You finally create a course or three with your small team, and customers buy your instructor-led training offerings. Congratulations. Now, how to meet the growing demand to deliver classes across the globe? Explore live online training.
Live online training, also called Virtual Instructor Led Training, is a way to deliver hands-on interactive technical training remotely. Customers take technical training without travel, in an interactive, hands-on remote learning approach. Live online classes are led by a live instructor and include access to a remote training environment, with lecture, demos, labs, and break times.
Live Online training provides benefits for both your customers, and your customer education team.
Benefits of live online training for customers
Customers love live online classes because they are so accessible to attend. Rather than getting approval for travel expenses, being away from the office and from key projects for several days at a time, customers fit training into their regular workday.
Students attend both public and private live online classes. In public classes, individuals from several companies purchase seats in an online store to attend. In private classes, live online provides value especially when teams from a single customer are dispersed. Teams are brought together in the remote class rather than flying everyone to a central location, saving your customers travel expenses.
Benefits of live online training for Customer Education team
Live online training provides your instructors and your team increased flexibility as well. Rather than losing a day of travel at each end of a class, instructors deliver training from the comfort of their own homes, maybe even while wearing their pajamas!
Live online allows you to reach a wider audience with fewer resources. Instructors cover whole regions rather than just one specific location at a time. For example, I had classes scheduled from 4 to 8 pm PT, to address the APAC region, and from 7 to 11 am PT for North America and Europe. This also means it’s easier to borrow subject matter experts from other teams to deliver classes. I successfully had professional services consultants, sales engineers, and support engineers deliver live online classes.
So, how does live online training double margins?
Virtual classrooms benefits the Customer Education team as a whole. With live online you can eliminate the time to book training venues across the globe, and curriculum developers use most if not all of existing instructor led content for delivering live online classes. Financially, the margins for live online are great. While the margin for delivering a public classroom event in a rented facility is around 40%, live online delivery can be as high as 75 - 80%. The general rule is to charge the same price for classroom training. While the delivery costs may be lower, customers save money on travel and expenses, so it works out for them.
The bonus is that course evaluations are comparable for live online and classroom deliveries. Numerous studies show no significant difference in the effectiveness of learning between live, classroom training and online training. What’s most important, is developing and delivering good quality content that meets the needs of your customers. To build your expertise in developing and delivering virtual training, check out the live online specific courses at Langevin.
Live online training gives you a high-margin, scalable approach to expand your reach, train your customers, and increase the likelihood of customer success and renewals.
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