Developing a learning organization of employees who make a commitment to life-long self-development is hard work. 

SumTotal Learn makes it easy for you to deliver any type of content to your users, but you need more than a user-friendly gateway to courses and resources.  

Your users need information on learning that is relevant, timely, and useful, whether they are learners, managers, administrators, or L&D professionals.  

One of the best ways to give them feedback is with a well-designed dashboard tailored to their needs. 

Dashboards for Learners 

Your people need to know where their learning plans will take them, how they are progressing, and where to focus their efforts. 

They want the information in an attractive, compact format that they don’t need to decipher to get meaningful information.  

Here are a few examples of what you can do with dashboards: 

• Visual display of achievements like progress bars and badges to motivate them to achieve more. 

• Training schedules and calendars so they can plan their activities, with a to-do list that helps them complete assigned learning on time. 

• One-click access to learning resources, no matter where they are, inside or outside your SumTotal LMS. 

• Resources and quick links that put knowledge and job aids at their fingertips, so they can bring learning into the flow of work. 

• News and announcements. To make information timely and relevant, you need it to update frequently so it never appears stale. One way to keep people engaged is to provide blog articles related to their learning or their field of work. You don’t even need to write the content. You can curate it from reliable sources and push out email notifications when you add new articles. 

Dashboards for Managers 

Managers need to know the learning status of their teams, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they need to focus their efforts. For required learning, they need to know who might be at risk for a lapse in certification, with the ability to take immediate action right from the display. 

Managers would much rather view a dashboard then wrestle spreadsheets and tabular reports. 

Dashboards for Administrators 

Instead of running reports every time they need to see what is happening in your LMS, your administrators can save time and frustration with a graphical view. You could show them recent activity, compliance status, content usage statistics, and user evaluations. 

SumTotal Dashboard Tools 

SumTotal provides widgets you can use to customize your LMS landing page, and Advanced Reporting gives you a number of data visualizations. 

However, creating a dashboard is a do-it-yourself project, and if you really want to provide the most relevant information, you will need a more robust tool. If you don’t already have it, SumTotal can make it available for your data and design needs. 

Make Your SumTotal LMS the Center of Your Learning Ecosystem 

If you want your LMS to become the place to be if you're going to improve yourself, you need more than powerful learning content delivered to your users on demand. You need to make the total experience one your users will appreciate. 

Well-designed dashboards that provide useful and relevant information can boost engagement in your LMS and help you further your progress on the road to a learning organization. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Dynamic, flexible and easy-to-use tools will enable you to customize the user experience. They are in an HTML meta-layer, giving you the universal tools of online presentation. You can create a unique experience for each role in your organization.

• Target learning and talent channels to support specific business functions, projects, roles, or any other unique audience. 

• Streamline the user experience by removing friction, reducing the effort required to access tools and resources. 

• Turn your LMS into a Learning Experience Platform, where your people can easily access any learning modality. 

You can reinforce your culture and brand: 

• Embed cultural messaging in user interactions. 

• Provide company and industry news, team and project successes, and company objectives and milestones. 

Create a complete user experience ecosystem: 

• Create multi-page dashboards, so users can have all the tools and resources they need in one place. 

• Link dashboards to any URL, and since each dashboard page has a unique URL, you can link them to each other.  

We can think of many uses for specific channel dashboards, including: 

New Hire Onboarding: enable online new hire documentation, provide a new employee or partner training plans, enable a new hire checklist, connect new employee with the team, or any other onboarding activity 

Sales Learning Channel: provide new product learning resources and performance support. 

Customer Service Channel: enable knowledge resources, information sharing, and performance support for customer service representatives. 

Compliance Tracking: enabling individuals, their managers, risk management, and executives to monitor compliance learning and progress.

Leadership Development: begin lowercase your leadership programs together into one dashboard and link it to Succession Planning. 

Targeted Manager Dashboards: gather the resources your managers need to develop their teams into a multi-page manager dashboard. 

Generation Focused Channels: provide resources to people in different stages of their careers. 

Just-in-time Learning Channels: populate a Custom Content Widget with links to specific tasks and provide a link from associated work apps. 

Implementing SumTotal Dashboards 

SumTotal provides two types of widgets you can use build your dashboards.  

Each standard, out-of-the-box widget is pre-built for a specific purpose. The advantage is that you can just drop them into the dashboard, arrange and resize them, and create an engaging dashboard with little or no coding. 

As of this writing, SumTotal provides over two dozen widgets. They display items like employee profile, course offerings, learning progress, and motivational tools. However, you have little control over the configuration of standard widgets, and you cannot customize them. 

The Content Editor Widget is like a blank canvas you can use to drop in components to create your own widgets. You can add HTML code, embed pages and documents, display images, play media files, add charts and graphs, and deliver many other valuable tools. 

SumTotal provides training and complete guidance for using the Content Editor. See Appendix A in the SumTotal Core Platform Administrator Guide available at SumTotal Connect. 

Custom Widgets 

You or your SumTotal partner can build custom widgets. Since the widget framework is HTML code, what you can do is limited only by what you can imagine. We can think of dozens of ways to drive value for users. Here are a few examples: 

In custom widgets, you have complete control of the content and can make the design visually appealing. However, the work HTML and technical knowledge in linking and embedding resources. You must also re-validate that your widgets work with every SumTotal update. 

Build your SumTotal Dashboards 

Standard widgets, the Content Editor, and custom widgets each have their place in a well-designed dashboard plan. You could use them progressively, but they will work together to deliver a complete dashboard system. Begin with a few simple dashboards with standard widgets as you learn to use the content editor, then move on to more sophisticated dashboards. Finally, you could build your custom widgets to deliver even more value to your users. 

We recommend using Agile design method, in quick, iterative cycles. Involve your users in design from the very beginning. In the same way that doing so improves learning development, it will improve user satisfaction and help you drive business results. 

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

It has already happened.

Today, customers expect more information than ever before when they make a purchase. They focus on value and service, and they want instant answers to their questions and concerns. In consumer markets, customers will spend 17% more to get excellent service, and 33% would switch after only one incident of poor service.

In B2B markets, 71% of customers are at risk of going elsewhere to place their business.

Although customers want excellent service when they call a support representative, for most it is not their preferred option. They will instead use a Google search or self-service portal to learn about your services and solve their problems.

This preference places knowledge management at the center of customer experience strategy, and the infrastructure to enable that strategy is a robust, well-integrated learning management system.

With an enterprise LMS, you can put the answers at their fingertips anywhere, anytime, and in any mode, they prefer. An LMS can make it easy for you to deliver the right content at the right time at any point in the customer cycle.

Onboard New Customers

Initial training and job aids, beginning the moment they sign the contract, will speed up user adoption. Break down training into short videos so customers can access specific learning on demand and refer to a single topic. Provide a transcript, edited for quick reading, for those who prefer it.

Include guides to using the learning platform, and make sure your user portal gives customers access to all the learning and resources they will need.

Provide reports for the customer project team to follow up on training requirements.

The more efficiently you train them on your product the better they know about your product and appreciate their experience on your product.

Resolve Problems Quickly

After a sale, it is normal for customers to question their decision when they experience a problem or something they don’t know how to do. Excellent service will turn that around and create the opposite effect.

Think about how you can change the experience when customers meet their first technical difficulty. Instead of being 17th in line to talk to a customer support agent, they can watch a one-minute video from your team on how to address that issue. You can also create a step-by-step guide online and share it via a social media app embedded in your LMS.

Create a Personalized Experience

Integrate your customer LMS with your customer relationship management (CRM) to both personalize the learning experience and to keep marketing and sales up to date on customer sentiment and concerns. Provide information on what training customers are using and what they are searching for and can’t find.

Work with marketing and sales to provide appropriate messaging at the right points in the customer cycle. Information in your LMS can inform your CRM of customer challenges so they can have the proper conversations during upsell and renewal conversations.

Recover Costs and Generate Revenue

Providing customer training gives you a significant boost to customer acquisition and retention, and it can have financial benefits far beyond the impact on customer sales and loyalty.

If it is appropriate for your business model, you can sell training to your customers or the public. You will need your LMS to contain or integrate with e-Commerce to make it a seamless customer experience.

• Offset training cost. One of the most popular models in freemium-based training, where initial training is free and more advanced training requires the company or individual to pay some or all the cost. Do diligent research to find the right entry point and think about developing advanced training and certification courses to increase the value of training.
• Generate revenue. Many companies like McAfee, IBM, and Cisco use certification programs as substantial revenue generators. Certifications are career boosters, and once an accreditation becomes recognized, it can be in high demand.

Which type of LMS?

One of the most critical choices you will make is whether you will use your existing LMS, integrate your current LMS into a portal, or build a new platform. We would base this on the structure of your organization.

With centralized funding and administration of your technology, you will most likely want to use your existing learning platform. SumTotal LMS, Cornerstone OnDemand, or another enterprise multi-tenant platforms give you access to all the tools you need to implement customer learning and integrate it with your CRM, customer portal, customer success platform, and e-Commerce platform.

If you have decentralized funding and administration, a single-purpose specialized LMS might be right for you.

We recommend you do not consider a learning platform that lacks a good user experience or features like xAPI (Experience API). XAPI integrations enable you to enhance your consumer experience and to capture data about any activity – not just classroom instruction and e-learning. It can allow you to collect data from customer support to alert your administrators to customer needs with no human intervention.

Don’t Overlook LMS Administration

Companies frequently underestimate the resources and training required to administer customer training. We recommend one of three approaches:

• Hire an administrator skilled in customer training in your software. Salaries for an LMS administrator range from $55,000 to 107,000, with an average of $81,000.
• Contract an administrator or support services as you build your team. You may find it so cost-effective and trouble-free you will want to make it a long-term relationship.
• Train your administrators well before you go live. Minimize “learn as you go” as much as you can.

The Bottom Line: Customer Loyalty

The cost of acquiring a new customer is many times more expensive than keeping an existing one. Look at your metrics to assess the long-term return on customer training. You probably have a lot more to work with that might be apparent. Consider the long-term sustainability of your organization in a world where the customer is in charge – before, during, and after the sale.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

Employees are not the problem. Research firm Towards Maturity has surveyed over 40,000 employees      through its Learning Landscape audits and found that that most employees are willing to learn — and they want that learning so they can do their jobs faster and better.²

None of this is news. We know employee engagement levels are dismal. We also know that timely, relevant learning engages them. But few organizations deliver the learning employees need to improve themselves and their performance.

What is mind-boggling about this is that the world is awash in learning anyone can access at any time. As the Internet has matured, anyone with a connected device can find learning on any topic.

Barriers to Learning

So why the disconnect? If anyone can learn at any time, why are they not doing so? Towards Maturity’s report identified the top five barriers to learning online. At the top of the list is lack of time. Other top concerns are uninspiring, irrelevant content and the inability to find what they need.

Any of these difficulties can be overcome, but there are a lot of challenges in the way. Most organizations have a reluctance to invest heavily in learning for employees. They are caught in a cycle where employees see learning and development as most important to their careers, and if they don’t get it where they are they will quickly move on; employers see this and assume that employees are going to move on, so they don’t want to develop them.

CLOs have difficulty getting the funding to improve development, administration, and delivery of relevant learning at the point of need. According to industry expert Peter Capelli, most companies would rather spendtheir resources on fighting the war for talent than teaching the skills they need to their employees.³

How Learning Portals Can Help You Overcome Barriers to Learning

Learning Portals, if used well, could go a long way toward overcoming the barriers to learning. They can also solve many problems without a massive investment in technology, content, and delivery.

Learning is Work, and Work is Learning

Let’s consider the first and most crucial barrier — time. It’s easy to say that organizations need to make a commitment to their employees to provide them time to learn, but the majority of organizations don’t think that way. They see learning as time away from work that hurts productivity.

A learning portal can help you bring learning into the flow of work, so learning is work. Embedding learning in business applications is time-consuming and expensive, but you can place the learning portal adjacent to work so people can quickly switch to learning and back to the task at hand at very little expense. You only need to use your single sign-on (SSO) or identity management system to make sure users don’t have to endure a complicated login process.

Then, it’s only a matter of placing access to the right learning resources in the portal. You can save time and money by deploying advanced search techniques in the portal. And you don’t need to curate learning for every granular skill.

Overcoming the Learning Content Blues

Addressing the problem of uninspiring learning content areas is quite another matter, but curation can help you overcome resource issues. Developing a single e-learning course can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but you can consider free resources from EdX, course era, and other online resources. Most major universities provide much of their course material online for free. And don’t forget to see what YouTube can offer.

Encourage your learners to curate and share the inspiring learning they find. You can do this by embedding your collaboration tools or social media into your portal. Your only expense, then, is the time to vet the content. You will find in any organization that many employees love sharing useful content.

Is Your Learning Content Relevant?

The challenge in relevancy is meeting the needs of both learners in the business. In some cases, your hands are tied, such as when regulators specify a required course. But in others, you have many choices.

The key to relevancy is feedback. Make sure your assessments, questionnaires, and surveys help you identify which content learners find relevant. You could embed a mini-survey alongside each content offering so you can get immediate feedback. Ask your learners to participate in identifying the most relevant resources and develop your content with their input.

Make It Easy to Find Relevant Learning Content

Natural language processing has come a long way, and search engines have vastly improved how they interpret our clumsy attempts at saying what we want. It may be useful to provide an on-demand lesson on how to define search parameters, but in most cases, it won’t be necessary. We recommend you embed a custom search engine in your portal to make sure you get results about learning and not polar bear feeding (unless the job is feeding polar bears).

Easy Access is Essential

A learning portal can be embedded in your LMS, in another learning application or resource, in an intranet resource like a SharePoint portal, or a standalone web portal. All a gateway needs from IT is easy access to the Internet.

More Benefits of a Learning Portal

A learning portal can be a gateway to making learning personal and engaging.

• Provide a news page to keep people informed of topics relevant to the business, the industry, and their roles. Tell them about new learning offerings, but don’t leave those notices active for too long. Stale content will send the wrong message. You can use an RSS feed to make sure that content gets updated every day.
• Almost all learning portals are modular, so you can offer different components to your people based on their role in their learning needs. Give managers dashboards to help them monitor and encourage learning for their people. Provide a high-level learning dashboard for executives so they can track learning KPIs. Provide learners with recommendations related to their career paths and interests.
• Gamification has proved to be a powerful way to engage learners. You can embed progress indicators, leaderboards, badges and other indicators of achievement.

Drive Traffic to Your Learning Portal

Even if your portal is engaging, fun, and useful, it won’t become a hub of activity until you make it so. The best learning content in the world will go nowhere if nobody knows it exists. Even if you use the traditional methods of fostering adoption, growth will be slow unless you drive people to the portal.

We recommend you work with your LMS provider, your learning partners, and your IT group to push out inviting messages where ever you can. Make them relevant to what employees are doing at the moment and encourage them to learn more about it.

Partner with your marketing team to learn how you can use email as a tool to drive traffic to the portal and the learning in it. Push out the good news to your people about the availability of learning and let them pull in topics relevant to them.

A learning portal will solve all your problems, but it can help you build momentum in addressing the most critical learning issues in your organization.

References:

 1. Chertok, Zachary. "The Future of Learning is in the Reflexes.” Aberdeen Group. March 2016. 

 2.  "In Focus: Engaged Learners." Towards Maturity. March 28, 2018. 

 3.   Capelli, Peter. “The Real Crisis in Hiring.” HRExecutive. April 16, 2018

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing systems.

B2B customers want fast responses to their questions and concerns. If they don’t get it, they will at the least be open to alternatives. If they have a terrible experience, they are apt to share their experiences on social media.

What’s more, you are not competing only with businesses in your niche. Your customers will compare your customer experience with the service they receive from every other product or service provider. If you sell construction equipment, they could compare your service with what they receive from an online shoe seller.

Customer self-service has emerged as the preferred solution for customer expectations, delivered through an online portal. Gone are the days when a customer with a problem picked up the phone to get a resolution to a problem. A customer who needs help is eight times more likely to search Google and five times more likely to use a company’s self-service customer portal than to make a phone call (See Figure 1)

Online Customer Portals Reduce Cost

Faster service is not the only reason to maintain a useful and engaging customer portal. It can have a lot of impact on costs and revenue.

• Cost of resolving issues using telephone support averages over four times much as customer self-service.
• For companies whose products and services require training, an integrated learning center can mitigate or offset the costs of providing training. In many industries, training and certifications are a substantial revenue generator.

Online Portals Consolidate Information Services

A well-designed customer portal is much more than support. It can be the central repository and gateway to everything a customer needs – knowledge management, CRM, an online community, and in-depth training. You can create a community discussion for sharing ways to get more value from your services and products.

With a unified look and feel, your customer portal and its components can become an active advocate for your brand and create a strong message that your customers are the core of your business.

However, that will not happen without a common purpose across the organization in creating an excellent customer experience.

Who Owns the Customer Experience?

One of the most influential arguments we can make for complete, unified customer website is that it can create the opportunity for you to build an organization-wide and comprehensive picture of your customer.

In many organizations, a fragmented view of the customer experience (CX) is the rule. Sales think they are the primary drivers of the customer experience. Customer Success may or may not believe they own it. Only 9% of marketers think they lead it.

Last year, the CMO Council reported that only 14% of sales and 12% of marketing professionals rate their ability to deliver customer service as exceptional.

It’s easy to say everyone in the company owns the customer experience, but you know how that goes – when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Sales think CX is gaining a new customer. Marketing thinks it is a string of campaigns. Customer Success believes CX equals resolved issues. Each of them is both right and terribly wrong. Your organization needs a customer experience champion, and a unified view of the entire customer experience from the first contact to the advocates who answer questions in your customer community.

Integrate the Customer Experience

We recommend making the data your customer portal and it associated components integral to the comprehensive view of your customer and mine the data it produces to both improve the experience and inform your CRM.

• A knowledge management platform is an essential component of the customer portal. Use it to capture customer actions as they search for manuals, guides, and problem solutions. Keep your content current and do a continuous gap analysis to know what they are seeking.
• Integrate your CRM with your portal and make customer interactions available to marketing and sales. Detailed customer history can be a powerful conversation starter when it is time for subscription or contract renewals.
• If your service or product is technology-based, keep customer success and sales aware of updates, upgrades, or enhancements the customer has not implemented.
• Go beyond providing a tool for customer suggestions. Mine support data and the customer community for feature requests and keywords like “I wish they would…”
• Of course, your customer learning system Integrate must be accessible from your portal home page and anywhere else your customer seeks knowledge, but also send data from your LMS to inform your CRM what training the customer has or has not completed.
• Don’t skimp on your search engine. Go beyond basic keyword search to an AI-driven search capability that can index your support and knowledge resources. The search history will be an intelligent data source for product development in addition to helping you improve the customer experience.
• Consider using a chatbot or textbot to assist user searches. Anything you can do to remove friction between the user and the support and information they need will pay off in customer loyalty.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it may help you think about how the components of your customer experience should talk to each other. We hope you can take advantage of the opportunities that a unified customer view will provide.

Chasma Place, is an independent source for solutions that will help you keep pace with changes in the way your people work without ripping and replacing your existing system.