Heard of training credits, but not quite sure where they fit into your learning strategy? You’re in the right place! Join me as I discuss how Thought Industries’ training credits feature works, and the benefits for both your learners and your organization.
Give it to Me Straight: What are LMS Training Credits?
Training credits are a simple way to offer customers access to learning content without the need for a direct financial transaction. Site administrators can create credit accounts for their Panorama environments and apportion credits to learners via sublicense, as well as credit account access for Panorama manager roles. These could be organized by customers, departments, seniority level, location, or any other configuration that works for the enterprise customer.
Imagine you’re an L&D admin, or customer education leader.You want to offer a specific subgroup of users access to content without the need for up-front payments, credit cards, or a complicated expense account. Thought Industries makes this easy, giving you a way to add however many credits you choose to any specific credit account on-demand. At the click of a button (or two), all users within a particular group will automatically have access to all of the credits within their sublicense.
Your users are now like kids in a candy store. They can access these credits from inside Panorama, and use them to buy training content on a first-come, first-served basis, and without the need for a financial transaction. In contrast, subscription-based training or an à la carte training offering would require these same users to make a direct and targeted purchase of a set price. They would need to choose the specific courses and content they want ahead of time, complete with approvals for budget and a financial layout.
Psst, hey, admins! As credits don’t equate to any specific dollar value, you can decide how to manage the process, like many credits a specific course or content offering should equal, even down to a per-account level.
How Training Credits Boost Learner Consumption
One of main benefits of training credits is the flexibility for your enterprise customers, as well as to their end-users.
As a business, you can offer enterprise training credits as part of your solution, and then hand the customer the ability to take control over the number of credits they use, when, and how.
Let’s say you’re a manufacturing company, or a software provider, and you provide a wide range of training to your customers. When you sell a subscription, or upsell or cross-sell a new product, you can add value to the buyer by including a set number of training credits in the sale, rather than locking them into specific training courses or certifications.
Your customer knows they’ll need to train on your product to get the most value, but they don’t know exactly what they will need. A certain number of users will need certifications, while others might want product training. Nothing is set in stone, and the admin hasn’t quite got that far yet. But they do have leftover budget burning a hole in their pocket, and it’s use it or lose it time.
By including training credits, your customer is incentivized to buy now, recognizing the added value of credits that can be used for any training content further down the line. They are also likely to appreciate the autonomy that comes alongside credits which can be used for a wide range of content. After all, this checks a lot more boxes than buying set courses now, which might not fit their requirements 3 or 6 months down the line.
How LMS Training Credits Boost Learning Program Success
So far, I’ve been talking about how our training credits feature makes sense for the customer. Now let’s switch perspective to the business. Here are some of the top organizational wins as our customers see them:
- Add more trained users: The more people you can train on your solution, the more your users are seeing the value of your product! And even when credits run dry, having a critical mass of employees who have consumed your training content makes it more likely that customers will opt to purchase additional content for its dollar value. This is especially true as new employees join the team and need to get up to speed.
- Encourage prospects to convert: Training credits are a fantastic value-add to sweeten the deal when prospects are further down the sales funnel. Of course, you can bake the cost of training into the cost of a software subscription or a product license, while both parties get the ease of a single transaction.
- Get greater insight into training behaviors: Get a better understanding of how customers choose to interact with and consume training when they have no limits on the content they utilize. As credits are all used within the Panorama environment, admins can track the usage of credits, monitor consumption, and gain insight from the most popular kinds of training and how customers engage with your learning content over time.
Offering B2B courses for your customers? Training credits could supercharge your sales strategy
Training credits aren’t one size fits all. For example, if you’re a company who are working B2C, monetizing its content directly to the learner through credit card transactions on a website, training credits wont fit your purpose, and may even add additional unnecessary steps or friction.
However, in any scenario where you’re directly provisioning content and giving a business access to Panorama as part of your product or service, training credits are a win for both the business and the learners. It’s a smart and straightforward way to allow your customers to distribute training to their own customers or employees, removing the need for financial transactions, and providing your enterprise customers with greater flexibility, autonomy and control.
Any questions on training credits, or how to get the most out of Panorama? We’re happy to help.
