Understanding the problem your company is trying to solve for its customers is the first step to investing in a training system. In other words, what behavioral changes or improvements do you want to see in your customers’ operations through an LMS? Your next step is to decide whether you want to build your own platform, or are looking for a vendor-maintained cloud platform (SaaS)? And finally, based on your customers’ needs, decide which features the LMS needs to have. Finding the best LMS for your business requires little time and will provide you with a competitive advantage!
In this article, we’ll examine the features of an LMS that help customers train effectively.
Learning paths
Courses are a core unit in any Customer Training LMS platform. They are made up of lessons. Likewise, courses can be grouped into series or paths. Courses can be arranged into paths to make them more discoverable, which makes them more accessible. Learning paths can be created based on roles, skill levels, and more, instead of browsing an extensive catalog of topics. To create an appropriate learning experience, some questions to ask are:
- Does the LMS provide self-directed paths or do you need to create them yourself?
- Can your learners easily navigate from one course to the next in a path? Do the paths have a clear UI?
- Does the LMS allow users to skip between courses, or do they have to complete previous courses before starting a new one?
Personalized catalogs
The majority of LMS platforms offer a learner grouping feature, allowing learners to be grouped based on factors. Such as which product or service they belong to, what are their needs, and how much they subscribe to. Depending on these factors, you can decide to select specific content that is more tailored to learners. After all, by making fewer choices but better recommendations, you prevent learners from making common decision mistakes caused by too many choices. For example, if LMS recommends a few courses based on learners’ profiles and needs, it becomes easy for them to select the appropriate course.
LMS serves learners with limited knowledge, so related courses and content should be automatically suggested by the system.
Search Engine Visibility
When you have learners who are customers or the general public, it isn’t wise to encrypt everything.
For example, they might have searched for something about your product and ended up on your learning site or portal. Once they click the link to access it, they see a login screen. And now they are irritated with the various questions such as, What are my login details? Where can I find the courses? Most customers don’t even give that much time or patience to the company. They might try for a while and then end up watching YouTube tutorials and then get distracted by other things.
During your evaluation of a Customer LMS, you should take note of the amount of content available outside of the login screen. Users can browse the courses and learn what they’re about before they’ve logged in, and LMS allows you to do this. Have an LMS that can let you create a page that describes each course and grant users access to it.
E-Commerce
Though you might not initially charge for any of your courses, you’ll probably be tempted in the future. By setting a price for your training content, you’ll not only make your finance department happy but also improve its value for learners.
Take a look at how your Customer Training LMS operates e-commerce. Does it use a payment gateway? Is it capable of generating invoices? Can your finance team monitor the billing process?
You probably won’t know exactly how to price and package your services when you first start selling training unless you have already done so. To support your evolving pricing strategy, make sure your Customer Training LMS provides flexibility.
Customer Reporting Tools
A training program’s ability to monitor your learners’ progress and activity are always helpful, so you can pinpoint where they need to improve. It does not matter what industry or purposes your client’s training serves, you need to give your clients the option of tracking their learning progress. In addition, the administration may use reporting to assess the effectiveness of their training program.
The LMS should be able to track a variety of metrics such as assignment grades, progress on courses, how much time users spend in a course module, as well as certifications and completions. Some LMSs require the integration of third-party tools to track eLearning progress and generate reports, so ensure that your LMS has them.
Conclusion
As internal training is about training employees, external training is all about educating your customers, whether it be a product, service, or process. So that your customers can understand and make use of your product and services to their full extent. Many LMS solutions can fulfill the above requirements. But important is to pick that perfect one which not only offers the above features but is also user friendly for your customers. Some of the best LMS that are popular for customer training are Mindflash, Litmos, Docebo, and many more.
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