Are you still burning out your Support and Customer Success teams firing fighting simple customer training issues? Is it becoming impossible to scale your manual onboarding procedures as your business grows? It’s time to formalize your customer education program with a Learning Management System (LMS).
Why Do You Need an LMS? 11 Benefits of Learning Technology
Prior to the digital revolution, training was a freakin’ nightmare. And at many companies, who are just building up their online learning initiatives, it continues to be. As we’ve all experienced at one time or another, in-person training can often be dull, lack engagement (or be super awkward) and it’s nearly impossible to track metrics. Not to mention, if you’re training customers or employees in multiple locations, it’s expensive due to the cost of travel, venues, printing materials and more. Today’s Learning Management Systems (LMSs) flip old-school training on its head, transforming perpetual drawbacks into unparalleled benefits. Here’s why you need an LMS.
LMS Benefit #1: Time Savings
Transitioning to digital-first training? Testing out blended learning? Doubling down on an existing education program? Without an LMS, moving from in-person to online training would take a ton of time — think building out the backend to designing the user experience — keeping you from focusing on other high-impact initiatives such as content creation and strategy.
LMS Benefit #2: Cost Savings
In-person learning can be costly after paying for venues, travel, printed materials and more. Using an LMS eliminates most of these costs. Additionally, because an LMS brings the content to your learners, they’ll need less hand-holding and rely less on support teams.
LMS Benefit #3: Single Repository
Keeping track of all your learning initiatives and materials can be a pain. But with an LMS, there’s no more searching through all the folders on your desktop or Google Docs or Dropbox to find them. You can store all your documents, videos, PowerPoint presentations, etc. in one place. This makes it easy to share the right content with the right customer or prospect at the right time.
LMS Benefit #4: Streamlined Processes
Launching and maintaining a learning program is no small feat, especially as you grow. LMSs are built for this, giving you a simple way to develop courses, update them and scale over time. A streamlined implementation process also gives smaller teams a hand in the game.
LMS Benefit #5: Consistency
Nothing is more confusing than having multiple places to find things. If you want your learners to engage with your content time and time again, you need to give them a consistent experience. An LMS offers your learners the same easy-to-use, on-brand experience in the same location each time they want or need to learn.
LMS Benefit #6: Impactful Delivery
An LMS gives you the flexibility to tailor the learning experience to the unique needs of your learners, ensuring impactful delivery that leads to engagement. For example, APIs can automate content delivery based on predefined conditions to ensure learners get the content at the right time.
LMS Benefit #7: Content Flow
Keep all of your learning initiatives organized. With an LMS, it’s easy for learners to find courses and easily transition from lesson to lesson. Depending on the LMS you choose, you can even create learning paths to help your people reach their goals, without questioning where to go next.
LMS Benefit #8: Mobile Optimization
Have you ever tried to do something on your phone that clearly wasn’t optimized for a smaller screen? LMSs take your learning content and courses and create a fully optimized experience so that people can learn from anywhere. To take it one step further, you can make your course content optimized for on-the-go learners with methods like microlearning.
LMS Benefit #9: Personalization
Go beyond Hi {First_Name}. That’s not what personalization means to an LMS. Well, it’s part of it, but you can do so much more. You can pick and choose which content gets served to individual learners based on their needs and learning history. You can see where they get stuck, where they excel and suggest the next course to them. Even better, you can connect your LMS to your CRM and your marketing software to automate these interactions.
LMS Benefit #10: Tracking & Reporting
Surprise. Traditional learning materials don’t give you learner-level insights. LMSs give you the exact opposite — metrics and analytics galore. With visibility into learner-level metrics, you can make smart decisions. You can also use these metrics to prove return on investment (ROI) and other key performance indicators (KPIs) related to your program.
LMS Benefit #11: Customer Retention
Happy customers are the key to building a successful business. How can you improve customer happiness and retention at the same time? Make sure your customers know how to use your product and services well. With an LMS, you can give them the education and tools they need to succeed. When a customer feels confident using your product, they’ll keep using it (and tell their friends).
Gainsight Customer Education: The Best LMS for Customer Education
Simply put, choose an LMS that allows you to get your educational content to customers efficiently and effectively. There are a lot of options available, so if you need some guidance, check out our LMS Buying Guide and schedule a demo of Gainsight Customer Education today!
