When a company has a new product, despite it being an exciting time, there is the issue of training employees on its features which may be problematic due to the time and cost involved, especially in face-to-face training. Employee productivity drops when employees are spending many hours sitting in training rooms during work hours – and when the benefits of that training are not trackable it hardly seems worth the effort. Online training solves all of these problems by being available to the employee in his/ her own free time, and saving the company the costs of bringing in a trainer, renting spaces for training, travel expenses involved and lost productivity.

What’s more, in the case of multinationals, when staff are trained across borders, training programs need to be adapted to different markets since a “one size fits all” approach will not work. With elearning, product training courses can be adapted with a minimum of fuss so that cultural learning differences can be accounted for and content can be delivered consistently across borders.

There is also a very real impact in terms of ROI. Businessspectator.com cites the following example: “In July 2013, CommVault looked to demonstrate the value of training by conducting a test with a customer that had consistently reported high numbers of monthly training-related incidents.” CommVault had the customer do a specific course for one of its products. After completing the training the pre-training incident log of 17.5 calls per month moved to 6.5 calls per month – a decrease of more than 62%. “This delivered a saving of $5,000. Before taking the course, the operating cost for this particular customer was $8,000+ per month, not including the cost impact of customer productivity losses and downtime.”

Benefits of online product training:

• Training becomes flexible, easy and quick. Staff can complete training in their own time, on their own devices, and on the go.
• Employees can be trained up on a new product or service in multiple locations, multiple languages, all at once or at different times, and from day one of release!
• Training can be adapted cross-culturally and to different markets, quickly and easily.
• Companies will have more efficient and trained staff with up-to-date and applicable knowledge.
• Greater efficiency and productivity means increased profits.