Recently, I met with my new financial adviser to review the performance of my investments. As he went through my portfolio I had to stop him many times and ask some pretty basic questions. My adviser did a good job answering my questions, however, I came out of the meeting with a spinning head and a lot of uncertainty based on not truly understanding what my options really are. Considering how important investing for retirement is and what the earnings through a well-invested portfolio could be, I find myself really in the dark when it comes to this whole area and I am unsure if my decisions are right – I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this. Which got me thinking about how I could learn more about this area and the value of educating customers.
Typically when we think about an eLearning audience, it’s internal – companies build and deploy courses on a private LMS for just employees. L&D, HR and if possible Marketing teams work together to build out learning campaigns to improve performance. Within the competitive landscape where customers want to be informed and educated there is a strong value proposition of using eLearning as a marketing tool. There is significant value that can be realised from creating and promote learning for external groups – dealers, channel distribution partners, suppliers, resellers, franchisees and customers.
The formal term for this training market is Extended Enterprise Training (EET).We recently worked with a Canadian food retailer to build and host a learning program that trains their Franchisee and Corporate store personnel on the wide array of best practices and policies giving a distributed workforce a unified knowledge base improving store operations and the customer experience.
Imagine a customer education strategy of a financial services provider where the fundamentals of investing are taught in a clear, simple way that would help customers feel more confident with their knowledge. This would help build trust which could open the door to new business or extend business with existing customers. There is an array of methods that can be used including videos, microlearning, blogs, webinars, all open the general public. Data can be gathered to understand customers better by embedding simple questions within the learning that could be captured and analysed – to provide better customer service or adjust the learning ongoing.