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!
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
Here are 6 tips on launching a successful, virtual corporate event:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 is the process of instructing, teaching, or coaching in a virtual environment - one that does not require students to be physically present.
There are many ways to facilitate remote training. Make sure you choose the right platform for you and your organization. Ideally this platform will support on-demand learning and your students will have more control than traditional learning management systems.
Raven360 is an enterprise-grade, scalable remote training platform that helps fast-growing companies with high-complexity products painlessly train employees, customers, and partners.