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Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of this holiday, we’d like to play Cupid and help you meet your LMS match. If you haven’t already done so, take a look at this customer training RFP template for a select list of relevant criteria.

We’ve also outlined three reasons to fall in love with an external training LMS below:

1. Branding

One reason to use an external LMS, rather than an internal one, is if you value having the option to change the look and feel of your training site. Specifically, many companies with customer-facing portals want to ensure their system can be custom branded. This allows them to align with any brand guidelines or standards set by their marketing team. In addition, they can increase conversions when users transition seamlessly from the company’s website to their desired courses. To the student, there’s no difference between the company’s website and the training portal or LMS.

2. Relevant Integrations

When selecting an LMS, many companies keep a list of “must-have” integrations in mind. For internal training, this may be integrations with their performance management system or Human Resources Information System (HRIS). For external training, this includes integrations with their marketing automation system, live training software, and a CRM like Salesforce.

The main benefit of integrating with marketing automation and live training software is providing a streamlined student experience. Students can sign up for webinars, add them to their calendars, and launch – all from one central location. They may also receive automated reminders, or recommendations for similar training events via email.

With a CRM integration in place, training teams have the ability to understand the true value of their program. Insights include:

  • How training affects customer health scores, churn, renewals, and expansions
  • The impact of training on product adoption
  • Reach and response to promotional training activities

They can then surface these results to relevant stakeholder teams – without switching between disparate systems.

3. Content Discovery

Content discovery is important for customer training teams, as their user base varies – not only by job function or skill level, but also from company to company. It simply doesn’t make sense to serve the same content to different people with different needs. To give one example, maybe someone has a question about how to set up an A/B test for an upcoming email campaign. Rather than taking an entire course on marketing best practices, they could skip ahead to the lesson on email marketing, and search specifically for “A/B test,” saving them hours of frustration.

Let students find courses that interest them. This can be accomplished through advanced search functionality, filters, and tagging. As a result, you can maintain higher registration and completion rates.