To go to our recorded webinar (~60 minutes), please click on the picture or:    http://blogs.2elearning.com/2011/04/top-20-trends-in-enterprise-education/.  (If it’s your first time, you’ll be asked to register.  When you register, you can also sign up for our magazines and newsletters.  Once logged in, then click Events, Web seminar series and Podcasts, then View this session on-demand)

In our survey of the top “must haves” in a new LMS, 44% of you said that rapid development tools would be a key factor in your selection criteria.  Although I’m sure you had other uses for the tool, I thought I’d take an opportunity to talk about how we can use a tool like this to reach new parts of our enterprise.

Consider Customer Support.  Did you know that the top 10 support problems usually create between 50-80% of the inbound calls?  Imagine being able to divert a significant amount of that traffic to a website, and away from the “live support” phone lines.  That would have a direct impact on the infrastructure expenditures in this area.  Why haven’t we helped in the past? The problem has always been that these support problems have an average life span of less than 2 weeks, and in some cases a couple of days.

With rapid development tools, however, a Customer Support Specialist or an expert from your staff can quickly create a 5-minute recording over a set of PowerPoint slides that tells a customer how to fix a problem – without the customer waiting for a ‘live’ support person to come on the line.  To service this need, we simply create small support vignettes for the top 10 problems of the day.  While a customer waits to connect to a support person, a recording asks whether the customer would like to be redirected to a support portal that contains problem solutions, of which theirs is one, according to the list being read off in the recording.

So what’s the ROI on using a tool like this in Customer Support?  Typically, a 300-person customer support operation incurs fully-burdened salary costs in excess of $15-20 million annually – possibly less if outsourced.  In addition, there are other infrastructure costs, such as tracking systems, complex inbound call distribution equipment, outsourced costs, the impact of Customer Support having to interrupt R&D for answers, and a host of other expenditures.  Imagine being able to divert half of that traffic to a repository of customer support ‘fixes.’  The ROI would be in the millions of dollars.  And as an added bonus, those same recordings can become part of the daily training for the customer support staff, as well as a performance support tool to help newer personnel.

Want to know more?  For those of you that missed our May 12th webinar, you can go here to download a recorded version: http://blogs.2elearning.com/2011/04/top-20-trends-in-enterprise-education/.

==================================================================