- Reaching your global audience
In a Global Economy, your Extended Enterprise Users can be located worldwide. To satisfy their needs, you need to bear in mind two things: speed and latency. The speed at which your users can download the content they need from the internet, or your company academy, should be high. The latency – the time needed to establish the connection between the final user and the remote service – should be low. One of the most effective ways to ensure both of these things is to use a content distribution network (CDN). This is a technology that replicates the learning materials on different datacenters, located worldwide, and delivers that content from the closest server to the user. This enables the learning materials to get to all users, wherever they are, with optimal speed and latency. - It’s all about brand
Delivering learning materials to different countries is likely to involve meeting several conditions. If, for example, your product is branded differently in different countries, you’ll need to create different customer academies with different product logos and even different content, based on each of your target audiences. - Fitting your clients’ brand identity
When using Extended Enterprise, you can build separate academies for each of your clients – tailoring the environment to the client’s logo and corporate identity to enhance the user experience and “fidelization”. - Different brands, different policies
Using the Extended Enterprise concept to manage different audiences might mean that you need different policies for each one. For example, in an LMS that delivers Internal, Customer and Dealer training with different brands, you may need to set up three separate login policies – mixing a Single Sign On system with the internal systems for those accessing the Internal learning materials. Dealer users can reach the LMS from the Dealer portal, while Customers can be handled via self-registration. - Different countries, different laws
Privacy and Data Protection regulations differ between the US and Europe – and variations in these regulations occur from country to country. Furthermore, laws in the world’s emerging markets are evolving swiftly. With the Extended Enterprise approach, you have to ensure that your Extended Enterprise Vendor is cross-compliant with the relevant Privacy and Data Protection laws. Usually European Union (EU) laws in this area are stricter than are US laws (you may wish to view the Safe Harbor policy).
- Don’t forget your CRM
Selling complex products involves the Four Keys of Social Media – Engage, Educate, Excite, Evangelize. This is a concept that can be applied to Extended Enterprise. Allowing prospects to self-register in a Customer Academy means that, thereby, you acquire a potential lead to record in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This starts a new sales funnel. An Extended Enterprise LMS must provide the API which allows it to send the lead to the CRM – and then update the lead with useful information (such as how much time the user spends online, how many times the user logs-in and so on) in order to better qualify the lead. - Don’t forget Mobile users
The rapidly growing popularity, as learning methods, of mobile learning and video pills mean the Extended Enterprise LMS – including the Branding/ Sub Portal – must offer learners the opportunity to have their learning materials delivered to smartphone and/or tablet. - Focus on a single product and vendor
In the Extended Enterprise, it’s to your benefit to have a single system that can meet your needs across different situations. Consider the benefits of dealing with a single vendor, having a single system to learn and a single set of procedures to distribute and maintain between the people who work on the LMS. - Help your Help Desk team
Training your customers has a direct impact on your Help Desk workload. The more your customers know about your product, the more they are engaged and motivated – and the less time they’ll spend calling your Help Desk team. - How fast will you grow?
Since business growth is a company’s key goal, company systems should be able to scale and adapt to cope with new projects and the acquisition of new customers. An LMS, especially one tuned to the Extended Enterprise, must be able to meet your needs and, especially, be capable of scaling up and down dynamically to support your business.
Author: Fabio Pirovano, CTO at Docebo
