What Is Extended Enterprise Training?
Extended enterprise is the view that your organization's success is dependent on an entire network, not just your internal workforce. This network consists of your external groups, including your customers, partners, resellers, contractors, and distributors. Extended enterprise training aims to provide each one of these groups with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to prosper, and in turn, help your business succeed.
Your Extended Enterprise Audience
There’s no one-size-fits-all training strategy for businesses. Every organization is unique. Each will have different audiences that make up their extended enterprise and its own reasons for wanting to train them. However, there are two main audiences that businesses commonly train. Note: Some include employee training as part of the extended enterprise. This makes sense. It plays a huge part in your organization’s success. Better trained employees elevate the Customer Experience, deliver a higher quality of support, and increase your business’s chances of success. But, that’s a huge topic in itself (in fact, we’ve written a whole eBook on the subject), so we’re just going to focus on audiences external to organizations. The first audience to concentrate on is customers. Customer education happens in a number of ways, but it’s only in the last few years that organizations have started to see the value of developing thoughtful, formalized training programs for their customers.
A great training strategy nurtures your customers through every stage of the journey. From the moment they buy or sign-up, they should start to receive onboarding training. Then, throughout their lifecycle, they should be provided with product training to keep them up-to-date on new features and best practice advice. When done right, customer training is an indispensable strategy. It’s known to help with product adoption, enable you to upsell, and also encourage your customers to stick around for longer. Second is partner training. Used here as a bit of an umbrella term, how organizations define partners can vary. Specifically, we’re referring to audiences like resellers, contractors, franchisees, and dealers. Akin to customer training, partner training involves onboarding new members, sales enablement, and product training to enhance their knowledge on new launches or upcoming updates. Additionally, it often entails a certification process to ensure your partners are authorized. Training your partners is a powerful strategy as your organization is providing them with the tools they need to excel. You’re improving their product knowledge, mindshare, and most significantly, their ability to sell, thus building a stronger network that helps your business grow faster.
Training With An Extended Enterprise LMS
Now that we understand what the extended enterprise is and the types of training needed, it’s time to outline how your organization should train these audiences. An extended enterprise LMS, otherwise known as a Learning Management System, is a platform that enables your organization to train all of your audiences through a single solution. This is made possible by enabling your business to set up learning portals. These portals are essentially distinct learning environments that you can brand and configure for each one of your audiences. So, when you, as an administrator, log in to your LMS, you’re able to manage all of your audiences within one solution. And your learner is able to log in to their specific portal, which contains content and courses that are tailored to their training needs.
Why You Should Use An Extended Enterprise LMS
Along with the standard benefits an LMS brings to your business—reaching remote learners, automating tasks, centralizing your knowledge base—using an extended enterprise LMS helps your organization:
1. Train Multiple Audiences Under One System
It’s a familiar story for so many organizations. They have 2, 3 or even 4 different Learning Management Systems being used to train their different audiences. One for their employees, another for their customers, the list goes on. An extended enterprise or multi-tenancy LMS helps you clean up the clutter. Instead of having several platforms on the go, you can train as many different audiences as you need. Each audience is in their own unique environment within one LMS. This means that not only is it easier for your teams to manage the training being delivered but also your organization isn’t investing in numerous solutions that all do the same thing. You have one LMS that trains every audience instead.
2. Scale How Your Organization Manages Its Training
With a good extended enterprise LMS, you’ll be able to scale how your organization trains. As your LMS can manage several audiences with each having a potentially high number of learners, you can train a growing number of people quickly and easily.
3. Create Environments For Every One Of Your Audiences
As every audience your business needs to train is different, your LMS should also give you the capability to tailor the learning experience to suit each one. Extended enterprise LMSs allow you to do just that. You can have multiple portals that have their own unique look and feel with your chosen branding and URL. Within these unique environments, you can then add the course content and resources that best suit each audience and even assign different people within your organization to manage different portals.
Getting Started With Extended Enterprise Learning
With extended enterprise training being such an obvious win, it’s vital you get started on implementing a strategy for your business. It not only impacts your customers' and partners' success, but it also helps your overall organization thrive. All you have to do is plan your strategy and find the best LMS to help you achieve extended enterprise training success. To learn how to implement an Extended Enterprise Learning Strategy, this eBook: "The Ultimate Guide To Delivering Extended Enterprise Training For Business Growth" is a great place to start; especially, if you are looking to dive deep into the content.
Up the value of your extended enterprise with an LMS and learn all the tricks by checking the Webinar: "Fuel Your Business’s Growth With Extended Enterprise Training."
