Benefits of Customizing Your Learning Management System (LMS)

When your company has a learning management system (LMS) that customers regularly use, it becomes an integral part of your brand. Choosing an LMS for Customer Education should include ensuring it has the ability to create a customized and engaging learning environment that matches your brand identity to strengthen the relationship with your customers and other learners.

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Why is a customizable LMS important?

Many companies offer Customer Education as a way to drive business results, so LMS customization is critical to standing out from the pack. Tie LMS features to your brand to provide a seamless learning experience for your customers. Creating a training portal that matches your brand’s visual identity with personalized design options is important to reinforce your commitment to customer learning and ensure a positive experience with your brand. 

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Benefits of customizing your LMS

LMS training can be delivered through eLearning courses, videos, PDFs, webinars, and any other format that can be delivered online. Offering a variety of formats is helpful in creating a positive customer experience as different learners prefer to consume content in different ways, but customization doesn’t end there. Here are some other elements to consider when customizing your LMS:

Custom branding

Your learning management system can match the look of your website and products, reinforcing the company’s image. With each course your customers complete in your branded LMS, they learn more about your company values, the “why” behind your products and services, and how it serves them.

Customized learner dashboards

You decide the best way to create a user-friendly dashboard to amplify the positive customer experiences you deliver.

LMS integrations

Your learning management system shouldn’t operate in a vacuum. It must work with other solutions like CRM, and marketing automation to provide a powerful experience and streamline reporting.  Look for an LMS that offers API integrations with the software you’re already using.

eCommerce functionality

When your LMS solution is equipped with features like API integrations or embedded modules, it streamlines the course subscription and purchasing processes with direct connections to your payment processor and financial accounts. It also enables you to respond to and manage refund requests easily.

Top 10 customization features you need for your LMS

The key features of an external training LMS will vary based on your company and its unique training needs. To determine the best LMS for your company, consider the business needs, the relevant benefits mentioned above, and the following features.

1. Learning paths

Personalized learning paths allow learners to choose or be assigned a set of self-serve courses to complete in a particular order, with the opportunity to save their progress and return at a later time.

2. Group creation and management

Harness the power of social learning and streamline learning paths by assigning learners to groups and feeding content specific to those groups. This is especially helpful for managing customer segments, such as those who’ve purchased a certain product.

3. Role management

Users are assigned roles with specific permissions to ensure everyone has the appropriate LMS access. For example, admins have complete access to managing the learning platform whereas end-users only have access to their specific courses..

4. Localization

Give all your customers the education they need to get the most out of your products and services by providing courses in their preferred languages. 

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5. Course authoring/creation and management

Learning management systems simplify content management by giving your team one place to create, update, and analyze learning different types of content. This may include resources like course templates.

6. Quizzes and assessments

Show learners how well they’ve grasped the material and help your team make data-driven decisions about which courses are working by using assessments like built-in quizzes.

7. Reporting

Your LMS user interface should enable your team to run reports and retrieve data on program usage easily. Course data should feed into a CRM such as Salesforce to help make sense of training activity by account. The most sophisticated reporting features will also help you tie training activity back to business outcomes like customer satisfaction and retention.  

8. Badges and Certificates

Earning badges and certificates to showcase learner achievement may motivate customers, while also allowing you to verify that they’re qualified to perform a certain task or function with your product. The ability to share learner credentials on social platforms like LinkedIn helps promote brand awareness for your products as well. 

9. Hybrid Learning and Blended learning

 Many learners prefer flexible training experiences, so providing a seamless, customized brand experience through hybrid learning — combining in-person sessions with online learning — is key. Offering these blended learning options allows learners to access training in a way that suits their schedules and preferences, enhancing engagement and effectiveness.

10. Notifications

Help learners stay on track with automated notifications and in-app messaging about new courses and achievements.

Choosing the best customizable LMS for your organization

As with any other software decision, the best place to start is with your training program goals. Take the time upfront to determine what your LMS needs to do, how your teams will use it, what pricing structure will fit best, how user-friendly the LMS has to be, and to what degree you will want to create your own content versus using pre-existing offerings. 

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Talk with trusted peers and get more information from potential LMS vendors. Ask providers about their ability to deliver on the items we’ve discussed here to help you make an informed decision. 

Skilljar lets you create a customized  training experience 

Skilljar is a powerful LMS platform for Customer Education with an intuitive user interface and tools such as personalized learning paths, badges and certifications, and integrations. Sign up for a demo to learn how Skilljar can help you customize your training experience to better engage learners and reach your business goals.