Most learning and development (L&D) solutions on the market today don’t take into account the needs of those behind the digital divide. As today’s workforce becomes more decentralized and more remote, some workers miss out on opportunities to learn and grow within their organizations. This is especially true in this new normal of ours, where a lot of in-person contact is may continue here and there — even with the COVID-19 vaccine.

For companies that want to provide equal access to opportunity for all employees, corporate L&D has to evolve. This includes implementing systems and policies that not only reach those best equipped but also those with limited resources as well. For those struggling with this conundrum, here are three surefire ways to make your L&D programs more equitable and more inclusive.    

Don’t Assume That Everyone Learns the Same Way

When going through the motions of L&D program development and implementation, it is easy to assume that everyone will digest it in the same way. However, estimates indicate that 30% of the college-educated workforce fits the current federal definition of having a disability. That number doesn’t include workers without college degrees, and only includes those who disclose that they have a disability. Current estimates also indicate that only 39% of workers with a disability disclose it to their manager, and even fewer disclose it to team members or the HR department. 

As such, L&D executives should consider providing sensitivity training to their training teams. This will help them better understand the types of disabilities in the workplace, whether visible or not. This will also help instructional designers and trainers tailor content to meet the needs of all employees. There are even some amazing technologies that can help with implementation. 

Microsoft’s Immersive Reader, specifically designed to support dyslexia and dysgraphia, is a perfect example. With the Immersive Reader, employees with reading disabilities can have text read out loud, even in other languages. In addition, for those with a limited understanding of computers, Windows 10 has a voice control feature, which is different from dictation. macOS user, you can use Apple’s built-in system.

Text-Based L&D Is the Most Inclusive 

Not everyone uses a computer at work or has access to the Internet. However, most have a cell phone of some type and can receive text messages. 

As Arist co-founder and CEO puts it, “text-based messaging is the one technology almost all of us have in common. It has the highest rate of adoption, nearly 98%, according to leading figures. This makes it the most inclusive technology there is.”

Artist’s ability to bridge the digital divide helped it win over more than a dozen Fortune 500 organizations. DuPont turned to Arist to supplement its online learning initiatives. DuPont Sustainable Solutions has even designed courses for onboarding employees, compliance training, sales skills improvement, health and wellness programs and refresher training. The training comes in bite-sized chunks over a period of days. 

Artist refers to these text-based quick bites as microlearning. In its simplest form, microlearning is a delivery format where users receive short-form content over an extended period. When comparing microlearning to traditional learning, research has found that 82% of users regarded microlearning as user-friendly, compared to less than 25% for traditional learning. 

For employees with language or learning barriers, microlearning is more digestible. 

“Not only is text a more inclusive technology, when paired with microlearning methodologies, but it also becomes an extremely effective way to eliminate other barriers to learning as well,” added Ioffe.

Make Reasonable Accommodations

Accessible, inclusive L&D initiatives boil down to making reasonable accommodations for employees. L&D professionals will need to evaluate all facets of this, whether non-tech, low-tech or high-tech. The Office of Disability Rights defines reasonable accommodations under those parameters. 

Non-technical accommodations include things like slowing the pace of training or providing extra assistance. Low-tech accommodations are typically low-cost and are already available in the workplace or easy to acquire, like speech-to-text technology. And high-tech accommodations are those that involve customized equipment, technology, devices, or sophisticated software. Knowing the workforce’s needs you are training will help you prioritize the things that qualify as reasonable accommodations. 

In the end, no matter how big your budget is or how much time you can dedicate to tools and technology, it is important to remember that L&D is all about people. As trainers, educators, and coaches, the primary responsibility for L&D professionals is the development of people. Remembering that will make all the difference.

Image Credit: pixabay; pexels; thank you!

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Chat has become the most important way to talk with customers. According to Facebook, 62 percent of people in the U.S. say they find it most comfortable to speak with businesses via chat. Facebook also reports that more than eight billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses each month. This statement is only covering the Facebook channel. Messaging-based sales have four reasons businesses should leverage it. 

You may have heard about messaging-based sales (also known as conversational commerce). Since messaging-based sales are now critically important for business, it means businesses can sell via chat platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, and WhatsApp. You can embed chat on your company’s website, as well.

If you’re a startup looking to position yourself as customer-centric business (and you should be), messaging-based sales are your next significant sales channel for doing just that. Here are four primary reasons why your business should focus on messaging-based sales right now.

1. Messaging-Bassed Sales Caters to Customers’ Preferred Communication Method.

People have grown accustomed to using messaging apps, and not just for personal communication with friends and family. When it comes to reaching out to a business for any support, people would instead use a chat app than an 800 number. After all, who wants to be placed on hold forever or talk to a stranger at two am?

Messaging-based sales are about being where the customer is when the customer needs support. Email messages often go straight into a spam folder and don’t support real-time communications. Meanwhile, no startup has the bandwidth for speaking to thousands of leads per day or offering around-the-clock phone support (ok, maybe the unicorns).

While there still is a role for self-serve portals, email, and even phone support, chat has become the primary channel consumers choose when given a choice.

2. Reintroduce Sales and Customer Service to the Shopping Experience.

Customers aren’t just communicating online; they’re doing everything else online, too. Before customers buy, they now often search online to learn more about product options. They also review customer comments and perform brand comparisons. Other customer’s comments is in stark contrast to the time when buyers previously went to brick and mortar locations to buy stuff.

Current shopping habits even differ from when buyers inspected products in store before ordering online—now most consumers go straight to online shopping. With both research and purchases taking place online, there was minimal opportunity to speak with customers to respond to questions or encourage a sale.

With messaging-based sales, businesses once again have the opportunity for assisting the buyer mid-sale. Chat can even serve as a form of concierge-level service in many cases. With just a click of a prominently displayed live chat button, shoppers can get answers to their questions or assistance selecting the right products. Shoppers can feel luxe if you implement the system correctly.

3. Enables Support Capabilities Without High Support Staff Costs.

If you’re getting your business off the ground, it’s this kind of concierge-level service. Using messaging as a service can set your company apart. Customers — especially Millennials — will prize your excellent customer service. One challenge that businesses face is being able to provide this level of customer service cost-effectively. Messaging-based sales square the circle of needing top customer service. But, messaging will need to stay in budget by enabling fewer support agents to serve multiple customers at the same time.

Since chat is real-time but not instantaneous like voice communications, one agent can serve multiple customers at the same time, cutting down on support costs. Chatbot technology also can be combined with live agents, further extending the number of customers a support agent can serve at the same time.

4. Improves Shopping Cart Conversion.

Shopping cart conversion can be pretty abysmal. According to Smart Insights, conversion rates barely reach three percent in many cases. In spite of attracting potential buyers through online marketing, businesses often don’t close the sale even when they win with their marketing efforts. Messaging based sales improve conversion by turning a “maybe” into a “yes.”

Better service in the critical moment can make a sale happen. Whereas a potential buyer might browse away to do further research without chat, with messaging based transactions, they can get their questions answered at the moment and make the purchase then and there. These quick and easy purchases are arguably the most significant reason businesses are adopting messaging based sales en masse.

Chat is the fastest growing communication channel for businesses today. Smart companies realize this, and they are capitalizing on it for better conversion and better customer support. There’s a reason that so many websites now have chat boxes hovering somewhere on the page. It works. It works well.

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Stop for a second and think about how nice it would be if you could boost your company’s profits by 95 percent. Or let’s be conservative and ask for a smaller number like 25 percent.

The truth is that all it takes is a 5 percent increase in your customer retention rates, according to research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (who invented the Net Promoter Score, so he knows a thing or two about the relationship between customer experience and business growth).

Nurturing existing customers is not as sexy as getting new ones, but it is far easier and more important for a business than fishing for new buyers.

At the heart of this nurturing is customer engagement. Think Apple fanboys during the Steve Jobs era, or the cult following of Zappos. When customers identify with a brand and engage with it, good things happen for that brand.

So if you want profit increases like Reichheld predicts, here are five tactics you can use for increasing your customer engagement.

Tactic #1: Create a Slack Channel for Your Community

If you run a business based in Silicon Valley or have even a single Millennial employee, you probably use Slack today. The communications software has become almost as important as email for many companies when it comes to collaboration and communications.

But Slack isn’t just for your internal team. It also can be a useful tool for creating community and engaging with customers.

Businesses like social media posting tool, Buffer, have found great success by creating a lively forum for their customers through a public Slack channel, and other businesses such as Crispy Mountain are doing the same.

Tactic #2: Nurture Customers Instead of Selling Them

We’ve reached a saturation point as a society when it comes to marketing and sales. People are fed up, and they see right through sales-driven customer engagement. It just doesn’t fly any longer.

Thankfully, there’s another way: Make your company a friend, not a transaction.

As Gary Vaynerchuk hammered home in his classic book with the funky title, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, you don’t make and keep customers by just selling to them every second. Instead, you build loyal customers by offering value again and again. Only every once in awhile do you slip in a sales pitch.

So don’t make your social channels all about pushing your brand (or even with your email campaigns). Offer up interesting or useful information instead, nurturing your customer until they are loyal and trusting. You’ll get the next sale from them. You just have to have patience and faith enough to not over-sell.

Tactic #3: Implement Live Chat

I know what you’re thinking: Live chat? Really? Slack I can see, but live chat is just icky.

You’re not alone in having that first response. But look again, because companies like LiveAgent have overhauled it to rock for customer engagement.

“Live chat is one of the quickest methods of customer service, but it used to be horrible,” marketing guru Neil Patel noted in his paean to the need for live chat functionality on your company’s site. “That’s not the case anymore. In fact, it’s become the exact opposite.”

That’s because customers don’t like to wait, and modern live chat properly implemented is an extraordinarily simple way to enable customers to interact immediately with a brand when they have a question, comment, or need some help.

Tactic #4: Make Customer Stories Easy to Tell

Social proof is a powerful force in marketing. It also builds great customer engagement, because customers are fans for live when you feature their comments on your site. By including their testimonial or story, you help them identify with your brand because they’re now a part of the brand’s story.

So make it easy for these customers who want to share their tale.

One easy way to build engagement with your customers through the stories they tell is by having a page on your site where customers can easily submit their stories and thoughts on your brand. Don’t hide this submission page, either—promote it in every marketing communication and receipt.

Another good way to encourage stories about your brand from customers is to ask for it on your company’s Facebook page. Just ask. It is that simple.

Tactic #5: Run Collaboration Contests

Finally, a good way to increase customer engagement is to build collaborative contests between your brand and the customer—then reward those customers who enter the contest with something like a coupon or special offer, encouraging further purchases subtlety while rewarding customers for engaging at the same time.

A good example of this was the Domino’s Pizza Mogul campaign.

The pizza company offered customers the opportunity to make their own pizza offerings and then share and sell their recipes on social media, paying customers between $0.25 and $4.50 every time someone bought one. More than 204,700 customers engaged with the campaign, according to Domino’s, earning themselves roughly $965,925.

That is a lot of customer engagement!

So the next time you sit down to plan your sales and marketing strategy, stop to give your existing customers some love. Encouraging customer engagement doesn’t sound as impressive as nabbing a host of new customers, but it sure is good business.

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While the impressive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is often measured in revenue for the devices that enable it, the “soft revenue” potential is even more impressive. Connected devices, supported by analytics and software, are boosting efficiencies in business, shortening sales cycles, improving customer satisfaction, and eliminating the need to pay human workers overtime.

Today, companies that employ field service workers walk a fine line between meeting the needs of customers and keeping revenues healthy and expenses down. There are many ways that connected devices networked to follow an IoT business model can help companies simultaneously improve their customer care while adding to their revenue generation.

Earning customer goodwill proactively

Today, most customer support is still reactive: a service fails or an error is made and the customer must reach out to a supplier to correct the problem. Making these calls and wandering through an inbound customer service maze does little to improve customers’ attitudes toward a product or service. (“We value your business. Press 8 to have your call disconnected so you have to start all over again. Or, visit our Web site to see that our FAQ list was last updated in 2009.”)

See also: How edge computing and IIoT are changing the way we think about data

Companies that embrace connected devices are better prepared to reach out to customers proactively before service issues arrive, helping customers before they even know they need help. This fosters an invaluable sense of customer goodwill that extends the customer lifecycle and revenue generating value of the relationship. It also can save companies from making unnecessary field service calls.

Collaborating with crowdsourcing

Collaboration, or the ability of remote stakeholders (whether human or not) to contribute knowledge to the same problem-solving pool, is revolutionizing the business world–and much of it is due to IoT technology. It’s also helping mobile field service technicians cultivate and save their knowledge to create best practices, consult with one another in real-time on appointments, and gain greater support from managers and supervisors.

Nashua, New Hampshire-based Nrby produces location-based workforce collaboration solutions that transform mobile field service into a more proactive, profitable operation. Nrby’s one-touch SmartPins feature maps events and conveys context-rich details so technicians can easily identify, instantly share and quickly resolve issues, while operation centers are continually updated and supervisors receive real-time status changes.

Kurt Dobbins, President of Nrby, says it’s like Waze-style crowdsourcing for field service. “With crowdsourcing, the human element is equally, if not more, critical than Internet of Things sensors and machine automation,” he said. “Technicians are much happier and better at their jobs, customers get the reliable service they deserve, and businesses profit from highly engaged, extremely efficient and revenue-generating field service organizations.”

Turning service calls into revenue faster

In a typical service call, a field service worker is dispatched with a manually prepared and static schedule at the beginning of the day. After the call, he promises to be in touch in the future. He brings his notes back to headquarters, and someone else transforms them into a work order (hopefully without transcription errors), which is then returned to the customer. If the customer signs it, the technician is sent back to perform the work. Once again, he brings his notes back so someone else can create an invoice (also hopefully without errors).

See also: With hundreds of choices, how do you pick an IoT platform?

Connected devices, backed up by a digital field service management solution, can change the workflow of the process entirely, accelerating it while simultaneously reducing errors. Fremont, California-based Apptivo shows the way forward with its CRM suite that includes an integrated field service management solution.

Technicians use their smartphones and tablets to check schedules from the road. On site, they can generate work orders instantly, and have customer approve them right on the mobile device. Work can be carried out on the same day, and at the end of the call, the work order can be easily converted into an invoice. A process that once took days is accomplished in hours.

Apptivo’s tighter integration with field service functions means that the connected devices of field service workers are connected in real-time with management and a company’s CRM, radically transforming workflow and making it truly more collaborative.

“When a collaborative field service solution is integrated with CRM and project management software, service personnel have all the connected tools they need to do the project from end-to-end,” notes to Apptivo CEO Bastin Gerald. “Because the field employee is working on a connected device, nothing happens without manager approval or formal workflow rules, so companies can be sure workers aren’t making promises they can’t keep.”

Preventing failures before they occur

Equipment failures are costly, not just for customers but for manufacturers and those responsible for installing and provisioning equipment. Today, networked sensors can monitor machinery in real-time, allowing operators or equipment manufacturers to have an up-to-date and centralized view of machine assets and operations.

This condition monitoring allows them to know which machines are at higher risk to fail and schedule maintenance accordingly, saving money and ensuring the best technician is dispatched for the job. As IoT technology expands, sensors are getting cheaper and easier to deploy, but since they can generate mountains of data, they require backup from predictive analytics and a robust mobile field service solution that can use the data generated in a coherent manner, Michael Fry, a director with CIMdata, told Advanced Manufacturing.

“We can call it Industrial Internet of Things or Industry 4.0, or something else,” he said. “The point is that there is a structure to this emerging system, where at the bottom of the stack are sensors, feeding data for something like predictive analytics and other enterprise applications at the top of the stack.”

Giving technicians an AR edge

It would be ideal if every technician in the field could have every machine or system memorized, but it’s not a practical reality for mobile field service. This is where augmented reality (AR) linked by IoT can improve the process. While virtual reality entirely replaces a user’s visual field, augmented reality overlays digital information over real surroundings. In field service, it can be a video of a machine under normal operation or a step-by-step demonstration of how to replace a part or make setting adjustments.

General Electric (GE) uses Upskill’s Skylight industrial AR solution in conjunction with Google’s Glass Enterprise Edition to feed information to GE Aviation production workers to prevent common mistakes. For example, mechanics are provided with visual guidance for the correct tightening of B-nuts, which connect fluid lines and hoses to create a reliable seal. Incorrect tightening often results in expensive malfunctions in operation.

“We believe that Skylight with Glass has the potential to be a real game changer in terms of its ability to minimize errors, improve product quality, and increase mechanic efficiency,” Ted Robertson, manager of GE Aviation, told Internet of Business.

The promise of IoT technology for field service operations is significant, and many companies are already seeing improvements in operations and revenue thanks to connected devices and systems. Networks, sensors, mobile field service solutions and wearable technology will continue to optimize, automate and create opportunities for companies that rely on mobile field service. Connected devices are set to radically transform how field service is conducted.

Co-authored by Peter Scott is a journalist and editor who has been covering business, technology and lifestyle trends for more than 20 years. You can contact him at PeterEditorial@gmail.com. JT Ripton is a freelance business and technology writer out of Tampa. He loves to write to inform, educate and provoke minds. Follow him on twitter @JTRipton

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