Increasing Use Of Extended Enterprise Learning For Improved Collaboration And Business Revenues

Increasing Use Of Extended Enterprise Learning For Improved Collaboration And Business Revenues
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Summary: Training extended workforce including internal employees, partners, and customers at different stages of a relationship with the organization is crucial for organizational success. Businesses investing in LMSs embrace the use of existing infrastructure that proves to be an asset for wider audiences.

Extended Enterprise Learning: How To Use It To Improve Collaboration And Business Revenues

What seems to be more important; Learning and Development of employees within an organization, or deployment of a robust Learning Management System (LMS) at the workplace? With digitization, both have evolved at a very fast pace. Today, learning is as important as the development of an employee within an organization. Without learning, the prime purpose of an organization to generate revenues from the proficient workforce will gradually come to a halt.

Using an enterprise LMS, organizations can initiate the delivery of engaging eLearning programs that are aligned with diverse corporate goals. An LMS, when used for the extended workforce, holds the potential to be used by every employee, as well as suppliers, partners, and customers.

Significant Drivers Behind The Extended Enterprise Learning Approach

Organizations strive to create unique avenues to impart training that educates and inspires its workforce. For this, training initiatives have to often extend beyond the confines of the organization to create an effective and personalized way of learning. The capability to expand knowledge and skills among veterans, customers, suppliers, channel partners, new hires, and even temporary workers is crucial to the success of modern organizations.

Therefore, enterprises are adopting ways to expand the footprints of learning inside as well as outside the organization. Using an LMS to train extended enterprise has left an incredible impact on businesses and it is paying off for them in a lucrative way.

Extended learning program increases the overall satisfaction of the external partners. The extended workforce connects more with the organization with an access to the latest learning content. They are able to apprise themselves on newer products as well as schemes for their prospective clients. This increases their overall work satisfaction and improves the sales figures as well.

The key benefit of an extended learning program is that organizations are also able to understand and manage available external manpower. They are able to ascertain the number of trained manpower at all times – helping them achieve business targets. It is easier for organizations to align their training efforts as per the needs of the external partner– motivating excellent performers with suitable incentives and creating re-enforcements for those who could not perform. Organizations that impart training to extended workforce always want to ensure that they are catering to the personalized needs of customers and partners. Let us discuss few approaches that improve the scope of extended enterprise learning:

1. Increasing Usage Of Mobile-Enabled Learning Platforms

External employees may or may not be sitting at their desktops. So, there comes the need to use personalized mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to enable learning on the go. By leveraging mobile technology, organizations can achieve best-in-class training outcomes for their extended employees.

2. Training Customers For Better Product Knowledge

Today, it has become crucial for businesses to train their customers on how to use the product they just purchased, resulting in optimal product usage along with increased product subscriptions and renewal requests. To increase business revenues, it is essential to train the customers in the right way. Therefore, an extended LMS helps sales employees to train their customers from diverse locations, which eventually leads to improved customer satisfaction along with reduced costs of customer support.

3. Incorporate Social Learning

Knowing the significance of social learning at the workplace, several organizations adopt this approach for internal as well as extended personnel to support maximum interaction between the peers. With the support of social networking tools such as forums, wikis, and blogs, a huge impact is reflected in individual performance, learner engagement, and overall business productivity.

Whether it is about conducting a team meeting in the virtual space or connecting with project heads from different locations, social learning encourages team participation and collaboration by bringing different people together on a single platform.

In today’ fast pacing world, extended enterprise LMS has proved to be a fruitful addition to an organization’s existing LMS. Training extended workforce including internal employees, partners, vendors, and customers at different stages of a relationship with the organization is crucial for organizational success. Businesses investing in LMS embrace the use of existing infrastructure that proves to be an asset for wider audiences. An LMS for the extended enterprise can aid your organization make profits, mitigate costs, improve learner collaboration, and the overall pace of eLearning and development.

Suggested Further Reading: Key Technologies Enable Extended Enterprise Learning Success

Originally published on August 20, 2018