A customer relationship management (CRM) solution tracks your customer base. It tracks customer experience by channels and touchpoints. When combined with a business intelligence tool, you get a great insight into your customer or prospect.
CRM technology continues to advance. This allows learning professionals to extract data from external customers to align present and future external training opportunities. Traditional CRM solutions tracked contact management, lead management, email, and social media. Consider adding functionality to your CRM such as marketing automation, online reputation management or the voice of the customer. Build relationships with viewers and their influencers. Build brand loyalty.
How does learning fit into this?
There are many touchpoints when building your brand. Learning and information transfer is one of the best ways to get customers who are loyal and engaged with your conversation. Marketing and training have many overlapping strategies.
Good marketing design takes a message and enhances the user experience with your product or brand. Good learning design takes a message and enhances the user experience. Yes, it is generally the same outcome so why do so many views it as different? Learning professionals constantly look for ways to get information to the intended recipient. When the recipient is an external customer, providing training information or product/service information is a great way to enhance the customer relationship.
CRM and the Learning Ecosystem Roadmap
As you create your ecosystem, you will eventually move away from the internal client and address the external client. Training your customers helps control customer perception, provides information about your products or services, and makes your customers wanting more.
Engaged learners equal engaged customers
Data analytics are important throughout the product life cycle. Comprehensive customer data allows you to define your customer demographics and target your learning opportunities accordingly. Perhaps you find your customers perceive value in one aspect of your product or service and not other aspects. If your customers are learned in your offerings, they will come to you for advice and information gathering.
Gap analysis is crucial to designing customer education. What information do you currently provide to your customers? After reviewing your offerings, are there areas where you do not have enough information, or do you think you can do a better job of communicating that to the customer? If so, consulting your learning ecosystem strategy reveals topics to discuss with your base.
The CRM technology transfer
As with your HRIS system, your CRM has a wealth of information at your fingertips. HR systems are the nucleus of your internal stakeholders; CRM systems are the nucleus of your external stakeholders. Take information from the CRM that helps you align your learning experience to demographics and business needs. Provide a rich information repository and your customers view your organization as the ‘go-to’ and may refer your educational pieces to others. Use the CRM as a two-way pipeline of information. Extract data to give you more information about your customers to use to offer learning opportunities. Use the data you gather from course completion to enhance the knowledge of your CRM.
CRM helps you view customers through different lenses.
Once you test and quantify learning measurement and satisfaction, you are on your way toward happy customers. You may also find this information adds to your bottom line by profit generation – either from increased sales or by revenues earned by selling the training.
Why Instancy?
Instancy’s Learning Platform was built from the ground up and has transformed over two decades. Our software integrates with most business applications and allows you to offer training to your customers and vendors. Use the feedback from your customers to advance learning objectives for your internal courses. Internal or external, if you know your customer (KYC) you can use all the data available to build upon important training concepts.
Instancy integrates with many CRMs such as SalesForce and HubSpot. Let our integration expertise take the risk out of this critical task. The health of your CRM is crucial.
Instancy pushes the registration and course transaction data back into your CRM. Information is updated, not lost. Instancy can help you sell individual courses or content. We can also create membership subscriptions, and manage new and expired membership data with your CRM for marketing purposes
We will continue to provide more information on learning ecosystems and the importance of interconnectivity. If you have any subjects you’d like to discuss, let us know. We will include it in a future article.
Do good work.
Harvey
