The key to expanding an organization’s customer training program is building an effective business case so your stakeholders can understand the cost and benefit of expanding your training program. For example, a strong business case addresses the pain points, describes the desired solution, provides potential cost savings and/or emphasizes the potential revenue generation—topics that your stakeholders may not have an understanding of without a formal business case.
With our first-hand experience helping many global training organizations deliver and expand their training programs, we compiled a list of the most effective benefits that drive stakeholder approval. This highlights topics you should focus on as you prepare your business case for building or expanding your training program:
Quicker time-to-value
The faster students learn how to use your software or product, the faster they can experience ROI. ReadyTech’s online training software speeds up this time-to-ROI, which allows the rest of your organization to cross-sell additional products and services sooner, as well as accelerating customer success and improving customer satisfaction.
And there is no question that the customer experience in crucial. Research shows that as customer satisfaction grows, so does an organization’s revenue growth.
Convenient & interactive delivery
Student engagement can be defined as one’s willingness, need, desire and compulsion to participate in the learning process. And engagement is vital to a student’s success.
Because of this, ReadyTech’s virtual classroom provides instructors with the features—such as over the shoulder view, inactivity monitor, messaging, lab timer, whiteboard, breakout room and screen sharing—to ensure that students are engaged during the virtual class. These features help to replicate in-person training in a virtual environment and allows (bring focus to over-the-shoulder-view to end the paragraph).
Take ReadyTech’s virtual training software for a spin.
And when students are motivated to do well, invested in their desire to learn and willing to exert effort, they are more likely to be engaged in their education.
Lowers training costs
Virtual learning is a more economical alternative to in-person training. In fact, when you compare in person training vs. online training, companies can save between 30-70% by switching on online training. With virtual instructor-led training (VILT), students can participate from anywhere as long as they have an Internet connection. This eliminates travel and hotel costs.
In addition to lowering training costs, VILT also reduces the amount of technical support that end users need. And this training not only lowers overhead costs for technical support, but better trained users are more likely to adapt to newer, more advanced product versions.
Reaches a bigger student population
With the increase in remote teams comes the challenge of providing effective training to employees all over the world. Online training increases your training department’s delivery capacity—without the need for physical facilities or travel expenses. Because more students can take part in the training at one time, your training department can reach bigger student populations.
Integrates your products into your customer’s processes
Online training helps your training department integrate your company’s products into your customer’s workflows and internal processes. This creates a strong integration between your products and your customer’s processes, which improves customer retention. And higher customer retention results in tangible economic value. According to studies done by Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to an increase in profits of 25% to 95%.
Increases training inclusion rates
In some instances, customers may purchase a product but can’t afford training because of the travel costs—or an in-person training facility has a waiting list to deliver the necessary training. For these instances, training departments can offer virtual training as an alternative delivery method. In the first instance, virtual training removes travel costs so customers with tight budgets are not limited by financial resources. And in the second instance, virtual training is not limited by physical training space, which increases your training department’s delivery capacity and removes waiting lists.
Building an effective business case is vital when expanding your training program. Be sure to prove the value of your training program by discussing the six topics above with your stakeholders combined with specific, measurable results.
