Online Training Tips and Tricks

How To Prove the ROI (Return on Investment) of Your Online Training Program

Oct 10, 2018

As a training or operations professional, you’ve probably faced plenty of questions regarding ROI (return on investment) from colleagues when evaluating an online learning initiative. You want to help them understand how supporting your learners with quality training can pay for itself with platform growth, reduced expenses and increased revenue.

Data is the objective pillar that drives every successful business. Its integration into every department helps teams reach success and contributes to higher-level revenue goals. For online training programs, data plays a critical role from beginning to end.

It is actually not difficult to demonstrate since modern training softwares (like Northpass) incorporate tracking and reporting functions that go right to the heart of ROI metrics. Below we’ll look at five of those metrics, but the big picture to keep in mind is that successful online training program sprouts from a clear vision of the business outcomes you want to move the needle on.

Start by discussing your priorities with your colleagues for business goals, such as:

Increasing conversion rates
Reducing onboarding time
Increasing productivity after onboarding
Increasing profits
Boosting retention
Ensuring compliance
Increasing revenue
Improving satisfaction

The objective is to drive performance on your priorities and business outcomes, so the training program should focus there and track the hard data needed to help you calculate the ROI of your online training program.

1. Online training makes your learners more proficient

Quite simply, training makes your learners more proficient at their job. By giving them training when and where they need it, you enable them to perform their work and to be successful.

Uber and Lyft have attained phenomenal success because their drivers drive well, know the best routes to take and interact properly with their customers. They learn about important values and best practices through training that enables them to be excellent representatives of those brands. A great brand reputation exemplified by your providers only serves to bring more dollars to your bottom line.

The best thing is, Uber and Lyft deliver the training to their drivers 100% on mobile devices because they know that's how their drivers consume their information. The focus and knowledge on their defined target learner helps them to craft their training to be perfectly tailored and aligned to their goals.

In short, you want to help your learners know how to excel at the service they are providing, so metrics that track improved response times or lower cancellation rates can help demonstrate ROI.

2. Online learning improves operational efficiency

Name any operational objective your organization aims to optimize — attracting more talent, decreasing onboarding time, getting new hires into the field — and you’ll soon realize the key to reaching those goals is through training. Accessible learning content within any platform helps your potential learners get comfortable, confident, and out into their role as quickly as possible.

Here's an example from The Beginner's Guide to Creating an Online Training Program: Measure the Success of Your Program.

To motivate employees to stick around and continue making contributions to your team or business, you need to make them feel like there’s plenty of room for growth. Companies that offer their employees plenty of professional development opportunities are letting their employees know that they encourage their employees to advance in their careers.

The goals summarized above can be measured using the following success metrics. Remember to start by documenting the baseline metric and measure the changes upon implementing your training program. Let’s start with the business success metrics for workforce training. These are metrics directly measured by your team, department or business.

Lead volume for new job applicants
Time taken to onboard a new worker
Turnover rates / retention rates
Changes in workforce size
Time to productivity

Below are training success metrics. Use your training platform’s analytics, assessment and survey tools, and workplace observations, to collect this information from your learners.

Ease of course access and navigation
Satisfaction of the topics covered
Relevancy and practicality of the content
Skills development and behavioral changes

3. Online learning fosters better relationships

Though online training platforms are digital, the interaction between who you are training and the people they will interact with on behalf of your organization is a very human one. At all times, your employees act as the face of your brand, its values, and its standards. These can be woven into and encouraged by your online training.

Using training to ensure your learners know your brand’s values fosters a better relationship with the end-user, the consumer. When the experience is good, customers are pleased and will give your organization high customer satisfaction scores. Happier customers are likely to use your product/services more and drive others to your company through positive word-of-mouth referrals.

Customer satisfaction is an early indicator of loyalty and increased customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV). So one great way to demonstrate ROI of your training program is to look at your customer satisfaction scores and the number of positive reviews before employees start engaging with training and to watch how those scores improve.

4. Online learning grows earnings

The ultimate success of a learning initiative is measured in increased earnings — for both the employee and the business. In traditional businesses, one common metric is revenue-per-customer, sometimes expressed as average customer value. Another metric companies typically measure is average earnings-per-employee.

Instructional videos and brief learning modules influence earnings by imparting fundamental knowledge, but they also show ways your platform can make employees more successful. In addition to helping them grow earnings, online learning demonstrates your commitment to helping providers succeed and keeping them in the fold.

Since it’s more cost-effective to retain employees than to acquire new ones, training that keeps them engaged and succeeding reduces churn and increases profitability. When your organization develops and scales up an online training program, it starts driving this ROI metric.

5. Online learning reduces support costs

Expenses associated with support services are also definitively and measurably impacted when you introduce a training program for your employees.

By enabling your employees to become more efficient in the delivery of the service, whether it be a ride to the airport, house cleaning or food delivery, the demand for support services plummets. Once adequately trained, your providers have less need to reach out for guidance from your support staff.

And it’s easy to calculate this impact. If your support ticket total was 990 in the month before you launched the training program and 500 after, you can directly tie the training to the reduction in support costs. That all filters down to the ROI calculation.

The four kinds of LMS reports that help you monitor business results

With the five metrics to prove the ROI of your online training program in mind (as discussed above), you can set up reports in your LMS to continually measure the business results to calculate your ROI.

LMS reporting is highly likely to give learning managers a headache, yet good reporting is one of the most important features in a learning management platform.

Case in point: