5 Important Metrics for Measuring the Success of Your eLearning Programme

How are you measuring the success of your training programmes? Although it isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do, it is very important. If you don’t know what impact your training courses are having, it’s hard to tell what the payoff is.

However, that doesn’t make measurement any less challenging. What you track largely depends on what your goals are and what kind of organisation you’re running. Nevertheless, here are several important metrics for measuring the success of your online training programme.

1) A Growth in Sales

If the training is tailored towards sales, customer service, and product education, a well-executed programme should lead to an increase in sales in your enterprise. Of course, you still need to cross-reference these numbers against existing trends, seasonality, or other factors that historically affected sales volume. Overall, your sales team should be better educated after going through course material, and well-trained salespeople are always going to do a better job of presenting products and services to leads compared to those who haven’t studied.

2) Reduced Cost of Training

In his book “E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age”, author Marc Rosenbergfound that eLearning requires 25% to 60% less time than classroom education to learn the same amount of material. Although course authoring and development will always require a certain amount of time and resources, eLearning training course material can be re-used and delivered more efficiently compared to classroom-based education. Plus, you’ll save on instructor costs. A decrease in overhead is a metric worth tracking for most organisations, regardless of whether they are more business-oriented or education-oriented.

3) Increased User Satisfaction

User satisfaction is a good metric to track, though it may be a little difficult to quantify. After all, for an eLearning training programme to be considered a true success, your trainees should feel that the material was valuable, and that it helped them to do their jobs more effectively. The good news is that you can implement surveys at the end of individual courses. You can also follow up with your trainees later to ask for more detailed responses. Since eLearning allows for users to take courses at their own convenience, as long as the material is good, you should have plenty of satisfied users.

4) Better Retention

Businesses spend about one-fifth of an employee’s annual salary to replace that worker. How long are your employees or team members sticking around? Those who feel that ongoing learning is a part of their training are far more likely to stay at a job for longer, giving you a pretty good idea of how effective your training programmes are. Human Resource departments are generally concerned with retention already, and have processes in place for tracking it. When team members feel well-equipped to handle their jobs, better retention should be a natural byproduct of effective online training programmes.

5) Improved Customer Service

Customer service is arguably one of the most important aspects of any business, and is perhaps one of the easiest things to track. By surveying and talking to your customers, you can get a pretty good idea of major concerns that should be addressed in current or future training modules. Customer satisfaction can greatly increase when you are taking the appropriate measures to address issues and train your employees. There are a variety of different ways to do this, but eLearning programmes can certainly be effective tools in improving your customer service initiatives.

Final Thoughts on Training ROI

It can take time to put the right processes in place to measure the appropriate metrics for your digital training programmes. Don’t get frustrated if things don’t come together as fast as you would like them to. Regardless, proving the efficacy of your courses should be high on your list of your priorities. Proven results speak to you and your team’s ability to create timely and relevant training programmes that support business or organisational objectives.