Customers and Employees: Why Their Journeys Deserve Equal Attention

Businesses spend a great deal of time considering their customers and what is important to them. They value the customer, so in turn need to value what the customer wants. It’s vital to the longevity of any business to demonstrate care towards the customer; being invested in addressing customers’ needs through products and customer service. Creating this value for the customer is what garners loyalty – another cornerstone to success. Employees are much like these customers we spend so long thinking about. We value our employees, so in turn we need to value what they want. It’s vital to demonstrate care towards the employee; being invested in what they want and need, and of course we value their loyalty too. To keep this, we must invest in the employee journey as we do the customer journey, and that all starts with your LMS.

I realise this is not ground-breaking or Earth-shattering news – your Learning Management System is of course home to effective management of Learning and Development – but are they just titles of suites you once invested in, or do they truly live and breathe in your organisation’s culture the way you once envisioned? Working with our clients, the message is always the same – employees want relevant, valuable content which is easily accessible.

 

Relevant, Valuable Content

So let’s break that down and tackle the first hurdle – relevant, valuable content. This means vastly different things to different people within the same organisation, and so relevant content can be achieved in myriad ways. Defining roles in the LMS is often the first step, enabling you to personalize content to job roles using system functionality such as tags, topics and playlists to deliver the content you want users to see. Some organisations choose to dive even deeper than that, opting to include a series of starter questions within courses which identify roles of learners even further; personalising the course to them and cutting out irrelevant content. Covid-19 has caused the unprecedented urgency for digitization of training, but online training must be different to classroom-based training or we risk the efficacy of the learning experience. We’ve also seen a real increase in L&D teams wanting to provide additional valuable content, and to achieve this we partner with Anders Pink. This ‘Freemium’ content keeps employees’ attention within the LMS, rather than hopeful web searches and other time-consuming hunts for additional learning.

 

Easily Accessible

How information is presented is paramount to user adoption of the LMS overall. To meet this need, we evolved Northern Star Digital; focusing on user experience by bridging the gap between Cornerstone functionality and your organisations’ own culture and branding. Cornerstone themselves know the importance of the tailored user experience, having recently equipped partners such as ourselves with the new Custom Login Page tool; enabling us to present your brand to your employees at the point of login (if SSO is absent). From this point onwards we developed Northern Start Digital to elevate the entire user experience, from personalised welcome pages to role-specific custom pages; from engaging check-ins to informative news feeds, we create a seamless user journey to ensure your learners access everything they need with ease.

If your LMS is not thoroughly integrated and implemented, it is impossible to effectively manage and optimize. You simply can’t expect your full ROI when you’re only using some functions, or you’re using all the functionality but to an inconsistent degree. Cast your mind back to time spent shopping for your LMS and remember all the reasons you bought into the platform in the first place – are you utilizing all those functions now to their maximum capability? Do you do the same each quarter when new functionality is released? Investing time into optimizing your platform is key, not only at first implementation but long-term to combat disorganisation, outdated content and irrelevant information.

So you’ve thought about the products you give to your employees and how to make them see the value, but what about customer service? Our team has been working with Cornerstone for over 20 years combined, and have helped organisations to overcome many challenges with implementation and user adoption. One of the most valuable tools in our armoury is the helpdesk, where admins and end users alike receive timely support with their queries. For your users, this is a vital asset to maximise their happiness with the platform, which is the driver for continued use. Overcoming user issues means the precious time they set aside for using the LMS is a successful and truly valuable experience.

 

Contact us for more information on how Northern Star can guide your success.

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