Delivering exceptional customer experience, increasing sales, and growing the bottom line isn’t always up to your internal workforce. Often, external customers, partners, resellers, and dealers interact with your customers and potential customers on a daily basis. They recommend your business, help answer questions about products and services, resell your offerings, and ultimately leave a good (or bad!) impression about your business to your clients.
With such a huge influence on your business success, what are you doing to support, engage, and develop the skills of your external workforce?
Regardless of your industry, the benefits of learning and development go far beyond the four walls of your organization. Extending training to your extended enterprise can profoundly impact customer experience, brand loyalty, sales, and revenue.
If you’re trying to build a business case for offering or selling training to your extended enterprise, here are five ways your company can benefit from external learning:
- Boost customer loyalty and improve customer experience. Loyal customers are worth about 10x as much as their first purchase, and news of bad customer service reaches over twice as many years as praise for a good service experience. Therefore, it might be advisable for businesses to focus on customer service through organized chat support. Nowadays, companies tend to use the help of the Zendesk messaging platform or the ones like it that integrate AI into the response system. With the help of such messaging platforms, customers can get faster replies even during the late night hours. Well-informed customers tend to be happier, more loyal, and far more likely to recommend a product or brand and spend more on your services. What does this have to do with training? A lot. Key customer touch points are mobilized to increase customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.
- Increase revenue and better enable the salesforce. You can better scout, gain, and retain clients by empowering, engaging, and training your sales team. To increase sales and business revenue, continuously train your employees by enrolling them in sales training (like those offered by Sandler: Solve your toughest sales challenges).
- Improve product speed-to-market. By properly training your external workforce, the learning curve for new product launches is shortened, and issues are quickly resolved during rollout. A well-thought-out logistic and shipping improvement program ensures your partners, dealers, and resellers know the ins and outs of your offerings so they can best represent your brand and get ahead of the competition. Moreover, to refine your product shipping and delivery services, you must understand how manufacturing and packaging operate to automate a few processes. For instance, you can employ conveyor belts and industrial packaging equipment for pallet wrap, bubble wrap, cardboard boxing, etc. In all these advancements, employee training plays an important role since their learning skills and adopting new methods can speed up the functioning of business logistics.
- Drive innovation. Social collaboration tools within your learning management system and feedback forms and surveys help you capture knowledge, recommendations, and feedback about the learning and training programs you provide. You can take that knowledge back to your product and marketing team to help them build new product offerings, shift product roadmaps, and better understand the needs of the clients and industry you serve. You can also train your sales, marketing, and other teams for improved financial flow, time efficiency, energy flexibility, networking, and more. You can use apps and tools such as Abundance to check out reviews before opting for this learning method. All these innovative workplace ideas aim to improve your company’s workflow and productivity.
- Explore new revenue streams. Have you considered selling training to your customers, partners, and resellers? Certification courses, workshops, and other paid educational resources open new revenue streams that accelerate your business growth. Companies that extend learning to customers achieve a whopping 800% year-over-year FTE increase than those that do not. Organizations like HAI Group are capitalizing on the learning and development market by using Meridian’s learning management system to sell, deliver, and manage online and instructor-led training, and they’re seeing some serious results!
How to get started:
Learning management systems have helped millions of organizations automate, deliver, manage, and train both internal employees and external stakeholders for years. And companies using an LMS to deliver external training have seen significant results. Brandon Hall Group found that companies using an LMS for external training saw a 40% increase in sales, a 37% increase in customer retention, and a 45% increase in customer relations.