Did you know what is more important for an organization's success? Not many people realize this, but it’s product knowledge among employees.
Most organizations usually spend a lot of time designing the perfect learning program for their employees. However, one area that many organizations neglect very often is product training. Not many organizations have made their product training available to their employees in all departments. This is where the challenge emerges.
Want to know why ongoing product training is the secret ingredient to boosting your workforce productivity? Don’t miss the last point—it’s a game-changer!
Topics covered:
The importance of ongoing product training
Your employees must understand how your product works, as they represent your organization, no matter which department they belong to. An in-depth understanding of the company’s offerings helps them perform better in their roles. Ongoing product training is a way of training in which learners are trained consistently over several sessions rather than a single training program. This method improves learner's product knowledge, motivation, engagement, and overall performance.
Product training is more like a workplace training program that covers all the details of a company's products and services. like product features, advantages, and some troubleshooting as well. It helps the employees understand the broader view and how their individual roles can play a part in the overall development of the product, regardless of what department they belong to.
Your sales team must have a complete understanding of the products and services that you provide to customers. Usually, employees do pick up some of this knowledge on-the-job, but ongoing product training for work-force sustainability is a more effective approach. Memorizing the no. of modules, attributes and functions is not product training.
No matter what your product is, customers can easily get that information online. Focus on understanding your product from the customer’s perspective. For instance, it's not about what a feature of a product does; it's about the importance of that feature and the experience of using it.
Can ongoing training sustain and enhance workforce productivity?
Yes, it can, as it entrusts employees with skills and knowledge that lead to enhanced performance. Today, it's more crucial to train your employees regularly, as business dynamics are changing rapidly. Knowledge retention among learners rises remarkably with ongoing training. because the learner is trained continuously rather than in a one-time process. This type of training is more effective than traditional training methods, in which people forget the information they get within a day. Ongoing training fosters sustained guidance, and as a result, learners retain knowledge for longer periods of time. Regular training helps employees get the knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs effectively.
Employees feel confident handling any issue when you provide ongoing training and support. They feel very satisfied with their job. This way, they get engaged in their jobs, which leads to increased productivity. Organizations need the engagement and commitment of their employees to improve the service or product that they offer. When you provide ongoing product training, your workforce will be self-sustainable, and the quality of your service or product will improve as well.
Benefits of ongoing product training:
Attaining success is not easy; it requires continuous effort and dedication. Organizations must invest significant time and energy to ensure the satisfaction of both their customers and employees. It's beyond doubt that employees are organization's biggest asset. And organizations can climb to success by investing in their greatest assets. By improving employee skills through ongoing training, businesses can help the professional development of their team, which then leads to the growth of the organizations.
Let's shed some light on the advantages of ongoing product training:
Boost employee's confidence:
Your employees represent your organization in a more positive and confident way when they have a better understanding of the product. Knowing a product thoroughly boosts the confidence of employees.
Motivated and engaged employees:
A complete understanding of your product and services makes employees engaged, and they can upsell the products to the clients in a more official way. Employees can offer other services to clients by keeping their future needs in mind when they have enough product knowledge. This is possible only when they are trained enough to know the client's requirements.
Customer satisfaction:
In this digital age, customers are very well informed, and they read everything on the internet about the product that they are willing to buy. So, it's more important for the salespeople to offer something more than just features, as it can be found online easily. Ongoing product training improves the salesperson's ability to answer customers' difficult questions. They can also explain the product properly and create a better customer experience.
We have explored the benefits of continuous training for employees. Now let's look at some key training elements that make ongoing product training successful:
Training needs assessment for work-force productivity
Conducting an in-depth analysis of your training needs is a must before designing your product training. Pick out the individuals who will get the training and explore their duties and responsibilities within the organization. This way, you can easily contemplate the benefits that they carry to their work with this product knowledge. Like improving their sales skills, polishing their marketing materials, or making better customer support interactions.
Methods to assess product knowledge skills
Different methods and tools can be used to gauge your staff’s product knowledge skills. Like tests and quizzes, role plays and simulations, and mystery customer feedback.
You can create quizzes and tests covering realistic and situational product knowledge questions or perform role-plays that impersonate real-life customer interactions. There are also some tools that can help you assess and gather data for analysis.
After assessing your staff’s product knowledge skills, you can use these results in your training and development plans. To do this, you must first pin down the gaps and needs of your staff and create your training programs accordingly. create customized online courses and tutorials that address your team's specific skill gaps and training needs.
The workforce productivity of any organization plays a major role in its success, regardless of size or industry. Ongoing product training helps improve employees' skills and equips your sales team with a comprehensive understanding of the products you offer. Enhancing workforce productivity with product training leads to improved customer interaction, uplifting brand trust and loyalty.
Curriculum design and delivery in ongoing training are very crucial. It must be delivered effectively and efficiently to get the desired results. In this digital age, conventional methods are not proving to be very effective, leading to substandard information retention. In this situation, eLearning offers captivating, workable, and interactive solutions for ongoing product training.
How to Provide effective product training with e-learning
Rather than sticking to futile methods of product training, you can shift to the modern learning and development process of eLearning to effectively impart product knowledge with the following tips:
Pick the right platform
The LMS that you pick must align with your organization's requirements and learning objectives. An LMS can host and deliver your eLearning content and can also shape the learning experience by tracking progress, evaluating performance, and facilitating communication.
Understand your objectives
You should clearly know the requirements and objectives of your organization before looking for the availability of the LMS platforms. Ponder over things like the intricacy of your product knowledge that you want to impart and the technological proficiency of your learning audience. And more importantly, if your team has a global reach, then you may need a system with powerful language support.
Features to look for
Go for an LMS that can grow with your organization. The system should handle the growth of your product line and accommodate courses without compromising performance. A mobile-friendly LMS is always good, as it allows learners to access content whenever they want. And make sure it provides complete analytics and reporting tools, as feedback and evaluation in continuous training are crucial. This helps in tracking overall progress and making the required adjustments.
Alter courses for microlearning
Don’t overload information in one product knowledge training course. Break up the content of your eLearning modules into smaller bits, covering your specific products, customer profiles, and sales practices. This way, learners will soak up more knowledge and retain it without getting confused regarding product features and target audiences. Microlearning makes the learning process easy, as learners have access to your courses on their smartphones and tablets. This is very helpful when they interact with customers. Learners can easily go to their mobile devices for help when customers ask them something they don’t know.
Use multimedia
You just can't depend on the text as a way of communicating with learners. Heavily depending on text to convey facts in your eLearning course can lead to boring material. Instead, make good use of videos and infographics in your product training module. This way, your product training will be more engaging.
Explainer videos are ideal to convey how to use a product, they are quite handy in both in-house and customer training.
Infographics can transform knotty ideas into visually interesting ones.
Offer extra online materials
For learners who have a natural tendency to learn much faster, you can provide external information like articles, slide presentations, and videos that are relevant to a specific course. High performers will take advantage of supplementary resources that are easily available online. This can lead to greater results, and extra information with more context can help learners who have difficulties with training. This is the best way to sustain employee motivation through continuous learning.
Summing up
You can't expect your employees to be at their best with just one-off product knowledge training. Continuous training helps employees remain up to date with the latest product changes, improvements, and basic customer questions. These things can also be learned through on-the-job training, but conducting ongoing product training is a more effective way. Constantly upskilling and re-skilling your workforce enhances employee engagement and productivity.
