How to Choose the Right LMS for Your Extended Enterprise Training

Your extended enterprise is a key component that contributes to the success of your business. If the training you provide them with is not managed and delivered correctly, you run the risk of poor performing partners and customers, which will affect your bottom line. You need to ensure the solution you plan to use best fits your extended enterprise training needs. Here are three key areas you need to consider when looking for an learning management system:

• Establish Goals and Objectives

The first step in finding the right LMS to fit your needs is determining the goals and objectives of your extended enterprise training program. This will help guide you towards the platform that matches the characteristics you require to deliver efficient training for your multiple audiences. Some questions you should be asking:

• Why do you need training for multiple audiences?
• Which audience will this be for?
• What do you want to accomplish with this LMS? 
  
  

Avoid vague, unclear, and general goals, such as:

• Increase sales
• Train employees more frequently
• Reduce training costs
  
  

Your goals should be clear, measurable, and achievable. For example:

• Reduce customer support inquiries by 40% with the implementation of a customer onboarding program
• Increase sales by 20% by training resellers on product information to better sell your offering. 
  
  

• Identify Your Audience

Determine your audience. Who are you looking to train? Having a sound understanding of who you need to train will help your decision-making process. Just like your content, your LMS needs to resonate with your external team. Here are some more questions you can ask yourself: 

• • What groups do you plan on training?
    
    Do you want to train partners, customers, or both? Each segment has its own unique training needs and requires a different training program. 
    
    

• • How old are your learners? 
    
    Millennials are famous for loving their phones, so if your trainees are in that age bracket, a good idea would be to opt for a mobile-responsive platform. 
    
    

• • What are your trainees’ skill levels?
    
    If your trainees are not very tech-savvy, this will affect the way they learn and how they use the LMS. You’ll want something easy to use and intuitive to increase engagement.
    
    
  • How many users are you looking to train?
    
    If your external audience is growing and you’re looking to train a large number of users, you will need an LMS that can scale with your business.
    
    
• Determine Essential Features

Carefully assess what features are necessary to achieve your specific goals. Here is a list of features that will help support extended enterprise training: 

• Sub-Platforms
• Integrations
• White-Labeling 
• Course Sharing
• Reporting
• Workflow Automation
• Multilingual Interface
  
  

We’ll cover each of these features in more detail in the next section. Other features you should consider to help make your life easier are: 

• Easy user management
• Intuitive interface
• Excellent customer support with dedicated account managers
• Fast and easy deployment 
• Enterprise-grade security
  
  

Request a call with our eLearning specialists today!

Key Extended Enterprise LMS Features You Should Look For

Standard LMS solutions have several great features to help you manage and deliver your training, but not all LMS providers are created equal. For extended enterprise training, there are specific features you should consider in your search that support training multiple audiences. These seven features will help you to effectively manage and deliver extended enterprise training to various groups of learners:

• Sub-Platforms
  
  
  • Your LMS should provide you with the ability to create multiple sub-platforms with unique branding and training content for each group of learners. It should also allow Admins to manage and navigate between these sub-platforms quickly and easily.
    
    
• White-Labeling
  
  
  • You want to be able to customize the look of each sub-platform to match your unique audience and branding. An extended enterprise LMS will provide you with white-labeling options from logos, custom colors, and email notifications, to personalized login pages to provide your learners with a more personalized and engaging experience.
    
    
• Course Sharing
  
  
  • Make sure your extended LMS platform offers course sharing features. It will allow you to share content with different sub-platforms with only a few clicks of a button. Courses in all platforms are automatically updated as soon as edits are made to the master course. You won’t have to rebuild your course for each of your various platforms and have to manually update them each time changes are made. This will save admins a lot of time and allow them to put more focus on creating the most effective training program.
    
    
• Integrations
  
  
  • Integrations with other software platforms such as CRM systems can simplify and streamline your processes and help ensure your learners are assigned to the right training. For example, for new customers that are added to Salesforce, you can automatically add them to your customer training sub-platform in your LMS. This prevents admins from having to enroll users into these courses manually and helps to ensure customers are assigned to relevant training sooner. 
    
    

• Reporting and Analytics
  
  
  • Be sure your LMS has advanced reporting capabilities to track learner progress, training performance, and to generate insights into your different platforms. 

• • You also want to make sure you can automate these reports by scheduling them directly to your team’s inboxes so everyone on your team can quickly stay on top of what’s going on with each audience. 
    
    
• Workflow Automation
  
  There are many different rules and trigger-based actions that can be set up. All you have to do is specify requirements that need to be met and determine what should take place as a result. Auto-enrollment and automated notifications are two essential features that support extended training:
  
  
• •  Auto-Enrollment
    

• • • • Ensuring learners outside of your organization are assigned to the appropriate training is stressful and tedious to manage. Auto-enrolling these users into relevant courses or learning paths based on their user properties such as completion status, title, location, or sub-platform they belong to will save you time and makes sure learners are instantly enrolled in relevant training.
        

• • Automated Notifications
    

• • • • It is inevitable that some partners and customers may have a hard time keeping track of their training obligations and forget to attend training. You can help your learners stay on top of their training requirements and increase course completion rates through automated training alerts. Automated email notifications can be sent out to users based on various properties such as users who did not start or failed a course, or those who have training that is about to expire for example. Your learners will be able to easily keep track of training they need to complete. 
        
        

• Multilingual Interface
  
  
  • Your extended audience may be located in various parts of the world and speak different languages. Make sure that your LMS supports a wide variety of languages and that each sub-platform can have its own language. Even if your extended audience can only speak one language, an LMS that supports multiple languages will be useful in case your business grows into other regions.
    

Final Thoughts

Extended enterprise training will enable your partners and customers to perform at a higher level of competency. However, the tool you choose to support this can have a significant factor in how successful your training will be. It is imperative that you invest the time to do your research to find a solution that has the features to support the training of multiple audiences and overall fits your needs. You will be able to manage your extended training initiatives better and ensure you are providing the most impactful training for your audiences.


Download our ebook, Extended Enterprise Training: What Are the Benefits and How to Implement It Successfully, and start your effective extended enterprise today!