Extend your reach. Drive revenue. Extend your enterprise.

Partners, customers, and suppliers are powerful advocates. Empower them.

Find out how!

The enterprise LMS that grows with your business

To prevent external stakeholders from diluting your brand, it’s essential to clearly communicate your vision for your product or service. As your business grows, clearly communicating that message with customers, partners, and suppliers can become increasingly difficult.

Are you struggling to…

Streamline and integrate training from development to delivery

Juggle a complicated tech stack that strains time and resources

Personalize training content to meet diverse learning needs

Quickly gather meaningful, data-driven insights to understand progress and gaps

Translate training in multiple languages while maintaining meaning and localization

Empower your customer and partner ecosystem with the best enterprise training LMS

Extended enterprise learning is a powerful strategy that recognizes learning is not limited to a single organization or its employees. It expands the scope of learning and is a powerful way that an organization can share knowledge and training with their entire ecosystem of partners, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

What can extended enterprise learning do for your organization? For starters, it can create stronger relationships and networks, improve collaboration and effectiveness, drive long-term growth, and more. Whether you’re a novice or an expert, we'll give you the knowledge and tools to make a big impact on your company’s learning programs with extended enterprise learning.

Did you know?
Organizations using an extended enterprise LMS saw a 45% increase in revenue and a 63% increase in customer satisfaction.

Brandon Hall

Award-winning platform for training

CYPHER has received multiple awards for our innovative learning technology, including Forbes Advisor’s “Best Overall Employee Training Software” and “Best LMS."

All awards

Supercharged extended enterprise training. In minutes.

CYPHER AI 360 can supercharge your extended enterprise training initiatives and deliver robust new courses fast. Build skills-based, gamified, personalized training in minutes. Imagine being able to create partner and customer training - using your own uploaded content - and launching it just in time! Imagine being able to control your content quality and credibility. Close sales cycles faster. Build brand consistency across your ecosystem. Shorten the time to market.

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What is extended enterprise learning?

Brandon Hall defines extended enterprise learning as follows:

"Extended enterprise learning is a comprehensive approach to delivering learning and development to a wide range of external stakeholders, including customers, partners, suppliers, and contractors. It involves creating and delivering training programs that are customized to meet the specific needs of these audiences, and that are aligned with the organization’s overall strategy and goals. The goal of extended enterprise learning is to improve the performance of these external stakeholders, which in turn can drive business growth and success."

Extended enterprise LMS improves external performance

Driving business growth and success

With the CYPHER learning platform, you'll enjoy outcomes like:

Enhanced collaboration

Sharpened product knowledge

Increased customer satisfaction

Driving business growth by extending the reach of the organization’s learning initiatives

Types of extended enterprise training

There are multiple forms of extended enterprise training that can benefit your organization depending on your unique needs:

Customer training

Focuses on educating and empowering customers on how to use your products and services effectively. This type of training can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Well-informed customers are more likely to become loyal and serve as brand advocates.

Partner training

Focuses on equipping distributors, resellers, and other sales partners with the knowledge and the skills needed to represent your brand effectively. This can lead to improved collaboration and communication, ultimately increasing revenue.

Supplier and vendor training

Focuses on assisting external vendors in comprehending and conforming to your company's policies, procedures, and expectations. This approach can improve alignment and enhance efficiency within the supply chain while fostering a shared understanding of best practices.

Compliance training

Focuses on organizations that work with customers, partners, and resellers who must adhere to specific industry regulations or legal requirements. Compliance training mitigates non-compliance risk and safeguards reputation.

Benefits of extended enterprise learning

Extended enterprise learning offers numerous benefits that can have a direct and significant impact on overall success. Some of the key advantages include:

Increased revenue

Developing a comprehensive training program for customers and channel partners can improve product knowledge, increase customer satisfaction, and drive sales, ultimately leading to increased revenue.

A recent study by Brandon Hall Group found that organizations using an extended enterprise LMS saw a 45% increase in revenue and a 63% increase in customer satisfaction.
Extended Enterprise Learning: The Key to Unlocking Business Performance, Brandon Hall Group

Improved customer retention

Well-informed and well-trained customers are more likely to be satisfied and loyal to a brand. By providing valuable learning opportunities, organizations can reduce attrition and foster long-term customer relationships.

“A well-designed extended enterprise LMS can provide personalized training and support to customers, helping to improve retention rates and increase customer lifetime value.”
Extended Enterprise Learning: The Key to Unlocking Business Performance, Brandon Hall Group

Enhanced collaboration

Training external stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, and partners helps to ensure everyone is on the same page, leading to better communication, streamlined processes, and more effective collaboration across the entire value chain.

“Organizations that leverage extended enterprise learning programs to improve collaboration with partners, suppliers and customers see up to a 20% improvement in revenue.”
Gartner Market Guide for Corporate Learning Suites, October 2020

Increased competitive edge

Organizations that invest in extended enterprise learning often enjoy a competitive advantage, as their external stakeholders are more knowledgeable, efficient, and effective than those of competitors who do not prioritize training external enterprise users.

According to a study by Bersin & Associates, companies with a strong learning culture are 46% more likely to be the leader in their industry.
Bersin & Associates, The Business Impact of Learning, 2011

Reduced costs

Proper training can reduce costs, the occurrence of errors, misunderstandings, or delays caused by a lack of knowledge or skills among external stakeholders. This, in turn, can lower operational expenses and improve overall efficiency.

According to a report by the Training Industry, companies that use eLearning and other technology-based learning solutions can save up to 50% on training costs compared to traditional instructor-led training.
The Business Case for eLearning, Training Industry, 2018

Mitigated risk

Compliance training for external stakeholders helps organizations ensure all relevant parties adhere to industry regulations and legal requirements, reducing the risk of costly penalties or reputational damage due to non-compliance.

According to a study by the Training Industry, companies that provide compliance training to employees have a 64% lower chance of experiencing unethical or illegal conduct.
The Business Case for Compliance, Training Industry, 2019

Scale

An effective extended enterprise learning program can be easily scaled to accommodate business growth or changes in the external ecosystem, allowing most organizations to adapt their training strategies as needed.

A study by the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that companies with a strong learning culture are more likely to have a scalable business model.
The Business Case for Learning Culture, ATD, 2018

benefits-of-extended-enterprise-training

10 steps to implement a successful enterprise learning management system

Step 1: Define your learning objectives

Clearly outline the goals and objectives of your extended enterprise learning program. This may include improving customer satisfaction, increasing sales, enhancing collaboration, or ensuring compliance, among others.

Step 2: Determine your target learners

Determine which external stakeholders will join the extended enterprise learning program, including customers, partners, suppliers, contractors, or a combination of these groups.

Step 3: Conduct a training needs assessment

Evaluate the current knowledge gap, skills, and competencies of your target audience and identify areas requiring improvement. This will help you tailor a learning program to address the specific needs of your external stakeholders. Learn how the CYPHER platform is innovating on skills development.

Step 4: Choose a modern LMS that aligns with your learning objectives

Select an LMS (Learning Management System) built to support both external user and employee training. Ensure the platform offers features such as easy training content management, robust LMS reporting capabilities, and acts as a multi-tenant LMS. Ensure the platform and learning approach align with your learning goals and objectives. Learn the ten questions that you should ask vendors when evaluating extended enterprise LMS.

Step 5: Develop compelling training content

Create engaging training materials that address new technologies and concepts about your product or service. This may include a mix of eLearning courses, video tutorials, webinars, interactive simulations, or other training materials. See how CYPHER helps you accelerate course creation with purposeful AI.

Step 6: Ensure the learning approach of the LMS aligns with the learning objectives

There are ad-hoc and topic-based learning approaches, but competency-based learning is a method of instruction and evaluation that focuses on an individual learner’s progress. Learners advance by demonstrating their subject mastery through valid and accurate competency evaluations. Learn more about the CYPHER platform’s competency-based learning approach.

Step 7: Invest in a blended learning approach

Combine different learning styles including self-paced online learning, instructor-led training, and on-the-job training to provide a comprehensive and effective learning experience for your extended enterprise ecosystem.

Step 8: Monitor and measure training progress

Track learner progress with comprehensive analytics and reporting tools provided by your extended enterprise LMS. This will help you assess the effectiveness of the learning program, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions for future enhancements.

Step 9: Provide ongoing support

Offer continuous and comprehensive support to your learners through various channels such as forums, helpdesks, and email to encourage engagement, boost motivation, and ensure your learners have access to the resources they need to succeed.

Step 10: Evaluate and refine

Regularly evaluate the outcomes of your extended enterprise learning program against the initial objectives. Gather feedback from your customers, partners, and resellers to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to the program as needed.

How to make extended enterprise training memorable, meaningful, and effective

Extended enterprise learning is crucial for modern businesses. Without the implementation of partner or customer training, your organization misses out on opportunities to reduce support tickets, increase sales, and spread brand awareness. Ensure you have a modern learning platform to help train your customers, partners, and resellers – choose CYPHER.

CYPHER is a modern learning platform that makes extended enterprise training for non-employees meaningful, fun, and effective. CYPHER enables companies to create engaging learning content, deliver training materials, and track training progress of both internal and external users.

Now, your business can provide customers, outside sales representatives, vendors, and partners with everything they’ll need to understand your products or services. With a centralized learning platform, admins can get all of this done in a single tool!