To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” In other words, if you can design an innovative solution to a common problem, you will be successful.
We think that providing effective customer training without a huge sticker price is a common problem, and that we can help you design an innovative solution. Moreover, because many organizations are looking for ways to improve their financial picture, we think that re-purposing existing materials is an effective way to innovate and have a positive impact on the bottom line. We intend this article to metaphorically help you “build a better mousetrap” for your organization’s customer training, with a focus on online learning.
Background
In 2008, we embarked on a process to strengthen and expand customer training strategy for a local software company. To guide this strategic process, we posed the following question to ourselves, “How can we re-purpose current learning products to grow customer training services?” As a final project deliverable, we wanted to produce a document that would answer this question, thus enabling the client organization to make key business decisions about the future of customer-facing training services.
To kick off the project, we researched best practices in the learning industry. We quickly discovered that the industry literature primarily focused on employee learning, and there was not as much information available on customer training. After completing our project, we felt that this was an area where we could contribute, in hopes that others would find the information helpful.
The customer training spectrum
Providing training to customers on products or services is a growing area. Technological gains continue to create new opportunities for companies to explore types of online learning that they hadn’t been able to use previously. We hear more and more about organizations that are using mixed modes of online learning to support employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. These modes include Webinars, Second Life, Podcasts, YouTube videos, and so on.
Many of us have experienced online learning as a way to figure out our cell phones, or even from our utility companies to learn how to save energy. Want to renovate your home? Go online … there is likely a plethora of choices to help you design or build it. Do you want to determine what your retirement plan should be? Financial institutions have online programs to help you. If you have children, you’ve no doubt experienced the blending of physical product with online product, such as Webkinz, Lego, or Barbie. These online products might be free, and you may not consider them “learning products,” but they will undoubtedly enrich your understanding or experience with a product or service, or the producer.
Customer training drivers
We feel that customer-purchased training forces instructional strategies and design to meet exceptional standards. If consumers don’t feel that the learning product is valuable, not only will they not use it, but with a few clicks of a mouse they can spread negative impressions globally. Corporate purchasers, understandably, have high expectations that the learning products are every bit as good as the original products. If they don’t get what they pay for, the results can be severely damaging to the long term business relationship.
Lastly, and most timely, is the economic situation. Economic downturns force companies that primarily offer face-to-face training to explore different channels to train employees and customers. This is a time for opportunity, to try something new, to innovate. Perhaps your organization is ready to consider training for your customers in an effort to stand out from the competition. Perhaps training your customers can increase sales of your company’s products, or represent a new revenue stream. Re-purposing is a way to breathe new energy into existing content.
Our objective
Throughout this article, we use the term “learning product” to refer to any tangible item that an organization produces to help the customer or user learn how, when, and why to use the product. We want to demonstrate how you can look at your learning products from a consumer perspective and find ways to improve them, whether your goal is to generate revenue for them, save costs of producing or maintaining them, or increase product adoption.
Business drivers
We found that five strong business drivers cause our client organizations to undertake customer training as a strategic initiative:
- External economic pressures starting to impact customer uptake of face-to-face training offerings;
- No effort toward curriculum renewal for several years, leaving behind a stale and outdated content set;
- New product changes that serve a larger audience, holding a broader spectrum of learning need;
- Increased pressure on sales and profits from direct and indirect competitors; and
- Stable training revenue, with minimal growth experienced over the last five years.
Early indicators
In addition to identifying the business drivers, we needed to be sure that undertaking a project to assess the learning products was going to be worthwhile. Some indicators that there might be great potential in successfully re-purposing the content and refreshing the customer learning strategy include:
- Significant interest in both re-usable learning objects and performance support concepts, which dovetailed with other work happening in the services area;
- Timing – release of a new type of product, and support resources being short so that customers asked about support for the new product; and
- Customer surveys and discussion board comments that called for other types of training offerings, including “anytime, anywhere” delivery options.
Approach
In order to deliver a solid decision document, we needed to identify some options for approaching the work. We determined that there were at least three options:
- Begin with defining the future state – how does the organization want things to work in the future? What is the vision? Where do they see things in three to five years? How will we measure success?
- Describe what world-class companies do to train their customers, and use that as a model. What is the best practice for software companies? How do world-class organizations do this? What lessons could we learn, and is there a blueprint to follow or implement?
- Document what the organization is currently doing, and make recommendations for incremental improvements. What is working? Where are the greatest opportunities?
We chose the third option for our approach; to catalog, assess, and analyze the existing learning products, and to document the current state, with the goal of repurposing existing content. Using other organizations as a benchmark was useful, but ultimately didn’t provide enough guidance to implement any changes. And while envisioning the future was worthwhile, it was important to chart a course to get there. We saw the third option as a compressed gap analysis, and we created straw models to compare the future to the current state and find areas for improvement.
Step by step
The first thing we did was to create some guiding principles. These provided an anchor for the project, and a strategic framework to help focus the analysis. We wanted to look at four aspects of the learning products (see Figure 1):
- Customers – Who were they? Why would they use the learning products? What problems did they want to solve?
- Industry – Who was the competition, and what were the trends? We wanted to ensure that we knew what was happening with direct competitors, the general industry this software product supported, and also with the learning industry.
- Organizational strategy – How did the learning products support or interact with the brand and vision? Did the learning products help or hinder?
- Organizational capabilities – We wanted to map those aspects the organization could leverage to a greater degree, what things could be modified, and what skills were available to draw upon.
Catalog
It was important to identify the learning products that currently supported customers, how the organization developed and maintained them, and how customers accessed them. This helped us create categories of learning products and map the existing content.
The first step was to create the scope – what did we consider learning products? We created a spectrum of support to provide common definitions across the organization:
- Technical support involves supporting learners and customers with set-up tasks, installation, etc. These can be help desk agents, software wizards, on-site support, manuals, quick reference cards, screen demonstrations, and other tools.
- Learning support is achieved through instruction, which can be in group settings or one-on-one, electronic or in person, short or long, live or self-paced.
- Performance support provides functional help. Performance support can help learners recall what they learned through instruction, or it can be instructional in and of itself. Performance support can be electronic, print-based, or personal (coaching is a form of performance support).
We then gathered all the learning products together to create an inventory, and entered information about them into a spreadsheet. We created a classification system that would help to identify linkages, and make it easier to assess the learning products. With this, we could create a strategy that would help the organization re-purpose existing content in a more effective way. This helped to paint a full picture of the learning products: what they did, who they were for, how they were created, who maintained them, when they were last updated, and how they were delivered.
Each learning product was then classified into one of six categories:
- Instructor-led Training (ILT)
- Online Help
- Online Learning (OLL)
- Demos/Screencasts
- Job Aids (which were called QuickSteps)
- Webinars
What we discovered is that there was a range of learning products. Some were under-utilized, and others were dominating the organization’s attention. The classroom training options (and one course in particular), were the most-used and most familiar of the learning products. We also quickly discovered that:
- There were many tools and/or learning products available to users that helped them use the software product (functional training).
- There was no central repository of information or centralized process to draw upon for creating or managing the learning products.
- Dates indicated that some items had not been updated for at least a year, some even longer.
- Different tools were used to create each learning product, which resulted in conflicting or confusing information, versioning issues, and changes in tone or language, style, and access points, as well as a myriad of other barriers.
The fact that the company sold the software product worldwide added yet another level of complexity.
Assess
Once we had an inventory or catalog of the learning products, it was essential to review them from a “learning effectiveness” perspective, based on industry best practices. We reviewed the products, as well as the instructional design process, to determine if improvements could be made.
Learning products
Since we were looking at print material, instructor-led training and e-Learning, we created a custom set of criteria for the body of learning products. There were general categories, such as how well the learning product met adult learning principles, learning style classification, and the target domain on Bloom’s taxonomy (cognitive, affective, or psychomotor objectives). We reviewed samples of each type of learning product, assessing against the criteria (making specific notations where necessary and providing examples to clarify), and, most importantly, made suggestions for improvement. We aggregated these at the end, and included estimates to make the changes.
For the online help, we used the following criteria:
- Table of contents
- Indexes
- Context-sensitive
- Contained a search method(s)
- Navigational aids
- Technical writing
- Writing for the Web
- Procedural information described in user terms: a limited number of steps starting with an imperative verb, among other suggestions
One source that was invaluable for us was: Standards for Online Communication by Dawn M. Stevens (see the References at the end of this article). For a good overview, see 101 Standards for Online Communication by the same author, online at http://www.stc.org/confproceed/1997/PDFs/PG410-.PDF.
Interestingly enough, we discovered that the existing online help did not follow these guidelines, but the online learning modules did quite well when compared to these criteria. This meant that with little effort the organization could repurpose some of the online learning modules as online help.
We then turned our attention to the asynchronous online learning modules. We used the following criteria, based on several industry experts (See the References for Clark (2002), Driscoll (1998), Quinn (2006), Horton (2002), and Downes (2005)):
- Interactive
- Non-linear
- Easy to use GUI/Usability
- Structured lessons
- Effective use of multimedia – primarily Ruth Clark’s six principles of effective use of media in e-Learning
- Attention to educational details
- Attention to technical details
- Learner control
We also looked at the number of words on each page, number and quality of diagrams, and the language and tone.
We used these criteria to grade the current learning, and provide constructive ways of modifying the existing training, focusing on repurposing content. We also provided a spreadsheet template that would allow for design guidelines and quality testing for new online learning products.
Instructional design process
We also reviewed and assessed the instructional design process, using ADDIE as our model. We reviewed documentation, interviewed the designers, surveyed the instructors, read Level 1 course evaluations, and sifted through any available customer feedback.
We uncovered what is likely a common situation. The organization had a history of relying on subject matter experts to design and deliver their courses. We couldn’t find much internal documentation on instructional design strategies or decisions. We felt that this was an area for improvement, specifically in four areas: needs analysis, design documentation and standards, implementation timing, and evaluation techniques.
Analyze
After cataloging and assessing learning products, we reviewed the software product personas to pair the learning needs with the existing learning portfolio. (Editor’s Note: In user-centered design, “personas” are fictitious characters that represent the different user types, within a targeted demographic, that might use a product. Personas attempt to capture the goals, desires, and limitations of the users.)
More specifically, we compared persona proficiencies, learning styles, technical aptitudes, and learning access points (geographical location of learning – that is, mobile or on-the-job) with each of the learning products in order to identify gaps and overlaps in the current learning tool set. Results showed a large amount of content to repurpose; however, the current variety of delivery modalities was insufficient for our existing customer needs.
Recognizing this gap in delivery options, we then researched other software companies to better gauge comparative training strategies. We found a high percentage of software companies leveraging the offering of bundled training packages – a combination of face-to-face learning with supplementary e-Learning tools and resources. Moreover, it was apparent these companies were using such integrated strategies to push and pull customers through their value propositions — in other words, for marketing purposes.
Finally, we analyzed different cost structures and revenue streams to identify ways of maximizing value. Through this analysis, we considered how the organization currently generates content and ultimately delivers it to the customer. Several immediate cost savings strategies emerged, including better collaboration with the Technical Communication team, use of an in-house Learning Management System, and single-sourcing content strategy.
