Product training is a key ingredient for success. It helps employees understand the features and benefits of the products, how to use them, and most importantly, the value the products offer to customers.

Product training is also beneficial for your clients. Increased product knowledge from your employees leads to a better customer experience and a higher level of customer trust. When your salesperson can answer every product question without missing a beat, confidence rises both for your team and for your clients. 

However, product training is not a “one-and-done” event. In order to keep employees involved and up to date on the latest product changes, you need to provide ongoing education in an agile manner. This is where microlearning comes in. Microlearning allows you to quickly and easily make adjustments to your educational content, so you can easily adapt to any changes in the product proposition, selling process, or other details. 

Microlearning is a quick, focused way of delivering content that is easy to digest and learn. It was developed to fit into our busy, modern lives and to capitalize on the way employees learn best – in short bursts.

How can you use a microlearning program to support your product training and keep your employees engaged? Let’s take a look.

What Does Microlearning Have to Do with Product Training?

For years, product training has been delivered in a traditional, linear format. Employees sat through long lectures or eLearning solutions, trying to take in as much information as possible. Then, they would be given a test at the end to see what they had learned.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work. Research has shown that we forget 90% of what we learn within the first 30 days if there is no solid reinforcement. That’s exactly the issue Coca-Cola was facing when they came to Code of Talent, looking for a way to improve support performance.

We suggested a microlearning solution that would provide reps with quick, targeted content when they needed it. The result was a dramatic decrease in the time it took for reps to find the answers that would help them listen to and understand their customers. The connection between learning and execution happened in real time, through solving “missions” that tested the skills covered in training. 

Employees were able to better retain information and understand their products, not just immediately after learning about them, but indefinitely. They improved their skills and implemented high-value behaviors in real time, on the job. 

The benefits of microlearning don’t stop there. Microlearning also:

✓ Increases Sales Agility 

To stay competitive, businesses need to be able to move quickly and adapt to changing markets. This means that your product training needs to be agile as well.

With microlearning content, you can quickly make improvements to keep employees up to date on the latest product changes. Sending an update via a short learning journey that can be consumed in 5-7 minutes is much more digestible. Not to mention, it’s less disruptive than asking employees to sit through a long, scheduled training session.

✓ Improves Sales Reaction Times

In today’s fast-paced world, customers expect quick responses. If they don’t get the information they need from your employees, they will go to a competitor. In fact, 90% of customers say a key factor to their loyalty to a brand is how quickly they can get their questions answered.

Microlearning helps you improve your sales reaction times by providing employees with quick, responsive content when they need it. This way, they can find and retain the information they need to quickly answer customer questions.

✓ Reduces Gaps Between Knowledge Transfers and Practical Skills/Execution

There needs to be more connection between the knowledge employees gain from product training and their ability to put it into practice. This often happens because traditional product training doesn’t provide employees with enough opportunity to practice what they have learned.

Many microlearning solutions include interactive features, such as gamification, that allow employees to apply what they’ve learned. This bridge between theory and practice enables employees to retain the information and be able to use it when they need it.

✓ Maximizes Sales Reps Engagement in the Learning Process

Microlearning enables you to get the most out of your product training by turning it into an ongoing, never-ending process. This way, employees continually refresh their knowledge and skills as they need to.

This contrasts with traditional product training methods that often result in “forgetting curves.” With microlearning, employees have quick and easy access to the content they need, when they need it. This maximizes the value of the learning process.

Finding the Right Microlearning Tool for Training

Creating product training with a microlearning authoring tool should be a simple, fun, and straightforward process. After all, if the process of creating microlearning content is too complex, you’re not going to want to use it.

Overall, we suggest looking for a microlearning tool that is:

• Easy to use
• Agile
• Participant-focused
• Collaborative
• Customizable
• Instructor assisted
• Able to offer real-time reporting

The best microlearning platforms will also offer a high degree of qualitative and quantitative measurement. For example, at Code of Talent, we provide our clients with data-driven insights, such as engagement rates, time to task completion, and abandoned learning missions. This ensures that our clients can continually improve the effectiveness of their product training. Companies that implement Code of Talent’s platform enjoy up to 10X engagement and completion rates compared to traditional e-learning platforms.

The Wrap Up 

As you can see, microlearning is an extremely effective way to train employees on new products. By breaking down content into small, manageable chunks, you’ll improve employee engagement, retention, and reaction times.

Looking for the right tools for building a microlearning journey and empowering employees? Code of Talent equips corporate trainers with all the tools they need to deliver engaging, interactive product training. 

To schedule a free demo, contact us today. We’d be happy to show you how our technology resources will improve your product training.