Guide to a Customer Education LMS

Your company’s customer education strategy is one of the most important factors contributing to a positive customer experience. While it’s often underestimated, customer education should be a priority for nearly every company.

Developing an airtight customer education program is difficult, but it can be made much easier with the proper tools. Using a customer education LMS can help you design a learning academy for your customers that maximizes the value they receive from your brand and your products. Powering your education efforts with the right software platform can enable you to greatly improve your customer training efforts.

Customer experience is critical for pretty much any kind of business. It’s one thing to be able to attract new customers, but retaining customers is far preferable. With a customer education LMS, you can create a learning environment that provides customers with an exemplary experience. When customers have access to this type of learning environment, they’re set up to succeed with your products, which is essential for retention.

No matter what your goals are for your customer academy, a customer education LMS can help you achieve them. Learning management software is a flexible tool; there are multiple types of LMS and numerous ways to use each kind. Let’s dive into how you can use an education platform to improve the customer training experience you offer.

Understanding Customer Education Learning Management Systems

A customer education learning management system (LMS) is a type of software that makes it easier for customer education teams to create, manage, and deliver educational content to their customers. (You might also hear people call it a customer education platform.) A customer education LMS is a kind of platform used to build an online learning environment that enables customers to succeed with your products and services.

There are numerous groups that can benefit from an LMS, including employees and partners. However, one of the most important groups to educate sufficiently is your customers. When your customers are well-educated about your products and services, you may see a variety of business gains, such as higher sales numbers, lower churn, fewer customer support expenses and more.

Building an extensive online customer education academy from scratch without an LMS is a challenging task. A customer education platform introduces all kinds of possibilities and makes the idea of developing a successful learning environment for customers seem more attainable. 

Here are some examples of the LMS features that can make creating a customer education program a breeze:

• Customization: Many learning management systems are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the user interface to provide whatever kind of customer experience you wish. For some platforms, this goes beyond simply changing colors and logos—you can truly personalize every aspect of your academy’s design.
• Learning Paths: Just like you can customize the appearance of your customer academy with an LMS, you can also personalize the learning experience for each customer. You can design learning paths to take customers through predetermined sequences of content to suit different needs.
• User Feedback: One of the most important steps of running a successful customer education program is collecting feedback from your users. This makes it possible to make incremental improvements to your customer education materials. You can use an LMS to deliver surveys or implement other customer feedback tools.
• Flexibility: Different people learn in different ways, so it’s best to incorporate multiple content formats into your customer education courses. This way, you can cater to a variety of learning styles. An LMS can be used to deliver multiple kinds of content such as videos, charts and graphs, infographics, quizzes and more. Plus, you can use an LMS to easily optimize content for mobile devices.
• Certifications: Certifications can be used to motivate learners to complete courses or learning paths. When your customers have a concrete goal to work toward, it can inspire them to see courses through to the end, improving your course completion rate. Certifications are also opportunities for professional development, which can entice learners to strive for them.
• Content Creation: A learning management system can do more than just deliver content. You can also use the tools that come with an LMS to create the content itself and upload it directly where your customers can benefit from it.
• Seamless Integration: One of the best parts of using a customer education platform is that it enables you to integrate your customer education with the rest of your tech stack. You can use APIs to allow your learning management system to communicate with your other systems for a seamless learning environment.
• Learner analytics: You can use a customer education platform to keep track of information regarding the way your customers are using your academy. This can help you determine whether they’re getting the most they could out of it or if there are areas that need to be improved. It can also help you tailor your content more closely to your customers’ needs.

Types of LMSs for Customer Education

Learning management systems are useful tools for nearly any kind of business. There are multiple types of customer education LMS to cater to different types of customer education needs. Here are some common learning management system examples::

Custom-built LMS

A custom-built LMS gives you an enormous amount of control over the final outcome of the software. Since you’re having it custom-built from scratch, you can personalize the design to your exact specifications. However, the drawback is that building your own software from scratch is challenging, time-consuming and expensive, whether you do it in-house or outsource it to a developer.

SaaS LMS

A software as a service (SaaS) LMS is a bit like a cloud-based learning management system. It’s a customer education platform that another company has developed and hosts on their servers. By using a SaaS LMS, you can greatly reduce the time and resources required to create a customer education program because you don’t have to build your own software from scratch. Many SaaS customer education platforms are extremely customizable, allowing you to present a fully personalized interface to the user.

Installed LMS

An Installed LMS is an LMS that is hosted on your own servers instead of on a provider’s servers (like the SaaS LMS variety). This allows you greater control over aspects like data storage and security, but you’re also fully responsible for maintaining the data. As your data storage needs grow, it may become more trouble than it’s worth to handle it yourself.

Open-source LMS

An open-source LMS is built on open-source code that anyone can customize to suit their customer education needs. This can offer a great deal of flexibility without requiring you to build your own LMS completely from scratch, but you’ll still need access to some considerable coding abilities to personalize the platform for your brand.

Customer Training Software

Northpass’s customer education platform is a highly customizable LMS that offers a robust arsenal of features that make it easy to create a world-class customer education academy.

One feature in particular that sets Northpass apart from other customer training software is the inclusion of LMS certification courses. Using Northpass, you can create courses that reward users who complete them with certifications. This can give your learners a reason to complete more courses to attain more certifications.

A customer LMS platform like Northpass lets you take advantage of useful features like learning paths without taking control away from you. You can customize the learning experience your customers get so it captures the look and feel of your brand. You can even customize the user interface to tailor the navigation to your preferences. 

Customer education presents many challenges, but overcoming them is a necessary part of equipping your customers for success. A customer education LMS like Northpass is one of the best tools you’ll find to help you build a successful customer education program.