No matter your particular area of interest or expertise, if you’re in the training and development industry, you obviously have a passion for learning and for teaching others. That passion also means you likely thrive on innovation, newness, and discovery. But just because you have an insatiable curiosity and a desire to share your ever-evolving knowledge with your clients, that doesn’t mean you can’t make your work processes more efficient. In fact, with the right tools, you can make your course development and management processes far more streamlined. The result is optimal growth and profitability for you and world-class custom content for your clients. One of the most important of these tools is a multi-tenant LMS, or learning management system. With this, you can spare yourself time, effort, and labor while also avoiding untold headaches in the process of updating, modifying, and managing your courses.
The Power of LMS Multi-Tenancy
One of the most significant advantages of a multi-tenant LMS for training providers is the immense flexibility and functionality that such a platform provides. Many LMS platforms are geared toward a single audience: either for K-12 education or corporate training purposes.
That might be perfectly sufficient for clients and end-users, but when you’re trying to grow an e-learning business, such a homogenous platform can be extremely limiting, stifling the growth of your business.
A multi-tenant LMS enables you to develop courses for a diverse array of audiences and learners, all without having to reinvent the wheel for every new client. For example, each client will have their own system, specifically customized for their unique needs, requirements, expectations, and uses. This includes, for example, the ability to brand the LMS according to the client’s unique specifications and to devise standardized user privileges based on their particular needs. This ensures that you’re providing your clients with an exceptional service experience and a premium, bespoke LMS experience.
But of course, providing such tailored, specialized content for each individual client will devour both your time and your revenue unless you play it smart. With a multi-tenant LMS, you can provide exactly the kind of customized, client-directed content that your customers want and deserve without having to build, rebuild, and roll it out afresh for each client.
The multi-tenant LMS enables you to create master courses and modules that you can then modify, update, and administer through a single login to the multi-tenant LMS. For example, the system gives you the power to update content and to roll out those updates to every tenant on the LMS simultaneously.
Similarly, since clients’ needs are always a moving target, a multi-tenant LMS enables you to modify, add to, or subtract from course content based on the client’s individual needs. Those modifications can be rolled out only to the requesting client, or they may be curated and archived for future use with other clients who have similar needs.
In essence, a multi-tenant LMS is not only the ideal administrative tool for providing exceptional service and content for a diverse and growing clientele, but it also serves as a repository for curating, managing, and using learning assets.
Creating On-Brand Spaces for Your Clients
As important as the agility of a multi-tenant LMS may be, another advantage is the finished product itself. When you’re trying to deliver next-level service and content for your clients, the last thing that you want to produce is a cardboard cutout e-learning experience that is indistinguishable from the millions of learning assets on the market today.
With a multi-tenant LMS, you can create on-brand spaces for each of your clients. Specifically, you can customize client logos, login pages, domains, emails, completion certificates, languages and more. You can also support clients in developing branded content with their authoring tool of choice.
Integrating your clients’ logo, colors and other signature branding into their LMS site will provide a recognizable and trustworthy environment for end users. Logos can automatically appear on all pages when navigating the LMS, in system-generated emails, and on your account login page. The login page can be uniquely designed for each client to match their branding specifications.
Similarly, customizable settings in your LMS can enable your clients to choose from a range of languages and user attributes. For example, grouping users by their location or job title is an effective way to keep large audiences organized, assign course content to specific groups, and report on each of those groups.
In addition, a range of templates can be used in your multi-tenant LMS for each client, including email and completion certificate templates. Individual clients can customize these to their specific needs and preferences. It’s all about efficiency, because when you create a new template option, it can become instantly available to all the clients in the LMS!
All this will produce a more familiar, comfortable, and functional system for the client, which in turn, leads to an enhanced client experience, improved loyalty, and increased opportunity for growth.
Serving Multiple Clients with Unique Specifications
A multi-tenant LMS is a tremendously powerful tool for training developers because it enables easier and more efficient updates and modifications. Such a system also enables developers to customize content available on the LMS, rolling out changes to all clients on the master LMS based on the evolving needs and expectations of your clients, the market, and/or the industry.
From a business perspective, such efficiency and agility mean immense market opportunities. After all, the more quickly you can produce quality LMS content options or make meaningful, relevant, and timely adjustments to existing assets, the more (and improved) product you will have to meet clients’ ever-evolving needs.
This includes the ability to make just-in-time updates to ensure that the LMS offers the most relevant and timely features for your clients to select and modify based on their specific and unique requirements. For example, some clients may require the addition of an infection-prevention module to their workplace safety training course or a data security video lesson for clients transitioning to a hybrid work schedule.
One Program/Interface
When you are a training developer, you have multiple irons in the fire. Delivering exceptional content and superlative service for your clients can be an overwhelming process. A multi-tenant LMS can take away many of your headaches because you can administer your courses and your clients from a single interface.
The system enables you to keep track of, manage, and disseminate important client and course data. Reporting for each client, for instance, can be managed easily through the LMS. This client-specific reporting facilitates scalability and enables targeted customizations for individual clients, a subset of clients on the multi-tenant platform, or all clients on the platform. Armed with such knowledge, you can make more informed business decisions regarding course updates, modifications, and development.
The Data Security That Your Clients Expect, Built-In
If you’re a training provider and are considering transitioning to a multi-tenant LMS, you might be wondering what such a platform might mean for your company’s and your clients’ data security. With the right platform, data security should be no more a concern than on a traditional, standalone LMS. In a multi-tenant LMS, data and content are separate from one tenant to the next.
In addition, the LMS enables you to determine precisely how much content and data access each individual client receives, based on your own business needs and on your clients’ requirements. For example, you can set specific administrative privileges to add or remove capabilities based on the end-user’s role and permissions.
Similarly, with the Firmwater multi-tenant LMS, if you need to have standard roles modified for all your clients, you can adjust the privileges that are inherited by all clients. Likewise, the Firmwater LMS allows for security customization based on clients’ diverse needs. A healthcare corporation, for instance, would likely require more stringent security settings than might a small e-retailer. The LMS enables you to customize security settings and permissions from a single interface.
Here at Firmwater, we don’t just sell an LMS for training providers. We partner with our clients, giving them the tools and insights they need to implement the best practices in e-learning course development, growth, and delivery. We care too much about our customers’ businesses to have them wade through forums and chatbots for help.
Ready to use an LMS that’s designed for the way YOU work, with a team dedicated to YOUR needs? Book a no-obligation consultation directly with our team today!