As most workers today are dealing with a new landscape of challenges in the workplace, figuring out one more complex technology is the last thing they want to add to their to-do list.
A Gartner survey from this summer revealed that 82% of company leaders plan to allow some form of remote work for their employees even as companies slowly begin bringing their teams back into the office.
With so much of the workforce distributed, it’s become critical to forge and maintain connections between employees and their company as well as among co-workers.
UC technologies are innately helpful when it comes to these challenges. Collaboration tools foster team-building. Unified messaging ensures that an employee can always be reached. Presence management keeps tabs of who’s available.
But when your product or service offering is complex, it can confuse and frustrate new users and turn them off from the very features that could improve their work experience.
When you simplify your offer and the end-user training that comes with it, you can speed up product adoption, enhance productivity, and give your remote team the features they need (wherever they are).
Let’s dive into best practices for making end-user training and your product/service offering simple.
Why end-user training for UC products is vital
End-user training is the final step in UC deployment and is arguably the most important today. If you want your users to get the most out of your UC services and products, here’s why investing in a simple training program is essential:
- Increases adoption - Users may not be as well-versed in all of the exciting features as system managers may expect. After years of using the same legacy tools, plenty of employees are finding it challenging to switch to something more up-to-date. With simple explanations of things like navigation style, updated icons, and new features, enterprises can help speed up adoption for their users.
- Increases customer satisfaction - When a customer understands their product better, they’ll be more satisfied with it. Think about it. A frustrated user going in circles trying to set up unified messaging will have a much different opinion than one taking the time to train so they know how to use the system on their first try. You want your customers to get the most out of your offering, so give them the tools to understand it well.
- Improves business productivity - In addition to speeding up adoption, solid UC training can also boost business productivity. Rather than waste time trying to troubleshoot new issues that arise or “figuring things out” on their own, your employees could be using that time to get important work done. With working knowledge of their new communications system, they’ll be primed and ready to hit the ground running.
- Decreases reliance on tech support - With so many large changes happening internally for many enterprises, tech support teams everywhere are overwhelmed with requests and tasks. By empowering the user to take training into their own hands, they will become less reliant on IT staff so they can focus on larger-scale issues.
Creating effective training and support solutions for your end users
Now that it’s clear how important UC end-user training is, let’s explore training and support best practices that will simplify the user’s learning process.
Micro-learning
More than 50% of respondents in a Software Advice survey of 385 employees indicated a greater likelihood of using their company’s learning management system (LMS) if the lessons were shorter. That’s no surprise. Research shows learning in small chunks at a time transfers the information more efficiently because it matches the attention spans and working memory capacity of humans. Using this principle of micro-learning by creating short training articles and step-by-step support tutorials can make understanding new technology feel approachable.
Learners love video
A 2018 survey by the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice revealed that students support “the use of multimedia video as a viable teaching resource.” But why do learners love video? They’re familiar with it (hello, Netflix and Youtube!), it’s more interesting than still content, it gives them increased control over their learning, and keeps things small enough to digest. Adding video into your training and support content is advantageous to you.
Investment in an LMS
A cohesive training program is a good training program. If you’re holding all of your content together via Google Doc or a string of email attachments, your users will have trouble going back to reference the content down the road. An integrated LMS like Smart-Lynk serves as the go-to source for any and all support or training content, making it easy for users to track down what they need when they need it. It’s an investment in both your enterprise training and in your employees – and it’s worth it.
From complex to simple with Smart-Lynk
B-Lynk’s Smart-Lynk is the most robust (and affordable) UC services training option available to mid-sized and enterprise-level companies today. Through your very own custom-branded portal, your users can get educated about the necessary features, feel empowered by their new knowledge, and use it to close your customer experience loop.
While some companies see training and support as a cost, it’s actually an investment. Through streamlined and straightforward educational and support content, companies like yours can speed up product adoption, boost productivity, enhance customer satisfaction, and reduce the reliance on tech support staff.
Simplify the complexities of your UC product or service through your very own Smart-Lynk managed training portal and give your end users one less thing to worry about on their to-do lists.
Contact Us to Get Started Today