Software Training: Accelerate Company Growth

Although great products or services are vital for successful companies, promoting growth goes well beyond that product/service excellence. You have to position your employees to be a part of how the business grows and thrives. The people you employ and the skillsets they bring to the table can make or break success. Your workforce is crucial in executing best practices in all aspects of the business, the better they perform, the higher the probability of success. The explosion of the digital workplace and remote work make the digital component of work a challenge in terms of ensuring best practices in application tasks are understood and performed competently and continuously.

Just simply throwing employees onto your critical software programs and hoping for the best doesn’t seem to make sense but if quite common. Your critical applications need to be used as intended, all the time, in order to fulfill their role in contributing to the success of the business. Accepting the fact that software training must be a priority for your workforce. And not just training, which is usually viewed as a one-and-done phenomena, software training that is dynamic and resides within your critical applications every day for every user. Armed with this mindset, software training takes on a new meaning, with a new set of tools to enable that vision.

Increases Employee Productivity

When your employees don’t quite know how to get the most out of your software or effectively perform their application tasks, they’re forced to do things that are unproductive at best and harmful to business outcomes at worst. They may waste time poking around the menus or muddle through the task, uncertain they are taking the right steps, or even begin their work only to hit a brick wall and disrupt their coworkers and managers. These scenarios not only hurt productivity, they can result in omissions and rework which can negatively affect business outcomes and customer and employee satisfaction.

Alternatively, you may have assembled content you believe will be helpful but store it or organize it in a manner which requires too much time searching for the help they need. They may or may not find the precise help and if they do, it’s often not in the form needed to guide them through the task but may be in the form of an eLearning course, a PowerPoint or Word document that takes too much time to absorb, and so on.

At the end of the day, traditional training and documentation has proven time and again to be ineffective but is definitely costly.

All these scenarios add up to lost time each and every day. When multiplied across your workforce, your company is hemorrhaging opportunity cost in wages and overhead without getting much back in return. The losses may even increase if support structures have to get involved such as Support, management and software/service vendors.

In fact, if you have 1,000 users within your workforce, all that extra communication alone could result in a loss of almost 20 hours a week, totalling over $50 million a year (assuming a $50/hour fully loaded labor rate). By implementing the right kind of software “training”, you can remove the need for these types of unproductive and ineffective activities which impede achieving the intended business outcomes.

Improves the Quality of Work

When people are confident in their knowledge and abilities, they easily produce higher quality work in less time. They don’t have to second guess their approach and worry about their results. This extends to their competent use of mission critical software.

Most enterprise applications aim to streamline processes and improve the quality of outcomes. But that’s only possible when it the application is used as intended. Key functions may be overlooked because they simply aren’t known to the user, they may be avoided because the user doesn’t know how to execute the function or they may simply be processed incorrectly. All reduce the quality of results.

Only through dedicated software training and support systems can employees quickly learn how each function should work and how to apply them to their assigned tasks. Once they feel confident using the program, their work quality will increase.

Provides a Better Customer Experience

With so many competitors on the market today, you cannot afford to let the customer experience fall short of your competition. Good customer experiences are the key to brand loyalty and repeat customers and when loyal customers return, they are likely to spend 140% more than those who had negative experiences in the past.

A quality product, good customer service, and marketing that speaks to customer needs are critical to ensuring your company excels at customer experience.. Alongside these are the systems which make your company run effectively behind the scenes: order processing, supply chain availability and movement, customer support follow up and cash management. All these \require your employees to have a mastery of your critical applications. An inadequate training function that fails to align product, process and people  could leave your customers looking to your competitors.

Reduces Workforce Turnover Rates

When your employees do not know how to effectively use your software, their frustration levels inevitably rise. If they struggle with getting their tasks completed in a timely manner and at the quality level needed, they could be left feeling quite inadequate and fearful for their jobs, which could lead to further job disengagement.

Once employee productivity drops more than 15%, absenteeism is likely to rise significantly. Disengaged employees are more likely to search for a different job, increasing your turnover rate and its associated cost which, according to Gallup, could be 50% to 200% of an employee’s annual salary or wage Then, you still have to train them on all your practices and processes with no guarantee of successful performance, particularly if training efforts were part of the problem to begin with.

With the explosion of the digital workplace, providing supportive software training and support in the first place can help maintain your employees’ job satisfaction and keep them engaged and effective. This is more effective when combined with other methods of increasing workplace satisfaction, such as offering competitive compensation packages and recognizing efforts and accomplishments that contribute to company success or reflect company values. You can then refocus those lost turnover dollars into promoting growth with improved systems and other investments.

Eliminates Technology Waste

There’s perhaps nothing more frustrating than investing in complex and enterprise applications only to fail to effectively integrate them into the day-to-day operation of your workforce. Unfortunately, this is common with up to 70% of all spending on tech ends up wasted, especially when used to keep legacy systems up and running.

In order to make the most of all your investment, you have to back up your software purchases with effective training and user support. By getting all your employees onboarded in using the new tech, you can achieve the results intended from your optimized processes and increase your competitive advantage.