A Customer Training Learning Management System (LMS) can significantly enhance the efficiency and scalability of training providers. By streamlining the onboarding process for complex products, a customer training LMS ensures that users receive the necessary education to maximize their satisfaction and the overall success of the business.
There are lots of businesses that don’t have to teach their customers how to use its products. They’re the lucky ones. Selling hammers, t-shirts, or drinking glasses? Customer training is one less thing to worry about.
That’s not so for manufacturers of complex machinery and electronic devices, software apps, or do-it-yourself products, for example. In these instances, training plays a huge role in customer satisfaction and the continued success of the business. It is incumbent upon these businesses to make sure that employees and end users know how to effectively install/operate/maintain their product or service so that they get the best experience possible. The premise: a happy customer is a returning customer.
The trouble is companies with hundreds, thousands, or millions of end users of their products simply don’t have the time or capacity to personally onboard each one. That’s where a customer training learning management system (LMS) comes in.
It can introduce new customers to the basics or educate existing users about the latest software enhancements. It can teach techniques for using advanced medical equipment or power tools, host compliance training, or show a homeowner how to properly lay an interlocking laminate plank floor.
The goal of a customer training LMS is to provide information to a user base so they can use your product or service properly or further their education without firsthand assistance. Let’s talk about how a customer training LMS brings customization, integration, and scalability to keep end users happy and drive business growth.
What is a Customer Training LMS?
By definition, any LMS can be a customer training LMS. A LMS is a digital home for a company’s courseware and training assets used by its employees and/or customers. It provides infrastructure and organization for content to make it easy for learners to find the courses they need, and the tools for administrators to build and manage content as well as monitor learner activity through a centralized portal.
Asynchronous online training allows end users to teach themselves about a topic wherever and whenever they need information. A good LMS is infinitely scalable, able to handle growing user populations and course libraries without having to expend more resources on infrastructure.
Further, a LMS can be more than a passive courseware hosting site that simply waits for learners to request training – it can proactively assign the right courses to the right people at the right time. A LMS automates scheduling for compliance and re-certification purposes, keeps employees on track through an entire curricula, and ensures entire user groups receive the latest updates.
Every good LMS does all this and more, or it should, anyway (and if it doesn’t, keep looking). A “Customer Training” LMS focuses on using the platform as a multiplier to train large populations of end users, resellers, or employees of companies that have bought your product or service.
Customer Training LMS Optimized Properties
Here’s a list of the essential user and administrative features training providers should look for in a customer training LMS:
- Multi-tenancy with customization. Most training providers serve more than one customer. A multi-tenant LMS allows training providers to segment their platform into independent client sites, each one customized to individual customer preferences. This “white labelling” allows customers to incorporate logos and imagery to reflect the client brand and take ownership of the training. Create custom login pages, customize content, and set unique rules for email communications, prerequisites, testing, passing grades and certificates for every account.
Each client site is essentially its own LMS with its own user population. Customers are free to train their end users in a way that makes sense for their business model. Administrators can assign content to specific subsets of learners based on attributes like job title or location. They can customize learning pathways to ensure content is consumed in a logical progression, on a fixed schedule, or they can give users free access to the entire course library to train at will.
Multi-tenancy means the LMS grows with your business and eliminates the need for training providers to change their LMS in the future. - Independent yet interconnected. While each client site operates independently, all are managed through a single unified interface to streamline administration. A customer training LMS will offer a number of advanced capabilities such as:
- Cascading course updates: A change made to one module will automatically flow to all customers sharing the same module, saving time, eliminating errors and omissions, and ensuring consistency across all accounts.
- Custom course updates: Conversely, it is just as easy to make one-time changes to customize a module for one client site without impacting all other customers.
- Course tags. Assign identifiers to courses to make organizing and granting access to the right courses easier. Once tagged, admins can edit course settings like attempts, scores and completion certificates in bulk, streamlining workflows.
- User communities. Organize learners into groups by location, job title, department, or role. Assign the appropriate courses to all users and monitor the progress of entire teams.
- Administrative privilege management. Control the level of access client site administrators have over your intellectual property and general LMS settings.
- Detailed reporting. Receive and share analytics with clients regarding training consumption, course start and completion rates, testing scores, and more.
- Integration capabilities. Your customer training LMS should address common integration needs. Some customers will want their LMS to share training data with business software like a CRM app. Other clients may ask for API access to enable their own applications to communicate with your LMS. Larger corporations using Single Sign-On technology for user authentication throughout the organization will want their employees to use those same credentials to access the LMS – one less password to remember and fewer identities to track. Enterprises with their own LMS will want their employees to access your courses through their LMS portal, a.k.a. eternal LMS integration. This allows you to link your LMS to the client’s yet maintain access control over your courseware.
A customer training LMS will support these integration capabilities and grow with your business over time. - Cost efficient and scalable. As a cloud-based service, a customer training LMS relieves training providers of the burden of setting up and hosting their own on-prem LMS with the accompanying hardware, security, IT, and upkeep expenses. It should be noted that the size of the business is not as important as the size of the user base.While smaller companies and start-ups certainly will not have the time or resources to train every end user, even the largest enterprises with the deepest pockets (think Apple, Microsoft, SAP, Tesla, Salesforce, Shopify, Chase, Adobe, et al) do not have the ability to train millions of end users on the latest software upgrade. A customer training LMS offers less hand holding while still maintaining the high training standards of the company.
Once the courseware is ready for consumption, a customer training LMS makes it easy to get training into the hands of your customers’ end users by giving each account access to a customized portal where they manage their own training business with near-autonomy. Infinitely scalable, training providers can add end users and more client sites as needed while retaining ownership of their intellectual property.
Firmwater: Your LMS for Customer Training
The Firmwater LMS checks all the boxes for a robust customer training LMS. Multi-tenancy provides scalability for growth while customization and integration capabilities bring unmatched flexibility to handle each client individually. Give your customers the best possible experience to train their customers with Firmwater. Contact us to schedule a personalized demonstration today.