6 Tips to Help Keep Your Employees Engaged with Product Training

Employees that are well-educated on your services and products, are able to offer a better customer experience to your clients. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be tough to get employees excited and keep them engaged about product knowledge training. When training is not directly linked to their personal career goals, it can cause lack of interest and employees may find it hard to prioritize training into their busy schedules. In this article we will look at some ways in which you can create an effective training strategy, eliminate employee engagement roadblocks and ensure product training is always made a priority.

Why Is Employee Engagement Important?

A solid product training strategy will create a better understanding of the entire organization for your employees. To help employees realize the value of product knowledge training and how it is attributed to them and the organization as a whole, we must first identify why employee engagement is important. 

Delivering the right training content to your employees will make them more productive in their roles but it will also assist them in:

• Recognizing the most appropriate opportunities to engage with clients
• Communicating with existing and potential clients about how your products or services will positively affect their target results
• Troubleshoot any client issues effectively and with ease

When employees are truly engaged in training, your organization will be able to uphold a superior brand image, while seeing an increase in profitability and productivity. Now, let’s take a look at how you can create training content that will keep your employees motivated to learn.

1. Be Clear About The Benefits

Product training should not solely consist of demonstrating how a product works. It should also teach employees how and why the product matters and is useful to a client’s day-to-day life. Additionally, let employees know how they will benefit from this training on a personal level and in correspondence to their current roles. Do not hesitate to promote your training internally. A good idea would be to send targeted emails to various teams or groups, outlining what they should expect to learn and why it will specifically benefit their role. Briefly mention the product training that will be covered in the program, along with what the expected outcomes of the training are.

2. Customize Courses And Learning Paths

Avoid creating general training courses, instead opt for courses relevant to the specific roles within the organization. It is important that the content speaks their language. It should be focused on teaching each role such as your sales or marketing team, what they need to know about the product or service. For example, your training content for your customer service team should be created around common questions that clients ask. Your LMS should also be able to show relevant and curated training courses based on the employee’s role. Content that is easy to find and navigate, will keep employees engaged and motivated.

3. Keep Content Bite-Sized

Employee training courses are most engaging when they are kept short and sweet. Break up big chunks of content and keep the format simple and easy to digest. Following the principles of micro-learning is a good starting point. Design your training modules to cover one topic at a time. Courses that are packed with too much information will have you losing your employees’ focus and interest. They will end up not paying attention past a certain point and dropping off the program, which in turn combats the goal you want to achieve.

4. Make Employee Training Interactive

Make training modules interactive by including quizzes, practice scenarios, multiple-choice or questions that require a short response answer. These touch-points will help employees stay focused on the information at hand and create stronger knowledge retention on the topic.

5. Utilize Gamification 

Eliminate the days of employee training being presumed as boring and tedious. Keep training fun by implementing the use of gamification. Create an objective for learners, give clear directions, and include the resources they need in order to complete it. Give them something to look forward to once they get to the end. For instance, points can be awarded once they have completed a section. Another gamification technique you can use is to include a leadership board where employees can compare their scores with colleagues. This creates an element of fun and healthy competition amongst all learners. Badges and certificates should also be awarded for every level that is completed. 

6. Include Various Learning Formats

Reading page after page of information gets boring fast. Instead of loading up each learning module full of text, consider adding in other ways information can be delivered such as podcasts, videos, infographics, voice-overs and attention-grabbing images. Having variety with how your information is being presented and delivered will not only help keep your training course interesting but additionally cater to various learning styles.

A strong product training program will make employees better at what they do. SkyPrep LMS elevates your employee training programs while assisting you in reaching your overall training goals. To learn more about how we can help, request a call and one of our product specialists will assist you shortly.