How an Extended Enterprise LMS Can Help You Train Multiple Audiences

Most organizations have different types of audiences that extend outside of the business, known as an extended enterprise. These external audiences consist of customers and partners that require adequate training to help make your business a success, but they often get neglected. 

 

In today’s very competitive market, organizations cannot rely just on their internal employees, they also need to rely on their extended enterprise to help reach their goals. Educating your partners on your products or services will help them to better sell your offering to drive revenue for your organization. Training your customers on your offering will help them to get the most value from your solution, which reduces churn. This is why providing extended enterprise training is vital for any organization to remain competitive. 

With multiple types of audiences you need to deliver training to, it can be a challenge because each segment has their unique training needs. An extended enterprise LMS can help with this by allowing organizations to create different environments with their branding and training content  applicable to that specific group. It will enable businesses to deliver effective training to external audiences while making it easy for your team to manage. 

What is Extended Enterprise Training?

Extended enterprise training refers to the training of external business partners that contribute to the success of the business, such as customers and partners, specifically vendors, resellers, and consultants. The goal of extended enterprise training is to provide these segments with the resources they need to be more knowledgeable about your products, services, and processes. With extended enterprise training, your customers will be better equipped to use your offering, and partners will better sell your products. 

What are the Different Types of Extended Training?

There are many different types of extended training use cases an organization can offer for their external partners. Here are some of the most common examples:

• Customer training: This consists of training an organization’s customer base on the company’s products and services to help them use the offering more efficiently. For example, a software company that provides training courses, how-to tutorials, and FAQs for its customers on how to use their product. 
  
  
• Partner training: This is the training of resellers, dealers and agents, franchisees, and consultants to make them more knowledgeable on your offering to help drive more revenue for the organization. For example, a retail company that offers sales training and product guides for resellers to be more familiar with the product and how to better sell it.
  
  
  

How Can an Extended LMS Platform Support Extended Enterprise Training?

An extended LMS platform, such as SkyPrep, can help support the different training types, as mentioned above. It provides organizations with sub-platforms to help deliver distinct and relevant training for each audience, such as customers and partners, under one system.

• Manage Multiple LMS Platforms Under One System
  
  

Your organization may have diverse branches and brands, different sets of customers, and multiple types of partners that require their unique training. It can be incredibly messy to offer training to all of these audiences within a single platform. An extended LMS provides organizations with the ability to create multiple sub-platforms with unique branding and training content for these different segments. Admins are also able to manage and navigate between these sub-platforms quickly and easily.

For example, a software company that has multiple product lines with different branding can create a sub-platform for each of those product lines for its customers. They can customize the branding to match the various products and include training materials relevant to that line of business.

• Share Courses Across All Platforms With a Few Clicks

An extended LMS platform will offer course sharing features that allow you to share your content with your different platforms with only a few clicks of a button. This prevents you from having to rebuild your course from scratch for your various platforms, saving you time to focus on creating the most effective training program.

You can update your courses across platforms instantly when you make edits to your master course. Any changes to the master course will automatically be applied to the duplicate courses in all sub-platforms.

 

• Customize Sub-Platforms to Your Needs

You can customize the look of each sub-platform to match your unique audience and branding. You can easily customize each environment with white labeling options, from custom colors and logos to personalized login pages and email notifications to provide your learners with a more personal and engaging experience.

• Track and Report Learner Progress

An admin of the master platform can generate reports on all sub-platforms levels from the master level to track learner progress and performance at all levels. You can automate these reports by scheduling them directly to your inbox and other members of your organization so you can quickly stay on top of what’s going on with each audience.

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Benefits of an Extended LMS

Extended enterprise training through an LMS will provide your partners and customers with the knowledge and information they need to succeed. Training your customers on your products will make them more knowledgeable on how to use your offering more efficiently, which will help to improve user adoption and reduce customer churn. Properly educating your partners will help them to better sell your products and grow your business.

As you can see, providing adequate training for your external business partners will help your business in the long run. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits you can achieve when you provide extended enterprise training.

• Establish a Unique Learner Experience

The ability to customize your sub-platforms to reflect your brand and tailor it to your audience’s needs will provide their unique voice and feel. It also creates a stronger brand as your partners and customers will receive the same education on your products. It improves consistency, enhances the company’s image, and turns your partners into brand advocates.

• Increase Your Organization’s Revenue

Providing effective training for partners and customers will enable them to perform better. Your partners will know more about your products, processes, and how to best sell them, which will drive sales. Customers will know how to use your products more efficiently, which leads to higher retention, reduced costs from less support, and you may have another stream of revenue through customer referrals.  

• Minimize Cost

There is no need to purchase full licenses for each sub-platform you require. Each sub-platform acts as a subsidiary, and all core features and functionalities are provided from the parent platform.

• Eliminate Redundancy

You can instantly share courses to each of your sub-platforms and keep your course content up-to-date across all platforms through live synchronization. This will significantly reduce repetitive tasks and manual effort, saving you time and energy to focus on other high priority business work.

• Generate Insights from Each Platform

You can generate insights and reports across all of your sub-platforms, not just from the master platform. You can drive operational decisions and identify areas of improvement within different branches of your organization and clients.

When you start training your partners and customers on an LMS, you will be able to track their performance and results better. Again, you can see if there are any issues you need to address and find ways to support their training needs better.

Final Thoughts

Providing extended enterprise training to customers and partners will help to increase your revenue and retain your customers. However, it can be difficult and messy to train multiple types of audiences under a single platform. An extended LMS can solve this challenge by providing various environments with its branding and training content to provide tailored and relevant training based on each audience’s needs. 

 

Learn more about how SkyPrep can help you deliver extended enterprise training to properly educate and onboard your customers and partners. 

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