Scaling Online Learning to Your Entire Business Ecosystem

If you drew a true organizational chart representing all the individuals that make your business successful, it probably wouldn’t stop at the walls of your corporate headquarters. Not only are there employees working in your office and remotely, but there is often an “extended enterprises" comprised of dealers, retailers, partners, resellers, and distributors that help get your products and services to market.

Every component of your organization -- whether internal or external -- requires some level of training. Investing in online learning technology can help your organization create a robust extended enterprise training program that enables you to reach more learners while reducing costs, speeding time to market, and improving content accessibility for learners.

Online learning technology can also equip your organization with the tools needed to deliver the same learning content to multiple groups of learners. For example, you could distribute the same, but slightly customized, learning content to different groups of resellers outside the organization without creating content from scratch each time. This saves your organization a lot of time, money, and frustration.

Different Learners in the Ecosystem

As mentioned above, there are a number of learner groups to consider when developing your online learning technology blueprint -- starting with internal employees all the way through to external channels. Here are ways to engage with each extended enterprise learner group:

• Employees: Quickly develop in-depth training, education, and certification programs for employees on the products and services your organization offers. This ensures each employee is knowledgeable and possesses up-to-date skillsets. Your organization might also want to use the same online learning technology to deliver important resources or security training to employees and able to track engagement.
  
  
• Customers: Connect with customers on new levels with engaging learning experiences designed to develop relationships and increase customer satisfaction. Leverage your learning technology through all stages of the customer lifecycle -- from acquisition through to retention.
  
  
• Partners: Create interactive learning experiences for partners in minutes, and then deliver important information and training on products, services, and strategy.
  
  
• Resellers: Distribute content, education and training materials directly to resellers, ensuring they have the latest information on products and services.
  
  
• Distributors: For organizations who are part of the supply chain and focus on distributing products on your behalf, ensure they have the latest marketing, training and educational material so they stay updated on your corporate standards.
  
  
• Dealers: Enterprise businesses which rely on a dealer model to sell products and services on behalf can leverage online learning to quickly stay trained and educated.

Online learning technology can help your organization streamline the delivery of extended enterprise training content to all of these different learner groups and enable seamless content updates. Thought Industries CEO Barry Kelly explains, “With online learning, now you have the ability to allow individuals in the extended enterprise to make their own rules on how to interact with the content.”  And all the while, they can be “continually drip-fed information and notified when there’s new, important information being made available,” he adds.

The Thought Industries’ Learning Business Platform™ delivers highly-engaging online training, education or certification programs to customers, partners, distributors, resellers, and more. With no custom programming or third-party software necessary, organizations can quickly create fully-branded learning programs, track user engagement and increase ROI. Request a demo to learn more.