Product knowledge and the LMS
What is a Learning Management System?
The LMS is an effective and efficient way to provide multi-device product knowledge training for your staff, offering a multitude of benefits. This article explores why it is an ideal platform for product knowledge training for your sales and customer service staff. Product knowledge enables you to keep your employees up-to-date on new products, thereby improving sales, enhancing the customer experience, and driving success in your business or organisation.
The LMS allows you to create standard or specific bespoke training, with plenty of room for customisation, with a variety of materials, which can be made available to all staff, or selected members of staff, according to their training needs.
Access to information anytime, anywhere
The LMS is a convenient and flexible way to deliver training to staff who may be located across the globe or work remotely. Access to timely and accurate up-to-date information is crucial to the success of your business, especially when launching a new product. An LMS can be accessed on various devices and staff can log in and out at their convenience, with their progress recorded as they go along.
Online training is user-friendly and easy to navigate, offering employees the chance to revise the same content until they feel confident handling the information. The instant nature of accessing the material boosts on-the-job performance and keeps your employees’ skillsets up-to-date.
Reduced training time and costs
Investing in a cost-effective LMS can transform the way you manage your training material, with access to everything located in one place, available to consult 24/7. Fast-track your training programmes, by being able to train a greater number of staff at once, rather than have them attend costly face-to-face classes, which can involve arranging extras such as travel and accommodation. The affordable online training system also cuts out the need for laborious paperwork and printed training materials, all helping you keep to your budget.
Training is consistent across the organisation. New employees are able to get up to speed at a quick pace, as all the information is already available. Once uploaded to the LMS, training principles can easily be revised to refresh knowledge, giving staff that extra boost.
Exciting and engaging content
Demonstrate the practicalities of your products by creating fun, exciting and highly impactful content. The LMS can host a range of varied e-learning materials, which is ideal as everyone has their own learning preferences. Use a mix of multimedia to create an interactive educational experience - videos, animations and games. The use of both visual and audio-visual aids makes training simple and straightforward and improves knowledge retention.
Add humour to make it more relatable and enjoyable. It’s possible to use walk-through scenarios and role-plays with virtual reality examples to help your employees become more familiar with the features of your products and see the best ways to respond to potential situations that could occur.
Detailed instructions can be broken up into manageable sections so as not to cause an overload of information. Infographics are a colourful and easy-to-read method of displaying information; they can be used for product overviews to highlight the important facts, show a breakdown summary of key components or parts and provide important pointers on how to promote the items. The LMS can help you structure your training so that your employees can walk their customers through every step in the process, and thereby improve their ability to educate customers on-the-job. The quality of your training material will influence the success of a new product launch.
Customer focus
To be able to offer excellent customer service, your staff need to know their products well. Improve your organisation’s customer service offering, by providing training material that covers customer traits, buying behaviours and needs, which is essential for succeeding in this sector. By documenting the selling points, benefits and unique features of every product, employees can gain the confidence to sell and upsell, thereby increasing the profitability of your business. Have every potential problem area covered, by incorporating troubleshooting product know-how into your material.
Capture feedback
The LMS enables you to create product knowledge assessments and practice quizzes, which can test and improve your learners’ understanding of the content. Providing correct answer feedback enables your staff to revise any gaps in their knowledge, thereby improving their job competency.
As an administrator of the LMS, you have the ability to track your staff’s development and check their performance in assessments by running progress reports. The ability to track progress allows you to identify any future training needs.
The facility to gather evaluative feedback from your staff enables you to continuously improve your training material. Allow your employees to brainstorm their innovative product ideas. The future success of your company can be greatly enhanced by your employees’ creative input.
Summary
Moving your product knowledge training onto an LMS system may be the best option for your business, with so many benefits to offer. Empower your team with inspiring and knowledge-driven e-learning content to assure the future success of your company.
