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How Role Plays Help in Extended Enterprise Training

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People empowered by technology are the biggest asset for businesses to compete in today’s cut-throat world. And businesses aren’t stopping at hiring the best talent and investing in their training; they are also broadening their focus to include those in the “extended enterprise.” These external stakeholders, who can play a pivotal role in a business’s success, include affiliates, franchisees, vendors, consultants, business partners, even customers.

Businesses realize that to deliver enhanced customer experiences, helping their extended enterprises become more effective is as important as building solid relationships. And that’s why it’s critical to invest in extended enterprise training.

This goes back years. Japanese auto manufacturers famously helped their suppliers be more effective back in 1993 by sharing their approaches to success and collaborating with them to make better products and cars. Big tech companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon run their own “partner programs.” The list is endless.

Extended enterprise training is a “must-have” for the huge benefits they bring. Better revenue, strengthened brand, reduced risk, and improved business processes are just a few, but significant ones. It makes sense that those businesses are constantly looking out for ways to make their extended enterprise training efficient. And role plays have emerged as one of the most effective modes of doing so.

How to use role plays effectively in extended enterprise training?

Role plays are an effective method of training for better retention and performance. Let’s understand how you can implement role plays as part of your extended enterprise training.

Product training: You can’t expect to engage the extended enterprise teams with the same old interactive manuals, videos and linear eLearning courses. Train them on product features and benefits through complex branching scenarios revealing information on each path. Demonstrate the functionalities through an interactive mascot or a guide. Build gradual curiosity in learners prompting them to ask questions and learn in-depth. 

Sales training: Identify the areas where sales teams are likely to face challenges and build role plays to equip them to handle those sales scenarios. Digital role plays are excellent for practicing the elevator pitch, demonstrating products and solutions, fielding typical customer objections, and learning negotiations in a safe environment. Strategically use digital role plays to prepare sales teams to face classroom practice sessions with sales managers or leaders.

Customer support training: No one benefits from role plays based training than people in customer support roles. Understand the profiles of the customers, their expected behaviors, and possible concerns that your extended enterprise teams might face and create role plays with branching scenarios for each customer profile. Prepare them to keep calm while interacting with customers in all situations. Equip them with specific product knowledge and soft skills to navigate complex customer interactions.    

Conclusion

Often the training materials given to extended enterprises are overlooked because they are boring and conventional. You can change the way extended enterprise training is done by changing the approach. Help everyone in your extended network learn with the same zeal as your direct employees. Make them feel emotionally connected with your products and solutions through a digital mascot or a guide. Give them a better brand experience that they can further extend to their customers. Role plays as the training approach makes this possible. 

Organizations must convince stakeholders to invest in extended enterprise training. Empowering your network to excel with product training and also helping them develop the necessary soft skills to succeed will add to your bottom line. Organizations widely deploy our off-the-shelf English language training as a part of their extended enterprise training solution. Our interactive templates for role plays make creating business simulations and branching scenarios really fast and affordable. They are customizable and can be used for any industry and audience.

There is no need to provide boring digital catalogs or customary page-turner eLearning courses when you can offer interactive role plays on mobile phones for busy executives. Talk to us to overhaul your extended enterprise training. We will take the role plays route to make your training stand out.

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What Makes Extended Enterprise Training Successful?

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Businesses worldwide use extended enterprise training as a strategic tool to grow their business. It means different things to different organizations and can be broadly categorized into customer training and partner training, underpinning the source of revenue for the business. Extended enterprise training is also significant for associations and member-based organizations, public organizations, and academic institutions.

However, in the era of specialization, having the same system for delivering internal employee and extended enterprise training does not work. Plus, having a system designed specifically for your industry makes it even better.

Let’s see why extended enterprise training is beneficial for you.

Four Core Benefits of Extended Enterprise Training

Improved brand reach and visibility: When you train a group, they become better brand ambassadors, know your products and services thoroughly, and help you create brand visibility.

Increased revenue: The outcome of extended enterprise training is adding revenue for your business. If you are training your channel partner network, they can sell better and in turn, get more business. If you train your customers, they can use the products and services better and add to revenue through renewed subscriptions.

Reduced costs: When your customer and partner ecosystem are better educated about your products and services, it improves customer satisfaction and reduces risks associated with knowledge gaps and misinformation. It reduces the overall customer support costs too.

Accelerated time-to-market: With an extended enterprise training infrastructure, you can roll out new products, features, services to the known territories faster. You can also expand to newer territories effectively and add to sales revenues.

What Facilitates Extended Enterprise Training?

You need a robust hosted learning management system (LMS) to roll out and manage extended enterprise training – an LMS with the capability to deliver learning content in various formats, tracking and measuring performance. All enterprise learning initiatives are different, but five common traits bind them:

1. All are voluntary learners on your LMS. This audience isn’t your employee, so you must invest in creatively engaging them.

2. The size of the audience is larger than internal training. In some cases, the LMS needs to support more than 100,000 learners.

3. Extended enterprise deployments must typically integrate with several other systems and tools, including CRMs, e-commerce, marketing automation, content management, customer support.

4. Specific business objectives drive most extended enterprise learning programs, and to measure the success of these objectives, tying them to defined metrics is essential.

5. Extended enterprise learning systems are domain-specific.

Step-by-Step Implementation of Extended Enterprise Training

So, how can you start implementing an extended enterprise learning program in your organization? Here are five basic steps to start with.

Step 1: Determine your target audience

Like any other new initiative, you need to identify your target audience before you think of doing anything. Figure out whether your targeted learners are customers, vendors, distributors, suppliers. And since they aren’t your employees, you’d have to invest a lot of time and effort and customize the approach, content, or even the training itself for their tastes or needs.

Step 2: Define your KPIs

Your next step must be defining the key performance indicators. When you define the expected outcomes, you’d have a clear roadmap. And every target audience segment’s KPIs will be different. Your distributors and agents’ KPIs can be their sales and quality of service metrics, while your customers’ KPIs could be customer satisfaction, the frequency of use, or conversion rate after taking the training.

Step 3: Gauge your LMS capabilities

Find out the exact capabilities of your LMS. It must be able to handle different groups as well as a number of learners. Extended enterprise learning needs to have separate content, user profiles, and rules.

Step 4: Calculate ROI

Calculating the approximate training costs at each stage will hold you in good stead to convince your stakeholders to adopt the program. Do you create courses in-house or outsource? How much does this process cost per learner? How do you compute the ROI of each training course that you run?

Step 5: Make a business case

After all your data collection and analysis is over, gather your requirements and get going on a feasible business case for an extended enterprise learning strategy.

Conclusion

Driving a revenue stream with extended enterprise training plays a significant part in your business success. Mapping the LMS to your target audience groups’ exact needs is the foundation. There are more than 800 LMS in the market available currently and selecting the right one can be a daunting proposition.

You have corporate LMS that are primarily built for employee training and can be customized for extended enterprise training while the open-source platforms focus purely on extended solutions.

If you need help in finding the right LMS for your extended enterprise training, we can help. For organizations focused on English language education, we have a Language LMS specially crafted by our ELT experts. We also offer hosted LMS that is widely being used by training companies, publishers, and educational institutions. Contact us to learn more.

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