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have uncovered how employees wish to be touched via mobile.

We foolishly thought that eLearning was going to morph into mLearning. We would build apps for companies, employees would download them, and life would be good.

We spent two years building a lot of very expensive

It’s time to set the record right on the subject of mobile training. What is mobile training?

Through the company I founded called Train by Cell we have been knee-deep answering that question for over five years now. I want to share our insights with you.

Our Journey

When we launched Train By Cell our goal was to provide compelling ways for an employee and employer to stay connected. If that involved training, then great. But per-haps it might just mean staying in touch in a new man-ner, by using a mobile device.

That mission remains our central focus, but our method of delivering solutions has drastically changed as we

MOBILE TRAINING

SECRETSREVEALEDThoughts from the industry leader, Train by Cell.

“eLearning is not morphing into mLearning. They are very different means of learning.”

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Our response was to build the world’s easiest to use cloud-based platform to author and publish content, on the fly, with no train-ing, software or technology skills required. We built this and watched as hundreds of thousands of end users (employees) used the software on their phone and now tablet.

Finally, we started to see some excel-lent results – a great improvement in usage, and a lower time to market and cost for the organization. But we still felt that one more piece was

missing.

We carefully studied our most suc-cessful clients, and interviewed hun-dreds of end users. As a result we have dramatically changed our view on mobile as an engagement and training tool. Here are our findings.

1. Interactions need to be snack-sized, say five minutes in length or less. If you want to deliver an LMS course over mobile, redo the content and splice it into bite sized segments that can be

apps, and in my view, they were a failure. But we weren’t really sure what was wrong.

The world of mobile began to change. As phones evolved, tablets were launched, internet connectivity improved and prices for phones and network connection fell. We were confident that if our clients moved from using a downloadable app to a mobile web site to take courses and conduct training, we would have found the answer.

“Our response to engaging with employees using mobile was to build the world’s easiest cloud-based platform to author and publish content.”

← Though native apps (apps downloaded on your phone) are popular for consumer applications, they are not very cost effec-tive for training purposes and require a full-time staff to manage them, even for the smallest changes. A mobile web app, espe-cially one created through our platform, is easy to manage and any changes are seen immediately and don’t require approval through the app stores.

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is a very personal device. Even if it’s company owned, it’s person-al. Your interactions therefore with them need to mirror the way the person interacts with content and other people. Don’t make all your interactions too serious. Sprinkle in a few funny YouTube clips. Put social media feeds at the bottom of a mobile web page so it’s easy to inter-act. Ask for their opinion and let them share it right in the mobile web page. Make it fun and per-sonal, and your efforts will be accepted.

5. Rewards are essential! If you provide a reward your adop-tion, usage and retention of knowledge will skyrocket. We know because we compare our clients that do and do not offer

them. What kind of rewards? A gift card, a restaurant certificate, some headphones are good ideas. A reward might also be recognition in either a leader-board that everyone can view on their mobile phone. Or recogni-tion might be a text or an e-mail the day following a mobile training exercise congratulating the person that got the most questions right, or answered the fastest, or offered the best sug-gestion.

6. You must push the content, the reminders and training to the employees. One of the major problems with apps (of which there are many) is the inability to send someone via text or e-mail a link to the specific five minute snack-sized exercise or training you want them to do right now! But if you push a message out, provide a link (our software pro-vides a link to every page), offer a little incentive or make it fun, employees will do it. Did you know that 95% of all text mes-sages received are viewed within minutes? You can schedule a text to arrive on the phones of your employees (if they opted in of course) and you know that within a few minutes they have at least looked at the message, and if it is worded correctly

done while commuting, at lunch, while watching tv, etc. All of our attention spans are about 2-5 minutes!

2. Making your LMS mobile friendly is not the answer. Employees do not want to log into the LMS in the first place, or you would not be having a difficult time with your current training program. And your LMS content cannot be easily ported into a mobile oper-ating system. Even if it could be ported, it's inappropriate for mobile.

3. Connect with all your employees that do not have a corporate e-mail account. More and more employees are not sitting at their computer and are not on e-mail. You might have hun-dreds or even thousands of employees that do not have a company e-mail address. How are you reaching them? We have found that if you make it attractive enough, more than 70% will agree to receive either a text message or an e-mail into their personal e-mail account. Start using these two methods to reach employees either not in front of their computer or not part of your current network.

4. Make it fun. A phone (or tablet)

“If you push content and exercises to employees, your participation rates will sky rocket.”

→ Since many employees have a cell phone (smart or feature phone, personal or busi-ness), sending alerts or reminders via text message is effective. Many of our clients get a 90% response rate to their text mes-sages.

↑“If you build it, they will come” is a fine cliché, but you definitely need to spread the word about your technology. Some of our clients offer incentives such as prizes and recognition, while others provide multiple ways to sign up for the service.

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mobile engagement steps are:

a. Load and organize your content in our platform, and make it fun and engaging.

b. Send a link to the page via text or e-mail

c. Log in to the dashboard to view statistics to see who did what, what time of day, what pages did they view.

d. Tweak your reward, your content, whatever, to improve results and sched-ule the next cycle.

e. REPEAT!

But what about………….

There is no perfect solution. Mobile has its share of issues. Let’s address the most common questions we hear.

1. Not every employee wants to use their phone for busi-ness work. Yes, that’s true. This should always be an optional ser-vice, unless you provided them with a company phone. The employee can opt in to receive communications via text message, or e-mail. And if they do not want to receive any, they can still access all of this content on a computer. In fact, 35% of all page views through Train by Cell are from people sitting in front of a computer.

2. How do I track these train-ings in my LMS? To be honest, out of our hundreds of clients, very few do this. That is because these interactions are light touches, reminders, nudges, etc. Are they really worth tracking? Most clients say no. Since mobile is a long way away from replacing your LMS, use it for those things that employees will actually do. Hopefully you will be satisfied that your training, albeit in bite sized chunks, is getting heard and read and absorbed. You can always ask employees to log in and take your quiz so it’s recorded. But all the pre-work has been done on a mobile phone.

clicked the link. Now you have them in your training hands!

7. Create engaging interactions. Use our tools to create quizzes, polls, answer questions, share insights, complete forms, or engage in social media. We have found that if you want someone to absorb content, say a video or text, asking them to take a poll or quiz dramatically increases usage.

8. Load as much content into the mobile platform that you think a mobile employee might need to access. Content can be videos, audio files, PDFs, PowerPoints, word docs – you name it. If the employee finds themself in a situation where they really need to view that content, they know they can access it 24/7 wherever they are in the world.

9. Make sure that whatever system you choose (hopefully Train by Cell) offers an instantaneous reporting system. Let’s summarize! The ideal

“People are glued to their phones. Take advantage of this strong connection by engaging usage of a mobile platform.”

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David AsheimCEO, Train by Cell

Contact Info Dave Asheim dave@trainbycell.com • (415) 297- 6677 www.trainbycell.com

employee use their phone to show a video on a prod-uct in a retail store, e.g. If you do continue to restrict usage, than do what many of our clients do – buy some inexpensive tablets that are connected to the internet and give every employee an account to access that tab-let. They can use the tablet when they have time and see what is new with train-ing, products, etc. Offering a leaderboard and prizes greatly encourages employ-ees to the tablet and check out.

Technology, particularly mobile, has come a long way. But human behavior remains the same. Most people do not want to spend hours in front of any digital device doing training. But they deep down want to improve their skills and do a bet-ter job.

Allowing them to learn and engage on the most personal device they own, when they

want to is the answer. And if you make the engagement short and fun with some rewards, employees will look forward to the next message from you.

Call us for a demo, a free test account, for the names and numbers of our clients, to have us speak at your association event or even to address your leadership team. We welcome the opportunity to help you successfully figure out your mobile strategy for 2015!

3. How do I keep my site secure? A phone accesses the inter-net through a browser, just like a computer does. So if you would never allow an employee to access specific content from a home com-puter, then do not make it available via a mobile device. Through our system you can require a user ID and pass-word so you can track usage and restrict it to just those people you want to access it. This is a much better solution than an app. If the employee leaves the company, how do you remove the app from their personal device? We can also create a single sign-on, so once a person comes into the mobile site we pro-vide, there can be buttons and links directly into your LMS or site where they can take a quiz or learn more.

4. My content is sensitive. Our system allows you to either load your Word docs, videos and other content directly into our cloud based server system. If that is unac-ceptable, you can leave it in your own server farm and our engineers can work with yours to access it.

5. My employees work in a retail environment – we prohibit using their phones on the job. To be honest, I see more and more companies mov-ing away from this IF there is a solution like Train by Cell in effect. Why not let the