With over 20,000 portals created and a wide variety of training solutions, it isn’t easy to define the best qualities that LatitudeLearning brings to impact the extended enterprise. Especially when customers tell us about their positive outcomes ranging from achieving multi-location training and customized user interfaces to resource consolidation and business process alignment. Just to name a few.
Yet we can consistently point to three advantages within our LMS platform that fuel long-term success in a way that traditional LMS solutions can’t provide.
Let’s take a closer look at these areas that position LatitudeLearning above the rest – certifications, brands and product lines, and performance metrics. These three factors help transform your extended enterprise training program.
Training Certifications
The individuals within your partner network or extended enterprise network can be more than participants. They can be professionals with the certification to know what’s required to be a high-performing team member of that network — whether they’re a technician, salesperson, field service person or more.
To get there, your LMS platform must be able to model the curricula and certifications that your organization needs for success. In defining the curriculum, we must ask:
- What do you need to take to meet the requirements for certification?
- How do you clearly define the requirements versus the electives?
- What is required to fulfill the responsibilities of a given role?
Answers to these questions determine the curriculum.
Still, we’ve only described knowledge and courseware requirements up to this point. LatitudeLearning can not only define requirements, but also handle any kind of complexity your organization requires. This capability is completely unmatched in the industry.
Once you’ve completed the curriculum and obtained certification, it’s time to bring in outside metrics of success to define performance at a high level. For example:
- Sales metrics
- Parts sold metrics
- Quality metrics for the entities within
- Warranty service claims and metrics
- Number of service orders complete
- Fixed first visit or fixed right first time metrics
- Worked on, units sold, etc.
Knowing these metrics tells us that we have someone who has not only completed course materials and earned certification, but they’re performing as a high-functioning member within an environment.
Performance metrics also mean receiving high-quality metrics from customers, including high satisfaction scores for completing enough sales units or repair units.
When LatitudeLearning ties curricula and certifications with business metrics, we begin to drive the organization’s performance forward.
Consider what happens when there is a gap in one of these areas. For example, a technician could be viewed in a positive light due to completing some aspects of a curriculum. Yet, what if that very same technician has terrible customer service and poor performance metrics?
These missed KPIs are an indicator that the technician is lacking in other areas and doesn’t meet certification requirements. When organizations recognize the link between certification and performance metrics, the more likely that each individual with certification can become a huge differentiator for the organization – with the proof in measurable data to back that up.
Brands and Product Lines
Suppose you’re a Recreational Power Sports dealer in Phoenix, Arizona. You probably don’t need to take snowmobile certification, right? It’s not a mandate for what you need. Conversely, if you were a similar dealer in Minnesota, you might need multiple people certified to sell, service and support snowmobiles.
LatitudeLearning’s ability to differentiate who is and is not required to follow the curriculum and then obtain certification based on the brands they carry is critical to a network. When we focus training energies on the things that are pertinent to particular stores, we can avoid offering certifications to people who would be wasting their time earning a certification that’s outside of their requirements.
By defining which curricula and certifications are appropriate based on brands and product lines, we ensure that training is targeted and organizations within a network only focus on what is relevant to their specific environment.
It’s a far more efficient, customized way to advance training programs in a network and LatitudeLearning excels in delivering it.
Performance Metrics
Let’s say Bob is a technician who is measured in fixed first visits, which refers to how well he made a repair the first time a customer visited for a specific issue. The better he does in this category, the more likely the quality score will be very high based on how the organization defines it.
That’s the individual performance metric structure. But there’s also the aspect of organizational performance metrics.
For example, what are the overall quality metrics for a dealership? What are the overall quality metrics for the overall mix of talent relative to having the correct number of people in the right positions? Are minimum training requirements being met to ensure you have the right combination of talent to be a functioning member of the network?
Having this data enables you to certify a dealership or an entity within your structure. These KPIs for organizations will show that while Dealership A is certified, Dealership B is not because it isn’t maintaining a level of competency by achieving strong customer satisfaction scores, it isn’t moving enough volume of product, and it isn’t moving a sufficient volume of parts.
Too often, people simply measure success based on the number of units sold and the revenue generated from the sale. But is that nearly enough? You should have high service and parts sales numbers if you’re performing properly.
- What are those performance metrics?
- How are they being applied to the dealership?
- Is the dealership certified or not?
Now you have a complete picture of what your network is doing at any given time. Dave’s dealership is lagging but Mary’s dealership is doing well. They can’t view each other’s metrics, but the people at the top of the organization most definitely can.
A training manager can see Dave’s struggling dealership and now come in with a complete picture of how to build a program and how to measure success in that particular dealership.
- Where is Dave falling short and having quality issues?
- Is it due to not enough people attending training?
- What kind of training is missing and which is most relevant?
Organizational performance metrics are built into LatitudeLearning’s platform so that each dealership can see that people in the network are getting what they need. Training time and training dollars are being used in the most efficient manner possible.
Performance metrics complete the holy grail of what you want in a training program – to correlate training to the success of an individual or entity, then bring that directly into the LMS and, as a result, make this part of a larger model of how you measure the network overall. Tracking the performance of your individuals and entities is vitally important.
Defining certification, factoring in brands and product lines and creating performance metrics don’t work nearly as well if they aren’t fully integrated. They can’t exist in silos and must cross-pollinate so you can get the most out of the LMS.
Being able to offer this dynamic of all three areas integrated seamlessly within a complete platform is what LatitudeLearning does best.
Latitude’s Advantages Mean Real Dollars for You
We’re using this structure at LatitudeLearning to drive down warranty cost, increase remuneration rates to dealers, increase individual and location certifications, improve overall network performance and more.
If you think about it, increasing the number of certified and trained people will ultimately result in your warranty and support costs dropping. If you’re like many companies, reducing your warranty claims by 1% could result in several millions of dollars – and you more than cover the cost of your training program.
If your dealership maintains a higher certification rating, you may receive an increased rate on your warranty remuneration because you’re a “Platinum-Level” certified dealer compared to a non-certified dealer.
If a business owner knows he will save a lot on the warranty work he is doing by maintaining highly trained staff, getting involved in a training program can be a very high motivator. The ability for people to see and understand where they stand within the network at any given time is vitally important, precisely the type of transparency our LMS supplies from Day One.
Only LatitudeLearning’s LMS platform can bring all three of these massive advantages together for greater business impact for your organization. Let’s discuss how it can apply to your environment.
Discover more about fueling your growth with training programs: download our ebook on certification today!
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