Extending the reach, remit, and value of L&D is one of the top 5 challenges according to the annual L&D survey by the Learning and Performance Institute. Here’s one way to get you started.

Did you know, you can use rapid authoring tools to create performance support tools that can be more effective than training?

Learning Designers are a talented and passionate bunch. They have a wide range of skills and access to many authoring tools such as Articulate 360/Storyline. Yet many designers limit how they use these tools to just creating eLearning. And in doing so, a huge opportunity is missed to solve performance problems quicker, have more impact on performance metrics, and ultimately add more value to the business.

We all recognize that training is costly and time-consuming to create.

In reality, training rarely solves the real problem anyway.

Many performance issues can be resolved much quicker with useful tools and resources, rather than training.

Here’s a couple of real-life examples that may help to show how a change in mindset, and how you use the tools you have can achieve better results and add more value.

Example 1:

A quad-play digital media provider reacts to aggressive market pressure with introductory offers for their products. Great for net-new acquisition, but a minefield for the inbound sales teams, who need regular training about the current offers and discount codes they need to apply during order entry.

With the offers and eligibility criteria changing all the time, it’s impossible to keep track of which customers are entitled to which offers.

The offers are on the company intranet, but the deals are so complicated that valuable sales time is burned trying to determine eligibility; plus, the intranet is often slow to be updated.

The L&D team try to help by developing a monthly eLearning module, accessed via the LMS. The module takes 3-5 days to create and publish and around 20 minutes for each of the 450 advisors to complete (that’s 150 hours of offline time). Despite most passing the quiz, many forget the offers before taking their next call.

What do you do?

a) Continue to use authoring tools like Storyline to develop the monthly offers module, or

b) Use the skills and tools in the L&D team to create a web-hosted sales offer calculator.

The calculator could be built in Storyline (or even Excel/Google sheets) and dynamically import current offer data from a .csv file. Sales advisors toggle specific criteria on and off in real-time as they question the customer about their needs, generating only the offers each customer is eligible for.

No training, no fuss, and created in less than a day, freeing up the designer for an additional 2-4 days’ work.

Example 2:

Inbound sales agents have a solid conversion rate of 38%, but the calls are so long (average 9 mins) that they can’t take enough calls a day to reach target. Following some analysis, you establish that around 4 minutes of each call is spent explaining the T&C’s of the customers contract and offers.

The sales director has requested sales training to help the agent’s close deals faster.

What do you do?

a) Use the rapid tools to develop an eLearning module aimed at developing closing skills as requested, or

b) Work with the business to establish the legal requirements of advising customers of T&C’s and then use rapid authoring software to develop a simple tool to enable agents to capture an email address and confirmation that the customer is happy to receive the T&C’s via email. This saves the customer having to listen to every word on the call, which they’re unlikely to remember. The agent then selects which T&C’s the customer needs, and the tool then sends the relevant documents to the customer, saving everybody’s time and ensuring both the agent and company are compliant.

With agents taking up to 40% more calls a day, most hit the higher targets and bonus, and the company exceeds forecast net-new acquisition and ARPU.

The morale of the story is this…

Just because something was designed to do one thing, doesn’t mean we can’t push it beyond it’s intended uses, if that will have better results. This shift in mindset is the key to extending the reach, remit, and value of L&D..

Get in touch if you’d like to know about adopting this approach.