Increase adoption of cloud services by using a Learning Management System to empower the user community
Community—when it comes to describing the user population for cloud services, we tend to group all users together to refer to them as “user community.” But the fact is—just like a community comprises a group of disparate personalities, a cloud service user community comprises a group of end-users with different personas. For example, a community of cloud-communications users could include:
- Executive assistants
- Mobile workers
- WFH employees
- System administrators
- Trainers
- Office workers
- Data analysts
- Troubleshooting agents
- Conferencing specialists
A poll conducted by the Technology Services Industry Association revealed that:
- Trained users use products 68% more than the ones which are not trained
- 56% of the trained users use more product features
- 87% of the trained users call support less than the ones which did not go through any training
Does your vendor’s training program measure up?
In practice, most vendors include training as part of the service implementation. However, all training programs are not created equally—there are some important questions customers should ask their vendors:
- Will the training be tailored to my user community, or is it a one-size-fits-all model?
- What are the limitations on hardware and software related to training disposition?
- Will there be flexibility around the schedule, and is there a penalty involved for changes?
- Is there a mechanism to track user interactions with the content—start, abandon, completion percentage?
- How often the content will be updated, and how will that be communicated?
The answers to the above questions could actually determine to what extent the service is adopted in your organization and the time it will take to realize the return on investment (ROI) in the service.
What is a Learning Management System?
A study conducted by Aragon Research highlighted the need and importance of administering role-based knowledge and tied it to the performance of the employees. In our belief, when users get empowered through the training, which they can take on their own terms, it lays the groundwork for a performance upgrade.
A cloud-based Learning Management System (LMS) allows organizations to administer, regulate, track, and deliver learning tailored specifically to their user community. Further, LMS also allows the user community to consume training on their own terms—anywhere, anytime, and any device. This is a very strong value prop, and organizations can leverage this to realize numerous direct and many intangible benefits:
- Reduced learning and development costs, as material is always current and is managed centrally
- When WFH employees do not need to sit through the training covering specifics related to help-desk agents, their productive hours increase
- A well-trained user community tends to use the service more efficiently and effectively and adopts features designed specifically for their workflow—e.g., forwarding voicemail to a secondary number for road warriors
- Tailored content training reduces the number of support tickets raised with IT
- Service administrators can create guardrails for compliance and allow end users to personalize the service platform
- Organizations can take scheduling out of the equation and support multi-language training
- For specific users, just-in-time learning (how to do one specific task is completed or use a specific feature) can be introduced
- Real-time audit reports for admins and end-users
How do RingCentral’s Professional Services approach training?
At RingCentral, we have interacted with hundreds of customers and have learned that they would rather focus on their core competency than design programs for training that align to their needs. Accordingly, we took the initiative and designed a program where customers can “rent” LMS—yes, Learning-as-a-Service!
Customers can rent LMS licenses on a per-month, per-user basis from RingCentral University based on their needs and do not need to invest in a full-fledged LMS. RingCentral University’s training program also offers other unique benefits not generally seen in the industry:
- Personalized training consultant to uncover your training needs and tailor curriculum
- Hybrid learning model that allows for on-site training, instructor-led remote learning, and self-paced through LMS to be combined for the best possible results
- Blended learning model within the product itself where users are able to start a course online and finish it in an instructor-led session
- Multi-channel disposition includes video, webinars, and interactive hands-on modules
- Content specific to onboarding, advanced, ongoing, and adoption phases
Don’t let your journey to the cloud stagnate after Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) delivery—leverage training as a tool to drive adoption, which will lead to growth in usage and accelerate the ROI.
Learn more about how RingCentral can help your business by contacting us or calling 1-877-807-5364.
Originally published Nov 20, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022
