Effectively engaging and impacting learners who are internal employees can be hard enough, but organizations that need to deliver learning experiences to audiences outside of the organization face even tougher challenges. Brandon Hall Group’s recent Next Generation Learning Technology Ecosystem survey found that nearly 60% of organizations deliver learning to the extended enterprise. It is more difficult to create learning that matches the specific needs of these audiences, and even harder still to measure the impact the learning is having.
One approach that has seen a lot of success for internal learners holds a lot of promise for the extended enterprise as well. Games and gamification can be a great way to engage customers, partners, franchisees, and other external audiences. For example, organizations that deliver training on their products to customers can add achievement mechanics to the learning and reward those achievements with samples of the products themselves, samples of new products as rewards, or free training. Not only does this drive adoption and engagement with the learning, but it also helps foster a stronger customer relationship. By synching the training rewards with active campaigns, training can create synergy by providing samples of the products that are the subjects of the training.
In a franchise environment, gamification can introduce the spirit of competition into the training; challenging teams, individual stores/restaurants, and regions to reach training goals and publicly acknowledge achievements. Leaderboards let everyone know where they stand and what it will take to make it to the next level.
Brandon Hall Group Platinum Preferred Provider Docebo has made extended enterprise learning a core focus for its solutions, helping its customers engage external learning audiences of all kinds. They have been leveraging their extensive gamification elements including producing badges that learners can share on LinkedIn. Adding gamification to learning provides new opportunities to collect data on learner engagement, retention, and specific outcomes. Tracking and reporting on extended enterprise learning has always been difficult, but the Docebo gamification elements feed this data into the system for better insights. Docebo also recognizes that, while fun at its core, gamification is not without its challenges, especially for the extended enterprise. They have comprehensive tools to manage various privacy and visibility concerns that may arise within different audiences.
Great customer experiences continue to be a top business goal for organizations in any industry and adding gamification to the training being provided is one way to take the experience to the next level.
– David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
