Top LMS Selection Speed Bumps: Customer Ed Nugget 18

Sooner or later, every customer education provider needs to invest in a learning management system. Whether it’s your first time or your tenth, finding the right solution can be an intimidating experience. So it pays to prepare yourself. Why? LMS selection speed bumps are all around.

Consider this: The LMS landscape is vast and highly diverse. We’ve counted over 1000 vendors that offer some form of learning system — and many say they support customer education.

But who has time to research and evaluate all these vendors? Isn’t there a better way to steer past this and other LMS selection speed bumps that stand between you and the right solution for your needs?

I think so. We call it shortlisting. And that’s exactly what I’ll unpack in less than 10 minutes on this episode of the Customer Ed Nuggets podcast. Today, rather than talking with a guest, I’m flying solo. This gives me time to dig deeper into the challenges that hold LMS buyers back. Then I’ll share a variety of tools and resources that make the shortlisting process easier.

Time is precious, so let’s get going…

Top LMS Selection Speed Bumps

After helping hundreds of clients choose learning systems for customer education and other enterprise needs, I’m convinced that the faster you land on a shortlist of qualified LMS solutions, the more likely you are to find a strong partner and long-term success. But what issues typically get in the way?

1. The Agenda Is Too Important to Fail

Organizations invest in customer education because it can create a measurable competitive advantage. And with the right LMS, it’s common to see dramatic improvement in metrics like customer success, satisfaction, renewals, sales, purchase size, and brand advocacy. At the same time, organizations often benefit from faster onboarding and time-to-value, as well as lower support calls volumes, service delivery costs and more.

On the other hand, selecting the wrong LMS can be devastating for your business. It can crush performance KPIs and threaten your organization’s competitiveness. Recovering from a poor customer LMS isn’t easy, quick or inexpensive – and it definitely won’t do any favors for your career.

So clearly, a lot is at stake when choosing a platform for customer education. No wonder decision-makers tend to hesitate or become lost in weighing pros and cons.

2. Limited Time

Time is of the essence when LMS shopping. From budget authorization to go-live, the clock is ticking. Few organizations start the LMS selection process early enough.

Often, when replacing an LMS, the contract is going to expire soon. This galvanizes everyone around a common target date. The buyer must choose, implement and roll-out the new LMS before that date. Otherwise, they need to wait another year, or pay double to cover overlapping contracts.

First-time buyers also must contend with timeline expectations from executives, including speed of purchase, rollout and time to value. Sometimes these assumptions are reasonable, but often they’re not.

And here’s a problem most organizations don’t anticipate. The upfront vendor research, discovery calls, product demonstrations, scheduling, and ongoing communications require a massive amount of time. You’ll find few economies of scale when you’re juggling 5, 10 or 20 vendor options. And with each new vendor in the mix, you lose another precious week or two.

3. Marketplace Complexity

The reason why over 1000 different LMSs are available is because many LMS use cases are outside the customer education realm. For example, you’ll find many solutions designed for employee compliance training, academic scenarios, professional education, association member programs, workforce enablement and channel partner learning.

Each use case has unique functional, technical, integration, service, support and license requirements. Accidently trying to qualify vendors who don’t specialize in customer education is a terrible waste of time.

Fortunately, there is a path through all of this complexity. Start by identifying solutions designed specifically for various customer education scenarios. This rapidly narrows the field from 1000 vendors to perhaps only 20-30 that are most likely to fit your needs.

4. The Term “Customer Education” Lacks a Universal Definition

Every organization has a unique product and service mix. As a result, every LMS buyer has unique customer profiles with specific educational needs. For some organizations, customer education means training only existing customers. For others, it may include partners and employee audiences or others.

In addition, content libraries can vary dramatically. They may include only one course or 1000 courses. Content types are similarly diverse. They can include any combination of courses, microlessons, video, in-product help, knowledge bases, user forums, certifications, virtual classrooms, live onsite instructor-led training and much more. Customers can be located in one country speaking English or 192 locations speaking every language you can imagine.

These aren’t the only parameters to consider. A customer education program can stand alone, or it may need to be integrated into a different business ecosystem with its own CRM, customer service and support systems, HRIS, virtual classrooms, authoring tools, single sign on, chatbots, data lake, proctoring system and proprietary applications.

This unique mix of requirements for every buying organization makes some customer learning systems ideal for some buyers and horrible for others. As a buyer, you can quickly qualify or disqualify LMS options based on a limited set of must-have, critical requirements – as long as you know what those requirements are.

How to Avoid LMS Selection Speed Bumps

For more than 10 years, our team at Talented Learning has helped customer education professionals find their best LMS. And the one capability our clients value most is vendor shortlisting. Now, you can put this method to work for your organization, too.

Here are our top free and premium resources to help you identify qualified vendors and build a custom LMS shortlist in record time:

FREE RESOURCES

1.  Customer Education Resource Center – To learn about customer education, start here. This is where you’ll find our full collection of topical blogs, podcasts, videos, webinars, panel discussions, executive interviews and more.

2.  2024 RightFit Solution Grid – Quickly identify potential qualified customer LMS solutions with our visual map of the top 50 commercial learning systems, where vendors are assigned locations based on the  characteristics of their primary buyers.

3.  Learning Systems Directory – Avoid the vendor sales overload by safely researching potential customer education solutions before you contact them. With this growing collection of in-depth vendor profiles you can investigate each system’s capabilities; watch video demonstrations, business briefings and reviews; read their case studies and thought leadership articles, and more.

4.  Case Study Catalog – Explore our library of nearly 100 vendor-specific customer success stories. You can search and filter these real-world cases by category or other criteria to see the kind of results your potential vendors can achieve.

PREMIUM RESOURCES

1.  2024 Customer LMS Buyer’s Guide – Get the insights you need to make more confident buying decisions with this detailed comparison of 20 top customer LMS solutions. Identify and learn about vendors that focus on your particular business, functional, technical, integration and service requirements. Download a copy to share with others in your organization for only $399. Or get started by downloading Part 1 for free.

2.  Talented Learning Center – Enjoy anytime access to the world’s foremost library of vendor-neutral LMS education. Find out about effective buying strategies and techniques, key use cases, functionality, integrations, top trends and more. Our newest content is always available here first. All for $29/month.

3.  Personalized LMS Selection Guidance from John Leh – Choose from a variety of options for every need, ranging from a complimentary consulting call to full-service LMS selection services.

Watch This Episode of Customer Ed Nuggets

Want to join a quick session with me now? In less that 10 minutes, we’ll walk through the LMS selection process and talk about how to build a qualified vendor shortlist in a fraction of the time it normally takes. Watch this YouTube video…

If you’d prefer to listen, tune in to the audio podcast right here at TalentedLearning.com.

The Bottom Line on Overcoming LMS Selection Speed Bumps

For multiple reasons, finding a new or replacement LMS is daunting. But with fast access to a credible shortlist of highly qualified solutions, the rest of your buying and implementation efforts can fall neatly into place. You’ll have sufficient time to poke, prod and verify each vendor’s capabilities. And you can be scientific and extremely subjective in narrowing the field to your favorite choice.

Thanks for reading!

NEW 2024 BUYERS GUIDE

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All customer learning management systems aren’t created equal. Get our in-depth buyer’s guide to research and compare the best customer education systems on the market today, so you can find the best options for your needs…

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About Talented Learning Customer Ed Nuggets

Hosted by Talented Learning CEO John Leh, the Customer Ed Nuggets podcast is a trusted source of advice, guidance and best practices for customer education professionals of all types. In this series of brief video and audio “nuggets” (each 10 minutes or less), we explore key topics with numerous guest experts.

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Need Guidance to Avoid LMS Selection Speed Bumps?

If you’re looking for a platform to support customer education, be sure you make the right decision. I can help. (For proof, check my 45+ LinkedIn recommendations.) Submit the form below to request a free consultation with me, Talented Learning Founder and Lead Analyst, John Leh: