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You probably remember when the only things training leaders needed to worry about were development and delivery. Those were simpler times — and they’re not coming back. In fact, modern customer education is an increasingly complex and delicate balancing act.
Training organizations are increasingly expected to deliver consistent, accessible courses on demand. This means juggling different modalities, geographies, languages, and learning needs, while contending with both limited resources and infrastructural challenges. Choosing the right virtual hands-on lab solution can help your organization smash through these roadblocks and deliver more effective, efficient, and responsive training.
That’s not all. Education teams are now – rightly – seen as a critical business function, supporting teams including sales, marketing, support, and customer success. And guess what? Virtual labs are increasingly crucial to those processes, enabling more impactful demos and POCs, issue replication, and ongoing training on feature updates.
So how should you define your considerations when investing in – or replacing – a virtual lab solution? We answer that question in our Strategic Buyer’s Guide to Virtual Hands-on Labs.
Here’s just a taste of what’s in the guide.
Connecting Training Metrics to Core Business Outcomes
The most successful virtual lab implementations go far beyond traditional training KPIs. While completion rates and satisfaction scores matter, forward-thinking organizations are connecting their virtual lab investments directly to business metrics that executives care most about.
Modern virtual lab platforms provide analytics that track how training translates into tangible business results. This means measuring support ticket reduction when customers receive proper training, tracking time-to-productivity for new users, and correlating training participation with customer retention rates. The data tells a compelling story: 47% of renewing customers received training versus only 21% of churning customers.
The best virtual lab solutions don’t just deliver learning experiences—they provide actionable intelligence that demonstrates ROI across multiple business functions, transforming training departments from cost (or cost recovery) centers into strategic growth drivers.
Controlling Costs While Maintaining Quality
Cost management doesn’t mean cutting corners on the learning experience. The most effective virtual lab platforms offer sophisticated cost control features that improve both efficiency and outcomes.
Look for solutions with automatic provisioning and deprovisioning capabilities that eliminate wasted resources. Smart platforms can detect idle environments and suspend them automatically, while policies for environment lifetime and resource usage ensure you’re never paying for unnecessary capacity.
The best virtual lab vendors offer flexible pricing models that align with your actual usage patterns rather than forcing you into rigid per-seat licensing. This allows you to accommodate seasonal fluctuations and business changes without breaking your budget or compromising on the quality of your training delivery.
Building an Integrated Customer Experience Across Departments
Virtual labs shouldn’t exist in isolation—they should be seamlessly woven into your entire customer journey. The most successful organizations position virtual environments as critical touchpoints that serve multiple departments and use cases.
This means your marketing team can offer compelling product trials that generate higher-quality leads. Your sales team can deliver standardized proof-of-concept environments that showcase capabilities while maintaining control over the experience. Your training team provides structured onboarding within these same environments, and your support team can replicate customer issues for faster resolution.
The key is cross-functional alignment and system integration. When your virtual lab platform connects with your CRM, LMS, and support systems, you create a unified view of customer engagement that benefits everyone from sales to customer success. Content becomes reusable across functions, and customers experience consistency throughout their entire lifecycle with your organization.
Ensuring Interoperability and Leveraging AI
Your virtual lab platform should integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack. API-first design and standards-based integrations with learning management systems, identity management platforms, and analytics tools ensure your virtual labs enhance rather than complicate your workflows.
Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, is revolutionizing how virtual lab experiences are created and delivered. Modern platforms leverage AI for automated assessments that provide immediate feedback, adaptive learning paths that adjust based on individual performance, and intelligent content generation that accelerates development cycles.
The most advanced solutions use computer vision to automatically verify task completion, reducing dependency on live instructor support while improving learning outcomes.
How CloudShare Sets Itself Apart
The right virtual hands-on lab offers stability, interoperability, and scalability. It’s intuitive for both end users and administrators, and supports strategic decision-making through comprehensive analytics. Perhaps most importantly of all, it delivers responsive, low-latency training no matter where you are in the world.
CloudShare does all that and more.
Trusted by global companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, and Motorola, our market-leading platform spins up hands-on software training, sales demos, and POC experiences in minutes. Supported by global infrastructure, we’re capable of delivering seamless, low-latency virtual environments anywhere in the world, and at any scale.
Learn more about choosing the right virtual lab solution by downloading Virtual Hands-on Labs: A Strategic Buyer’s Guide or schedule a demo to see what CloudShare can do for your organization.
