HR and L&D professionals face countless challenges. LinkedIn published a report in 2020 discussing some of the top challenges, and unsurprisingly, they were:
Online learning platforms help businesses overcome all these challenges by allowing HR and L&D professionals to get organized about their training programs. They serve as a central hub for your training material, enable you to import courses and create new ones, automate the onboarding program by integrating with your HR software, track learner progress, and provide analytics to measure engagement and demonstrate ROI.
Besides HR and L&D professionals, customer success professionals also face challenges that can be supported by online learning platforms including:
Online learning platforms that contain customer education courses help turn customers into brand advocates. Customer education also helps in increased product usage and adoption. In short, online learning platforms help with customer education as well as employee training, and help boost the overall performance of your organization.
One of the biggest advantages of online training platforms is employee skills development. Employees can receive onboarding training, role-based training, compliance training, and soft skills training all in one place. The skills they acquire improve their performance in their current roles and make them eligible for taking on more responsibilities in the future.
According to a study conducted by McKinsey, sales teams that receive customized training are 1.3 times more likely to outperform their peers. Your online learning platform serves as the primary resource for your sales team to gain more knowledge about customers as well as the products they sell. Sales managers and their teams access courses on the platform, take live, online instructor-led classes, learn at their preferred pace with pre-recorded videos, articles, podcasts, ebooks, and audiobooks, and take assessments to measure information retention. The training material on the platform equips them with the skills they need to improve the quality of the conversations they have with the customers and close more deals.
By offering customer education through an online learning platform, the customer success team can preemptively address the needs of the customer. By addressing customer needs in advance, the support team can reduce the number of new support requests they get every week.
Online learning platforms support customer success teams by giving them a place to create and host customer-facing courses. These courses can include full-length tutorials on products, highlight different features of products, and how to use the product to achieve goals. Some of these courses may also focus on improving the skill set of the primary users of the product.
The customer success team uses these courses to increase customer engagement and drive product adoption. Customer-facing courses are incredibly useful when it comes to products that have a diverse user base or products that constantly innovate with new updates. The customer success team uses these courses to increase customer engagement, drive product adoption, and educate customers at scale.
Companies such as Reddit and Quantum Metric use WorkRamp to offer customer education to their customers. They offer free online training in the form of short courses that teach learners how to get the most out of their products.
One of the core responsibilities of the customer support team is to keep the customers satisfied and informed, and that is reflected in CSAT scores. Online learning platforms offer an at-scale solution for support professionals to sharpen their communication, patience, empathy, active listening, and product-knowledge skills. Armed with these skills, your customer support team can respond to customer queries quickly and resolve challenges.
Apple, Amazon, and Costco have the highest CSAT scores in the retail industry. All three of these companies use online learning platforms to train their customer support representatives, which goes to show the impact of training your employees with the help of the right tools.
Employees rate opportunities to learn and grow as the number one driver for a great work culture, so developing a strong learning program is a good tactic to improve talent retention. By investing in an online learning platform and offering custom, role-specific training to your employees, you show them that you take their learning and development seriously.
Training platforms provide the necessary technology for businesses to develop talent through upskilling. Employees become better at their current roles and can become eligible for other roles within the organization. They can move into leadership positions or switch to a different role within the company. Upskilling can prevent employee turnover and reduce your cost per hire.
Besides helping you boost employee performance and customer retention, online learning platforms have many benefits that make them an essential part of the technology stack used at your organization. They keep the efforts of your company’s learning and development team efficient and organized. These platforms are compatible with the software programs generally used in most businesses, accessible to remote workers, scalable, and have reporting options that help you track user progress and find the ROI on your training budget.
Modern online learning platforms are compatible with desktop and mobile devices and can be accessed from anywhere. This means that employees have access to training at work, from home, and even while traveling. According to Gallup, roughly 45% of employees in the US work remotely either full time or a few days a week. In a survey conducted by Buffer, 97% of the participants said that they’d like to work remotely and recommend remote work to others. With so many people working from home, virtual learning through online learning platforms is a great way to make training accessible to everyone.
Online training reduces your carbon footprint as it eliminates the need for paper handouts. Everything from courses and assessments to feedback can be done online. Even certificates of completion are issued online.
54% of employees believe that automation can help them save 240 hours annually.
The best online training platforms allow you to automate everything from employee onboarding to compliance training. You can define rules addressing who gets assigned what kind of training based on job role.
Whenever there is a new onboarding class, the HR system will transfer their information to the learning platform, and the learning platform will assign them courses based on their job titles. You will not have to download a spreadsheet, upload it to the platform, or assign training to each learner individually.
For compliance training, you will not need to keep track of the expiry date of every employee’s compliance certificate, as the learning platform will do it for you.
The top online training platforms come with built-in integrations with major human resource information systems (HRISs), CRMs, and other tools. They also support third-party integrations, so they fit seamlessly into your technology stack. You do not have to change anything about the way you work to start using these platforms.
Online training platforms enable teams to train multiple batches of learners at the same time. Once the training material and learning paths have been established, learners can be enrolled in bulk and trained in batches without the you having to plan the training for each batch.
Through LMS learning analytics, training platforms give you the ability to track course completion rates, learner progress, active learners, and other metrics to measure the effectiveness of your training program. With the help of the built-in reporting options, it is easier to analyze data, detect patterns, and take steps to increase learner engagement.
Online training platforms are especially beneficial for growing businesses because of their cost effectiveness. These platforms allow you to train employees at scale so you don’t have to set aside huge budgets to train your teams. Even if you include live online classes in your training program, it still costs you less than hiring an instructor to visit your location and deliver classes in a physical classroom.
Training material on online training platforms is available in the form of smaller, digestible lessons, sometimes referred to as microleaning. Even the longer courses can be converted into bite-sized training. You can add small quizzes and tests at the end of each lesson. The lessons can be revisited at any time. All of this makes for better information retention because each learner can learn at their own pace and take more time with specific parts of the training material.
WorkRamp is a fully customizable, online learning platform for businesses of all sizes. It integrates with all major CRMs, HRISs, analytics tools, communication tools, and scheduling tools through first-party and third-party integrations. It helps in new course creation through built-in templates, and gives you everything you need to create highly effective training programs for your learners. With WorkRamp as your online learning platform, you get the following benefits:
Want to learn how WorkRamp can transform your business? Book a demo to connect with a solution expert and discover how WorkRamp can address your challenges and support your goals.
