However, if you’re yet to start utilizing it, the extended enterprise learning is the best time for you to implement it as you’re already behind. By the way, what is extended enterprise learning?
Well, it’s a training that is usually provided to learners outside of a company. It could be training targeted at channel distribution partners, resellers, suppliers, and customers.
One of its aims is to impact measurable behavioral change on non-employees of a specific organization. Also, it ensures that your extended enterprise has more knowledge of your company’s ethics, vision, products, and services.
Extended enterprise learning is a strategy that can help to improve sales and increase your organization’s profitability level.
The key benefits of extended enterprise learning
1. Lowered costs
One of the potential benefits of extended enterprise learning is that it can help to minimize business costs through reduced knowledge gap among customers and partners.
2. Create a stronger brand
Another benefit attached to offering extended enterprise training is that it can help you strengthen your brand. But how is that possible? Well, since all your partners and customers are going to receive this same kind of training on your services and products, it’s going to help your business.
It’ll help to support and strengthen your company’s image in the exact way you want it.
So, by giving out training to third parties, they tend to become better brand ambassadors for the products and services you offer. By so doing, they get to make your brand stronger and more visible in the industry.
3. Drive revenue
Asides from having extended enterprise training to strengthen your brand, it can also serve as a tool to drive more revenue to your organization. If extended enterprise learning is properly implemented, you’ll get the same results as investing in training for your employees.
When you give out training to your partners about your products and services, they get to understand a lot about your organization. And the more distributors get to know about your products and services, the more they can sell them.
Even customers who know more about your products are most likely satisfied, and can always get you referrals that matter for your business.
4. Reduced risk
Also, extended enterprise learning can help to reduce risk to your business. How? Well, it can make that happen by bringing both suppliers and vendors on the same page.
It ensures that both of them are capable of addressing your business needs. Apart from that, it also makes sure that both suppliers and vendors have adequate knowledge of your products or services and help to handle customers’ queries and demands.
With that, it helps to reduce your business risk as it becomes very difficult for your organization to lose customers.
5. Improve your business processes
In case you’re interested in improving your business processes, then extended enterprise learning is the right move for you. As soon as you start giving your customers and partners training through your LMS, then it becomes easy for you to track their learning experience.
It also becomes easier for you to provide them with a quality feedback loop to help them learn better. What that means is that you get the opportunity to educate your partners and improve your business processes at the same time.
How to implement extended enterprise learning in your organization
But how then do you implement extended enterprise learning to achieve all of the above-listed benefits? Here are a few tips that you can follow:
1. Determine your extended enterprise
I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it’s essential to determine who your target audience is before giving out your training.
Check whether you’re directing the training to your customers, chain distributors, vendors, and many more. And since these people are not your employees, there’s a need to adjust the training content in a way that suits your audiences.
2. Define your key performance indicator
Like any other learning, you must define your learning outcomes upfront before giving out training. However, the outcome of learning usually depends on your target audience.
For instance, if your target audience is your customers, then you’ll likely have different KPIs, including customer satisfaction and rate of conversion after the course.
3. Find out the capabilities of your LMS
Also, you must find out the capabilities of your learning management system. If at all, it wasn’t packaged for the purpose of extended enterprise learning, it can still handle the needs.
For your LMS to support all the requirements, it must be able to possess separate user’s profiles, different rules for individual learners, and separate content.
If it doesn’t have all of these features, you might need to consider opting for a better one.
4. Calculate the cost of training, and create a business case for approval
The next step is to calculate the associated cost of training. Are you having an in-house production of the training courses? Or is it that you outsource them? You must consider predicting the cost of implementing the training as it’ll require some investment from your part as an organization.
And that will make things easy for you when you’re trying to create your business case for approval from stakeholders. For better results, it’s advisable that you first run a pilot program before offering the idea to your extended enterprise for approval.
