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We recently released the eBook “How to Use Customer Training Data to Make Better Business Decisions,” where we discussed the state of training metrics in 2017, and where there is still room to improve. Today’s post is about how customer training teams are currently measuring the effectiveness of their programs.

  1. Registrations, Completions & Drop off Rates

There’s a good reason customer training teams tend to gravitate toward these three data points. Registration data is valuable because it helps you understand which courses are attracting users, as well as what areas are most interesting to students. Registration volume also helps you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing tactics and how well you’re drawing people to your program.

If a high number of students stop training part way through, for instance, you may want to reevaluate your strategy. Take the time to consider where, exactly, you’re losing people. If you’re using videos, you can then dig further into your analytics, and see if there are logical spots to break up your content.

  1. Audience Reaction

The Kirkpatrick Model consists of four levels. The first level, which is often referred to as a “smile sheet” measures the degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging and relevant to their jobs (source: Kirkpatrick Partners).

This is an example of a “feel good metric,” which isn’t really meaningful and doesn’t provide much business value. Often, customers who fill out these surveys will report a positive experience. And yet, they may do so out of politeness, without giving any thought to what their feedback means to the organization.

Customer training professionals who rely on this metric should do so with a grain of salt. Look carefully at your response rate to understand if you have a decent sample size before drawing conclusions from this data. The same is true if you simply ask students to rate your content on a scale of 1-10.

  1. Return on Expectations

Return on Expectations (ROE) is another term coined by Kirkpatrick Partners. The idea is, there are too many variables to demonstrate the ROI of training. As such, it’s better (or perhaps just easier) to consider the degree to which key business stakeholders’ expectations have been satisfied. This isn’t necessarily true.

We’ll dive more into this later, but it is actually possible to determine training ROI if you track the right metrics and let the data speak for itself.

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