote training, it’s easy to track the content being consumed, time spent, and any weak spots.

Better yet, you can connect training completed remotely back to the KPIs you care about most, giving you a more realistic idea of what the return on your investment in training actually is.

2. Accessible anytime, anywhere

Provide 24/7, on-demand access to remote training so stakeholders can learn at their own pace, whenever they want.

No scheduling training events, coordinating logistics, or setting up new agendas and curriculums.

Perfect for high-tech products with constant updates, on-demand content accommodates different learning styles by allowing access anytime and anywhere, including different devices.

3. Cheaper costs

Another benefit of remote training is the overhead costs you’ll save.

Planning and scaling on-site events and hiring instructors can become quite costly. The flexibility provided by eLearning will also reduce learning time, and we know time is money.

Training remotely allows you to repurpose the content you already have too.

Plus, it’s easy and cost effective for your subject matter experts to record and upload new content intended for your remote workers. 

4. Increased productivity and efficiency

Self-paced learning in a unique format that makes sense for the learner leads to increased productivity and efficiency, plain and simple.

The ability to re-access content, slow something down, or save something for later appeals to different learning styles too.

The best part though?

Measure how productive learners are with your training, then map this back to customer retention and closed deals.

5. Interactivity and gamification

Generate positive reinforcement and encourage continuous learning with leaderboards and gamification badges.

Create a healthy, competitive spirit between sales reps that drives more sales and brings students back to your remote training program by celebrating top performers.

6. Security

Guarantee high-quality content for stakeholders and protect intellectual property with state-of-the-art security and technology.

Top corporate learning platforms leverage granular security practices to ensure content and confidential information remains close to the organization.

This is a more secure option than leaving training material scattered throughout spreadsheets, email, and personal drives.

7. Easy to get started

In-person training requires a significant amount of preparation and overhead for it to be truly effective.

With remote virtual training, you can quickly repurpose existing documents, videos, and presentations to create various learning paths that appeal to different stakeholders.

In fact, your organization can launch a comprehensive training program for employees, customers, or partners in a matter of days.

How to Get Started With a Corporate Training Platform

Once a vendor is selected, the process of getting started on your new training platform is relatively simple.

Important components to keep in mind in the beginning include: syndicating and creating content, developing training modules, creating product labs, branding the user interface, and setting up a training storefront.

Understanding how you and your team will approach these is important to ensure future scalability. 

Assuming your organization has shortlisted a handful of vendors, below are 4 steps you and your team can take to assess whether they are right for you. 

If you're still deciding on who to partner with, spend some time learning  how to choose the right learning platform for your organization.

Raven360 is an enterprise-grade, flexible employee training software that allows fast-growing businesses to train workers seamlessly.

1. Understand your current & future training needs

Knowing the type of training your organization will need now and in the future will help you determine the features and functions you absolutely need.

It’s also important to perform an inventory on what’s working and what’s not for your remote workers. 

Where are the limitations? What opportunities exist? What do your learners respond to best? What do you hope to achieve out of your training platform?

Ask instructors, trainers, and management for insight into this area.

1. Content creation & distribution: will you be creating new content, or syndicating existing content?

2. Customization: understanding how much flexibility you need in a new platform will help determine the resources you need to get started.

3. Reporting and analytics: comprehensive reporting and analytics will help your organization refine your training over time to ensure the best possible return-on-investment.

4. Gamification: adding interactivity to your training platform will help incentivize continued use and might even create some healthy competition.

5. Integrations: it’s important to assess your existing technology stack before making any purchasing decisions.

6. Security: any platform you decide on should have measures in place to not only protect your intellectual property but sensitive user information.

7. Mobile: it’s critically important that any platform you consider be 100% mobile responsive. Allowing users to train wherever and whenever will determine how successful your training is.

2. Investigate the vendor & platform

Once you understand exactly what you need from your training platform, the next step is to understand the details of each platform.

Specifically, you should be most concerned with the vendor’s reputation, level of support and training provided, and pricing structure.

1. Reputation: don't rely solely on the quantity of reviews. Take the time to investigate less popular platforms who can offer more customized solutions.

2. Support: make sure the vendor offers the support you need.

3. Maintenance & updates: inquire about the frequency of maintenance and stability of updates.

4. Pricing: consider an active user-based pricing

5. Free trial or demo: don’t neglect seeing the remote training software is action

3. Develop an implementation plan

Once a decision on the platform has been made, you’ll want to develop a plan for implementation.

This strategy should detail the necessary stakeholders needed, how much of their involvement will be required, their exact role in the process, and an approximate timeline.

Doing this will prevent any bottlenecks and create a clear channel for communication during the implementation process.

1. Strategy: before you begin you’ll want to have a written strategy outlining in detail how you will handle all of the below points. Include, at a minimum, exactly the resources required, who is responsible and for what, a general timeline, and a plan for testing your new platform once the implementation is complete.

2. Deployment & administration: who is required? How much of your IT staffs’ time will be required and what are each of their exact roles in the implementation?

3. Communication: how will you team be communicating with each other during the implementation process? Communication is a key component of successful project management.

4. Timeline: it’s important for all stakeholders to be aware of the general timeline outlining the key milestones during the project.

5. Migration: are you migrating content from an existing platform? What’s the plan for this look like? If not, what’s the plan for new content creation or syndication look like?

6. Testing: lastly, when all said is done, you need a plan for testing your new platform. Test everything--from learning paths to security and gamification. Establish a small focus group to test and provide feedback on different features and functionality. Most importantly, try to gauge whether the content you’ve deployed is accomplishing the learning objectives you and your team have established.

Tips For Successful Remote Training 

Increased product adoption, better customer retention, more up-sells... these are just a few of the benefits of a strong corporate training platform.

And the more successful you are at delivering effective remote training, the more your organization will reap these rewards.

The trick in delivering more effective remote training is providing learners with what they need--even if they don’t know they need it.

To get started, here are 5 tips to create a better training experience for your customers, employees, and partners.

1. Understand your learners better than they understand themselves

Your users want to be more successful with your product.

It’s that simple.

The way to make them more successful is to identify common points of confusion, bottlenecks, and gaps in training that prevent them from extracting the most value out of your product.

Use the platform’s comprehensive tracking and reporting to understand what their desired outcomes are--and then make it easier for them to get those desired outcomes.

2. Create a seamless on-boarding process

On-boarding is an opportunity for a great first impression.

It’s also an opportunity for churn...which we don’t want.

The quicker you can get stakeholders to that ‘aha’ moment, the more likely they are to keep coming back for more training.

Start by mapping out the entire on-boarding experience, eliminating unnecessary points of friction or potential bottlenecks.

Lay out everything from the welcome email to a user's first transaction (the aha moment).

Understand the milestones you’ll want a learner to reach during their on-boarding as well, then figure out how to help them reach these milestones.

3. Launch product training alongside product updates

Complex products often come with constant iterations and updates.

These updates require consistent education around best practices and specific changes to your product.

It’s critically important, however, to launch this education in parallel with the product update itself.

Failing to do so will create frustrated, unsuccessful stakeholders in your product.

Have L&D work closely with the product development team to stay up-to-date on any changes or iterations.

4. Add gamification to the mix

The best way to incentivize learning is through employee gamification.

Offer rewards, like points, badges and trophies to recognize different milestones.

It’s also important to have clear visualizations detailing how far your learners have come, as this will also incentivize more learning. Lastly, make sure you provide leaderboards to foster some healthy competition.

5. Launch frequent content iterations based on reporting & analytics

Perhaps the most important tip on this list--using advanced reporting and analytics, your team can make constant updates to the training based on what is working well and what is not.

This is a great opportunity to uncover gaps in your training or to identify content that may not be necessary in your program.

Perhaps there’s an area where most users are struggling and it's a signal to your team to update the content, or perhaps users aren’t watching certain videos and that’s your cue to remove them.

Lastly, it’s critically important to quantify the impact this training has on real business objectives. Is your churn rate decreasing? Are you seeing more product up-sells because of certain training? How are your sales reps performing? 

Launching a Successful Virtual Corporate Event or Conference

Perhaps your organization isn’t ready to commit to a 100% virtual-based remote training program--but the cancellations around your regular, in-person training and events are forcing you to consider other alternatives.

If that’s the case, a virtual event may be the solution you need.

And no, we’re not just talking about webinars or podcasts, but rather a truly comprehensive collection of live training and collaboration from subject matter experts in your organization and industry.

Virtual events are perhaps the quickest and easiest way to:

• Position your organization as a trustworthy authority 
• Grow your audience and revenue rapidly 
• Build relationships with industry experts and influencers

Here are 6 tips on launching a successful, virtual corporate event: 

1. Have a unique hook

For your virtual event to stand out, it needs to offer a unique value proposition. Are you offering something that hasn’t been done before? Are your speakers world renowned? Is your topic controversial? 

This is true for any type of online content you produce: in order for it to stand out from the crowd, it either needs to be much better than anything else in terms of quality, OR much more unique than anything else.

2. Warm up your audience with pre-event offers

Start generating excitement through Facebook groups, email, or simply word-of-mouth, but let your content speak for itself. Start releasing previews and teasers of your speakers’ content to start building up hype.

Add event opt-ins to existing content and make sure you highlight the expertise and background of your speakers. Lastly, include call-to-actions to any new content inviting readers to your online event.

3. Leverage influencers’ networks for promotion

One or two well known influencers or subject matter experts in your field can be a game changer for your virtual event.

Identify opportunities for collaboration and make sure to stress exactly what the influencer will get out of it. Traffic to their website? Leads for their product or service? 

Identify owners of well known Facebook groups too, then approach them to see if they would be interested in collaborating with you.

Keep in mind though: most of these folks are busy, so try to keep in mind what you can do to sweeten the deal for them.

4. Automate, automate, automate!

This should go without saying, but the last thing you want to worry about on the day of your event is basic communication with attendees and deployment of content.

Consider email automation to streamline certain communications like welcome emails, event reminders, follow-up emails, etc.

You might also want to connect with your speakers to see how much of their content can also be automated. 

Automate as much as possible so you can focus on the bigger picture: hosting a successful virtual event. 

5. Use FOMO to your advantage

Successful virtual events are marketed using the FOMO principle, or fear of missing out.

Speaking from personal experience, the logical part of your brain telling you that the content will most likely be recorded and available at a later time can be overridden by the the feeling that you might miss the opportunity.

Use this to your advantage, especially during pre-event communications

6. Repurpose as much of your event content as possible

Don't let your virtual event become just a one time thing, repurpose your speakers' content on YouTube, content upgrades on your website, or through ebooks.

Make sure to record sessions and make a mental note of which content your audience is responding to the most.

Get as much of the expertise your speakers have brought to your conference as possible. 

Remote Training FAQs 

How to Make Use of Raven360 During Travel Ban

Raven360 is an enterprise-grade, scalable remote training platform that helps fast-growing companies with high-complexity products painlessly train employees, customers, and partners. 

Request a demo or give us a call at 508.786.0500 to have one of our experts help you:

• Determine whether to offer free or paid training 
• Identify the right features and customization options
• Provide guidance and an implementation plan