If your business or products require some level of technical knowledge of either the employees or customers, then technical training is a critical component of the operation that directly impacts the success of your company.
To ensure new employees to get up to speed and to inform current employees on new products and technologies, an effective on-going technical training program is needed.
To deliver a successful user experience of the products and customer satisfaction, thorough customer on-boarding and training is required.
On average, U.S. companies across industry spent nearly $1,000 and 6-12 months in training per employee. The money and time spent on training customers is equal or higher. How to provide more effective training to equip people with the right technical skills to perform their jobs, but saving money and time simultaneously, is an on-going challenge that every technical organization faces today.
Augmented Reality (AR) technology is poised to address this challenge by improving the efficiency of technical training and related technical troubleshooting. Since AR delivers the instruction and procedure directly where the physical objects and their components are, the learning process is completely contextual, in-situ, in real-time, without ambiguity. Therefore trainees learn things on average 20% faster compared to traditionally way of translating what is written on manuals to real world understanding.
The key for successful adoption and application of this technology is finding the right area in a business that AR can provide both short-term and long-term Return on Investment (ROI).
We will look at 3 specific examples where AR aided technical training/troubleshooting is compared to traditional tools. In each case, we can clearly see the kind of ROI that AR aided tool can bring to the bottom line of a business.
Case #1: Customer On-boarding Training
ROI =
(Instructor’s hourly salary) x (Hours saved on instructor’s time) + logistical cost of customer’s on-site training lesson
Depending on whether the AR tool just facilitates or completely replaces the on-site training, the ROI is typically >20% of cost saving from traditional training programs.
Case #2: Technical Employee Training on Large Group of Products
ROI =
(Instructor’s hourly salary) x (Hours saved on instructor’s time) + (Learner’s hourly salary) x (Hours saved on learner’s time)
The ROI is typically based on >10% of time saving for both skilled instructors and less skilled employees.
Case #3: Customer Troubleshooting Simple Errors
ROI =
(Technical support team’s hourly salary) x (Hours saved on technical support team’s time) + Field Service Visit Travel Cost
Depending on what the percentage of avoidable field service visit (30-50%), the ROI is saving on cost and time for those unnecessary trips.
The bottom line is, finding the specific problem area that the AR training tool can directly address is the first step of realizing the short term ROI (e.g. time and cost saving ) and long term ROI (customer satisfaction and operation efficiency).
To discuss how AR can help your organization’s technical training strategy and achieve ROI mentioned in this post, or to experience a real demo yourself, please contact info@distat.co.