How the Right Learning Management System Can Be a Game-Changer for Corporate Communication

You might be asking yourself, "Why would my organization need a Learning Management System (LMS)?"

Once you know how it can resolve communication challenges with employees and clients, you’ll wonder why you don’t have one!

In fact, the right LMS can help you 10x your results. This is true whether you’re directing a sales team, managing distributors, or helping clients sell more of your product/service. You can easily accomplish greater success by streamlining communication with the intelligent Learning Management System from SOAR LMSi.

Corporate Communication Problem #1: Delivering Information and Ensuring it is Understood

How do you get what’s in your mind into everyone else’s minds quickly, and without any misunderstandings?

Option #1: Schedule a conference and fly everyone in for the day. In this case, expect to spend a small fortune trying to coordinate schedules, flights, transportation, food, etc. Then you’ll find that someone is on vacation, another person is sick and someone else had a family emergency. The result? You’ll make a big investment and still only end up with 80-90% of your team in the meeting room.

Option #2: Call an "all hands on deck" virtual meeting or screen share at a specific date and time.  You’ll save money, but still have someone out sick, someone with a family emergency, and someone else with bad wifi.

Option #3: Send an email memorandum outlining the important information you need to get across. You’ll eliminate the absentee issue here, but 10-15% of your employees will miss the memo. Now you have to spend time following up to make sure everyone received it. Even if you accomplish that, you’re still not  fully certain that all of the important information was understood.

In any one of these cases, you run into problems:

1. You’ll spend time and/or money trying to get everyone rounded up to hear your message
2. Those who attend a meeting or conference will have only retained about 25% of what you share 72 hours later
3. You’ll spend time following up with those who didn’t didn’t get or understand the information in the first place

In almost every scenario, you’ll end up repeating yourself at least once. You’ll have to re-present content to those who missed the meeting, or chase down anyone who didn’t get the email. Otherwise, those who missed the information will just be “weak links” in the chain.

You run into these issues all the time:

• Training employees, clients, or vendors
• Issuing new product launches
• Publishing new company policies, procedures, or pay plans
• Anytime everyone needs to receive AND understand information so they can adopt or implement it

If you’re responsible for ensuring results, the efficiency and effectiveness of this process is a direct reflection on YOU. Imagine the burden it would remove from your shoulders if this issue could be easily resolved. Check out these simple but remarkable solutions to corporate communication problems, offered by SOAR LMSi:

Communication Solution #1: Pushed Content (to any device, including mobile)

SOAR LMSi platforms all include Micro Learning Pushed Content.

That’s a long way to say you can send any information to any device, DAILY if necessary, until viewed. And you can do this without requiring anyone to be in a board room, on a screen share, reading email memos, download an apps, or log into a remote website. A link to your content is sent to their devices via email in the wee hours of the morning. No matter how early they wake up, there you are.  Your message appears on their cell phone, and they can click to begin watching or reading your content.

But it gets even better! Then, from your mobile device you can WATCH everyone’s participation via custom activity reports. These reports will tell you when they watched your message, for how long, and how many times. If anyone doesn’t watch it today, they will automatically receive the same session link via email tomorrow, the next day, and so on. This will continue until they interact with your content. All of this happens automatically, without you or anyone on your staff having to be involved!

Communication Solution #2: Graded Questions to Confirm Understanding

Now that you’ve streamlined the communication process with your clients or employees, it’s easy to confirm their understanding. Simply set up an assessment on the SOAR LMSi platform immediately following your content session. In the same way, the platform will serve up a link to the questions (emailed in the wee hours of the morning, daily until answered). The questions can be true/false, multiple choice, essay, fill in the blank, or even require a selfie video response back if you want to confirm they learned a script or presentation you are trying to teach. The automated assessments will help confirm everyone in your group understands the content, intent, and objective of the information.

Next, without you having to do anything, their responses will be assessed or "graded." If you require 100% understanding and a participant does not achieve that in the assessment, the platform will continue to "teach" them until they get it right. It does this by sending the participant back to the message to review again, or by asking them to answer the questions again until they confirm understanding of your content, intent, and your objective for delivering the information in the first place.

Then again, without you having to do anything, participants’ test results are forwarded to your mobile device by email in real time and saved in their individual files. You don’t even have to log in anywhere to access this data. With these "intelligent" learning management features from SOAR LMSi, you can quickly confirm two three things:

1. You’ve delivered 100% of your content to 100% of your intended recipients
2. You’ve verified that they have viewed the content in its entirety
3. You’ve actually “confirmed” 100% of the attendees understand 100% of your information in regard to the content, intent and/or objective you wanted them to know

Corporate Communication Problem #2: Achieving 100% Buy-in and Adoption of Your New Ideas, Policies or Procedures Quickly

You’ve delivered your content and verified that your clients or employees understand it, your intent, and the objectives you’ve set out to accomplish. But that doesn’t mean that they will agree, adhere, or carry out the policy or procedure you are teaching.

In fact, as a rule, there are "early adopters," there are the “tough sells” and there are the “apathetic” in any group of five or more. Who’s who? How do you draw out their true opinions and feelings so you can continue to achieve your objectives successfully? This could be very important for:

• rolling out a new product launch
• updating an important policy or procedure
• helping distributors or clients to sell more of your valuable products using your new ideas, tools or methods

Communication Solution #3: Custom Surveys, Community Forums, and Private Chat

At this point, its time for honest, private feedback.

In a live meeting, the naysayers and the apathetic will typically not voice their opinion. Alternatively, they may voice what they think you want to hear while reserving their true opinions. Then later, they show their true opinions through their actual actions. And you certainly don’t want them “poisoning the well” with negativity – which is often a result of incomplete understanding.

To avoid this problem and achieve your objective, the platform can deliver a custom survey. You can word it in such a way as to invite and draw out each person’s true feelings about your message. Then, their feedback is delivered to you privately and securely for your eyes only. You are automatically notified of these responses, and they are saved in each person’s file for later reference if needed.

The platform also offers a community discussion board, which is a marvelous tool for positive comments and testimonials. Here you can create a discussion topic to which you invite all of the employees or clients in your group. As your early adopters voice their acceptance, approval or offer additional input to help achieve your desired objectives, you can publish their positive feedback under this discussion topic. Everyone in the invited group is automatically able to see these post, helping to move the naysayers and the apathetic to your way of thinking through peer to peer learning and encouragement.

This gives you the unique ability to publicly respond to their positive feedback on the same discussion topic for everyone to see, and shout your praises from the rooftops.

With all of these tools, here is what you’ve accomplished so far:

1. You’ve verified that a significant percentage (if not all) of your group has received your information
2. You have confirmations in hand that they understood your content, intent and objectives
3. You have written confirmations that they are on board and willingly looking forward to enthusiastically implementing, adhering to, adopting, or performing your objectives as intended

Spend Your Time Where it Makes the Most Sense

Now you can attend to the remaining few who have confirmed they received and understood your message, but simply don’t agree or care. I know, this is like mind reading! So cool. Let’s talk about how to help these folks get in alignment with your objectives:

First, engage them in private communication. You can do this by phone if you don’t need the interaction to be recorded and automatically saved to their file. Or you can use that private chat feature we talked about earlier in this article.

Next, listen to their concerns or objections, acknowledging them along the way. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find valuable information in those conversations.

Finally, once you have heard them out, begin to sell your point of view until you have achieved confirmed consensus throughout the rest of your group.

You can now focus your time and effort where it is needed, which greatly increases productivity and effectiveness! You only have so many hours in a day, and this process ensures you don’t spend any time unnecessarily repeating yourself, dealing with people who don’t understand your message, or investing unnecessary time in people who are already onboard with you.

Obviously we’ve lived through this!

As corporate trainers, managers and executives, the team at SOAR LMSi has collectively lived through these scenarios hundreds of times! That is why we developed the features in our proprietary learning management system the way we did.

Engagement in online learning is traditionally low – so we came out with the solution that is achieving 100% engagement rates. Pushed content and micro-learning features ensure content makes it to everyone’s mobile device. You can schedule this to occur daily, if necessary. And it will continue until the content has been viewed without requiring anyone to do anything. There is also no log-in required. EASY!

Knowing where everyone stands in regard to their learning AND understanding is key to effective management of people and processes. Therefore, the online reports and capabilities for testing, quizzes and feedback are essential!

Getting everyone’s enthusiastic buy-in and support to implement a new policy, procedure, product or sales technique, or distribute vital information to help vendors or clients sell more of your products must happen in order for the intended results to be achieved. The customized surveys with community forums and private chat allow you to confirm objectives accomplished with the least amount of time, effort and cost.

What is your part in the process?

Same as it is now, except you only do everything ONCE , and and everyone sees your best! This includes new hires, existing employees, vendors, clients and future prospects!

You still have to deliver the meeting information. But you can pre-record it on your mobile device or just write it out in text format. This gives you the unique advantage of getting your messaging perfect in advance. Everyone knows that this is nearly impossible to achieve when you are running a live meeting online or in person! Upload your perfect message to your new SOAR learning management system just like you would upload content to social media.

Here is the best part: Every new employee, client, or vendor who comes on later who needs that same information can be enrolled to receive it, complete with surveys and tests for understanding – and you never have to repeat yourself again! Simply enter the email addresses of everyone you want to be a part of the learning or discussion and voila!  They will receive their link to it directly in their inbox. Wash, rinse, repeat!

Do it once, and deliver it 1000 times without doing any more work later.

What if something changes? Like updates?

It’s simple to make changes or updates to your content and when you do, everyone sees the new information globally. Updates and changes are forever and will forever be occurring. There is no simpler way to ensure everyone always receives, understands and agrees with the latest.

As you can see, you can achieve group-wide results, group-wide consensus and build a positive culture in days, not weeks…months…or never. You can 10x your results, and do it from the golf course, beach, or mountain biking trail because you watch and control it all from your cell phone. Or you can stay busy recruiting a bigger team, selling more accounts, or coming up with new and better ideas to implement next month!

This is likely one of the fastest ways to a raise, or promotion, or both if you are a sales director, or anyone responsible for higher productivity of existing employees, clients, or distribution partners.

Request a free consultation with one of our corporate advisors today. Tell us about your business, your process, and your ideas – and we will help you craft a perfect process to achieve your objective with the SOAR LMSi platform.

Let’s Talk!