Case Study: Turning Training Into Profit
Technicians who buy access to the online classes receive two weeks of access to a password-protected site featuring the course material. Alternatively, the students can fit training around their daily schedules and use the web version to take a couple of hours of training at a time, rather than blocking out an entire day to participate in a single session.
In a little more than a year, Parts Now! has produced eight online training sessions. Each session typically lasts between five and eight hours, depending on the complexity of the printer being discussed. The company now is on pace for producing one new daylong online training session per quarter, steadily expanding the library of training content that is being made available on a paid basis.
In its first full year of programming, the company trained more than 200 technicians in its traditional in-person sessions. With little marketing support for the new online classes, Parts Now! sold access to online classes to 159 students, each paying $350 to access a daylong online seminar.
The Future
Now, the company is preparing a marketing push to reach new audiences that would benefit from the training sessions it produces. The online training makes it more feasible for companies on the periphery of the printer sector to explore opportunities in printer repair. For instance, companies that specialize in repairing office copiers could expand their repertoire by learning how to repair computer printers as well.
If Parts Now! (www.partsnow.com) can successfully increase the awareness of its training sessions among these groups, the company will not only generate additional revenue from training, but will also have a leg up on building partnerships with service companies that could buy replacement parts from Parts Now!, Geishirt says.
Beyond the potential for generating new revenue, the expanded availability of training in the online venue generates other benefits as well. Most importantly, technicians with training are more effective at what they do, diagnosing printer problems with far greater accuracy. Better recognition of problems up front helps them to order the proper repair parts at the outset. This decreases the number of unused replacement parts that are returned to Parts Now!, reducing the company’s overhead costs, Geishirt says.
The Parts Now! training team is employing online multimedia in a way that allows it to reshape the fundamental economics that support its departmental budget. Rather than simply charging fees for on-site classes that only allowed their department to break even from a budget perspective, Parts Now! executives are now using online multimedia to expand the reach and accessibility of the expertise they have to offer. In the process, they are creating revenue streams and new business opportunities that lay the foundation for future expansion of the company’s training activities, Geishirt says.