A few weeks ago, we introduced ON24 Forums, a new virtual engagement experience helping sales and marketers better connect with audiences through interactive, two-way video discussions for individuals and groups.
ON24 Forums can be used in many different ways, but we think it’s a great option for training and certification courses. Let’s explore why.
Many industries require annual training, continuing education and certifications, but effectively scaling these activities to meet demand is often difficult for those issuing these courses. In addition to the challenges of providing training for the many people who need it each year, subject matter experts and attendees often have limited time to participate.
That’s where ON24 Forums comes in.
A Brief Overview of ON24 Forums
ON24 Forums is a solution that provides you with a fully branded, interactive and live digital experience. It empowers moderated discussions and two-way engagement to build better relationships with participants.
With ON24 Forums, you can go beyond a basic one-to-many meeting or webinar and turn lessons and presentations into genuine two-way conversations.
ON24 Forums brings 50 users together to collaborate through live, face-to-face conversations. Users can interact with the host or each other to network, share ideas and ask questions.
Forums also includes audience engagement tools and generate insightful and detailed first-person data that you expect from ON24.
With Forums, event planners have access to custom, branded registration pages and automated email communication tools for event confirmations, reminders and follow-up messages.
Like all ON24 experiences, Forums seamlessly integrates with your CRM platform and backend business intelligence solutions to further analyze your event and attendee engagement data.
The flexibility of two-way video conversations means you can use ON24 Forums for stand-alone digital events or as part of a larger virtual experience like conferences and conventions. Forums can be particularly useful for open enrollment, focus groups, onboarding, networking, executive engagement and training courses.
ON24 Forums: Easily Scale Employee Training & Education
With so many events, activities and interactions shifting to the digital realm over the past two years, it’s no surprise many organizations shifted training programs online. After all, digital empowers brands to scale to large groups, provides on-demand flexibility and bypasses geographical restrictions.
However, organizations can run into non-trivial issues with online courses. For example, audiences can tune out if the event isn’t engaging, discussions are limited to what the presenter has to say, or chat questions that go ignored.
Typical online training solutions can lack in-depth metrics on audience engagement and interactions, making it difficult to know if a course inspires questions or falls flat.
Most digital formats don’t allow participants to converse with the instructor or each other, so they can’t ask questions or get clarity. Even worse, if the content isn’t immediately relevant or applicable, participants fall into The Forgetting Curve, where they will likely forget 75% of what they learned within six days.
ON24 Forums can help you overcome these challenges with engaging, audience-focused online training. Here are some examples of how you could make ON24 Forums work for your training programs.
Situation 1: Customer Training
Consider customer training — an essential element in every organization. These programs empower and educate users on how to use a product to drive results effectively.
ON24 Forums is the perfect solution for customer training because it provides an engaging medium where company representatives can meet with groups of dedicated users and customers, provide them with step-by-step instructions on how to get the most out of a new feature and answer any questions they may have in real-time.
With Forums, customers can directly interact with a brand. Attendees can jump on camera and ask questions and provide instant feedback to the host. They can also interact with the company and event host through built-in engagement tools like polls, surveys, resource lists and Q&A.
And, critically, every interaction an attendee makes is trackable. With Forums, companies can gather and analyze first-person data to cater later educational experiences to the individual customer.
Solution 2: Certification Training
With ON24 Forums, you can design a course that tests your audience. Forums includes certifications based on time and quiz performance and a participant’s interaction with your content.
Let’s take the example of a theoretical healthcare organization, like a local hospital, switching to a new software system for patient check-in and charting. With this new system, employees would need training to correctly use the program and avoid HIPPA violations.
A hospital system would use ON24 Forums in an interactive virtual class to do this. This class would feature a subject matter expert, like a rep or customer success manager, who would demonstrate how to use the new software, stay in compliance with regulations and answer questions.
At the end of the training class, participants can take a test to earn a certification.
Solution 3: Employee Training
ON24 Forums can also be a great option for employee training programs. In addition to onboarding programs, annual policy updates and acknowledgments, benefit open enrollment informational sessions and learning and development courses, Forums can be used for situation-specific employee training.
Say, for example, a company is adding a new product to their portfolio and they need to teach the sales and distributor teams on how to sell it.
The company could create a custom training session to show sales teams the product’s features, the pain points it solves, the sales materials that accompany the product and how to position the product in reference to competitor products.
ON24 Forums can help leaders take training sessions one step further through the two-way communication feature and offer the opportunity for participants to practice sales pitches.
For example, in a small group scenario, teams can roleplay different discussions, practice overcoming objections, addressing pain points and answering customer questions.
Combine ON24 Forums and training sessions to put a fresh twist on your usual webinar training courses. Engage your audiences and aid in content retention with interactive discussions and immediate feedback.
Learn more about ON24 Forums with a free demo.