5 Tips When Comparing The Costs And Benefits Of Extended Enterprise Learning

Igor Crnatovic
Summary: The most powerful part of running a formalized extended enterprise learning strategy with an LMS is that your organization can accurately track and measure the benefits it’s having on your business.

Extended Enterprise Learning: Cost Vs. Benefits

Return On Investment (ROI) is a critical metric an organization needs to track when delivering training to their extended enterprise. More than just a number, it puts into perspective the success of the extended enterprise learning being delivered, highlights areas for improvement, and shines a light on the overall health of your training programs. To help your organization discover the cost versus benefits of its extended enterprise training program, here are 5 tips to follow.

eBook Release: The Ultimate Guide To Delivering Extended Enterprise Training For Business Growth
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The Ultimate Guide To Delivering Extended Enterprise Training For Business Growth
Discover how you can find the best LMS to help you achieve extended enterprise training success.

1. Record The Numbers Before Implementation

Before you implement your extended enterprise training program with an LMS, it’s essential to establish how your organization is currently performing. These numbers can be used as a benchmark to compare and measure the success of your new learning program. To discover these baselines, you’ll need to collate past and current statistics related to the areas you want to improve. For example, let’s say your organization wants to reduce the number of support requests placed by your partners. On a high level you may know that the support team is dealing with an overwhelming amount of tickets, but to accurately know the training’s impact, you need to get specific numbers. For example, gather relevant data, like how many queries does the average partner who has not received any training log over a certain time frame or what’s the average number of partner queries the support team receives in a given week. You can go an extra step by asking the support team to collect data on the most common support queries. With this valuable information, you now have numbers that you can measure the training’s success against once implemented.

2. Set KPIs For Your Extended Enterprise Learning

In an earlier chapter, we referenced the need to set concrete KPIs and training goals for each of your extended enterprise learning audiences. When it comes to measuring success, your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the main metric you can use to determine if your training program is performing as it should or better or worse than expected. Every audience should have its own distinct overall KPI and every course or group of courses should have its own KPIs too. If we take the above example, reduce support requests from partners, there are a few KPIs that can, and should, be established. The first should be on a course level where, for example, your target is to have a 90% completion rate for the partner training certificate program. For the training and audience as a whole, the KPI could be to have a 40% reduction in recurrent and easily answered queries. For your customer education program, the KPI could be to achieve a 70% completion rate for your customer onboarding training. And, in turn, have an overall goal of a 20% increase in customer retention over the first year. A few months after implementation, when you’ve got measurable data, you can compare and contrast your benchmarks with your KPIs performance to see if your training program has achieved your desired results.When setting KPIs it’s important to be realistic with numbers and timelines. If you get input from team members and request advice from your LMS vendor, you’ll be able to set accurate and achievable goals for your organization.

3. Use The LMS Reports

Once your training has been implemented, it's time to start measuring its performance. Your LMS reports are your most valuable tool at this stage. Depending on what data you need, you should use reporting to track metrics like learner progression, exam results, course histories, and completion rates. These will give you a comprehensive view of your learners activity and achievements throughout the training as well as your audience's overall engagement rate. It's important to remember, reporting isn't a one and done practice. It’s smart to deep dive into your reports regularly to gain true insight into the training process and how your learners are reacting to it.

4. Compare Your Data

Throughout the training process, you can start to collect your reports for your extended enterprise learning—in your LMS and your internal systems—and start to observe the performance of your training. You can then begin to compare the customers and partners who have engaged with training to those who opted not to train, and the benchmark data you collected before training began. You'll be able to see if those who trained are putting in fewer support tickets than those who didn't receive any training. Or if your retention rate is higher in the ones who've been training versus those who haven't. From here you can go a step further and start comparing the time and money spent training to the results you actually achieved, to identify the true cost and benefits of the training program.

5. Don’t Just Rely On Numbers

Although it’s extremely important to put your organization’s training impact into numbers, that isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to measuring its success. The feedback you receive is another crucial aspect to observe when looking at the benefits. You can collect feedback from your learners in several different ways within your LMS. They can leave reviews on the courses that let you know how helpful they found them. There’s also an LMS forum where your audiences can converse and discuss the outcomes they experienced from completing courses. Finally, you can also survey your learners and ask for an honest evaluation of the training. By doing this you’ll get an impression of how beneficial the training is to your extended enterprise audiences. This feedback will also give you a mountain of invaluable information to sink your teeth into. It should offer you insight into where training is going well and where it isn’t exactly up to scratch, thus enabling you to edit and adapt it so it has a higher chance of meeting your business’s goals. Gauging the results of an extended enterprise learning strategy may take a little time and effort, but when done right it gets the best results for your organization. By continuously measuring, comparing, and adapting your learning, your organization has an increased chance of supporting your extended enterprise’s overall success. There you have it. By now you should have learned that a Return On Investment (ROI) is a critical metric an organization needs to track when delivering training to their extended enterprise. For more substantial insights on how to evaluate the costs vs. the benefits, download this eBook The Ultimate Guide To Delivering Extended Enterprise Training For Business Growth.

Extended enterprise training provides your customers, partners, resellers, contractors, and distributors with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to prosper, and in turn, help your business succeed. In the webinar Fuel Your Business’s Growth With Extended Enterprise Training., sponsored by eLearning Industry and presented by Phily Hayes, LearnUpon's Outbound Sales Manager will elaborate on how to discover the importance of extended enterprise learning, how to build a training strategy with an LMS, and how you can use it to fuel your business’s growth.

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