Extended Enterprise LMS: The Best LMS For Your Business

Every expanding business has growing pains, especially in learning and development (L&D).

You have product features for employees to learn, customer personas, and an ever-expanding list of new team members to train. That’s all without taking existing learners into account.

Extended enterprise learning management systems (LMS) exist to make your life easier. An extended enterprise LMS acts as a single platform to house all of your training content, regardless of who you’re training or what you’re teaching. 

What is an extended enterprise LMS?

An extended enterprise LMS is a platform that helps large organizations facilitate training.

It’s more customizable and scalable than a traditional LMS, offering a variety of use cases, from internal employee training to partner and customer training. 

Why are extended enterprise LMS important?

An extended enterprise LMS allows your scaling organization to distribute knowledge and skills both internally and externally—without switching between several platforms, each with its own training material and configuration.

Take employee training, for example, which offers many benefits to scaling companies. Studies show that strength-based learning can result in 23 percent higher employee engagement, and when companies invest in employee training, turnover reduces. The majority of workers would stay at a company longer if their employers invested in their careers.

But when pivoting to train paying customers, the learning materials differ vastly. You no longer discuss health and safety—more so, the use case of your product. 

With an extended enterprise LMS, you can organize both employee L&D and customer training materials in a centralized location. That means one subscription, one platform to maintain, and one central repository to locate your company’s training content quickly.

“WorkRamp enables us to train employees and customers in a single platform. This allows us to share training materials across teams and provide an amazing education experience for our customers without the added work of spinning up a new instance.”

 

—Chauncy Ford, Director of Customer Enablement, Quantum Metric 

Extended enterprise LMS features

Now we know what an extended enterprise LMS is, let’s explore five features your platform needs.

Reporting and analytics

By benchmarking training KPIs alongside business outcomes, you can judge the value of an extended enterprise LMS, make informed decisions about training budgets, and justify the investment in L&D to stakeholders. 

An extended enterprise LMS like WorkRamp shows:

• Revenue
• Learning path progress 
• Searches and topics 
• Customer/employee satisfaction
• Partner performance

Advanced reporting features also help identify skill gaps and produce more effective training materials. Learner satisfaction may be low, or participation scores might fall off if customers and partners struggle with your product onboarding series. 

Use these insights to fine-tune your learning materials and produce content that meets its learning objective.

Customizable interface

As your company grows, training needs and priorities may change. A customizable interface allows for flexibility by adding new features, reconfiguring layouts, or integrating third-party tools. You’ll keep one single LMS that easily scales as your organization does.

Maintaining a consistent brand image becomes vital as you scale, too. With a customizable interface, you can align online training academies with your branding guidelines using your company colors, logos, and domain. Learners have a seamless and cohesive learning experience that reflects the organization’s identity.

Plus, with scaling comes global expansion. An extended enterprise LMS with a customizable interface allows training materials to be translated into different languages, accommodating regional preferences and cultural nuances. Employees, customers, and partners get the same consistent learning experience—one that’s personalized to their geographic location. 

Admin dashboard

Admin dashboards might not sound like the most glamorous feature of an extended enterprise LMS, but they’re one of the most important. 

Why? Because they give you the ability to track, assign, prepare, and upload new training materials using a single log-in. 

Learning and development is a company-wide responsibility. A business’ key stakeholders—be that the CEO or HR manager—often want to see the impact of L&D initiatives on business goals. Admin dashboards allow you to do that. 

They give key stakeholders access to your LMS’ back-end to view metrics, learning materials, and customization options all in one place. 

Vast integrations

You’ll need more tools and platforms to manage a growing business. Look for an extended enterprise LMS that offers seamless integration between the platform and third-party systems, such as:

• Customer sales and support tools like Salesforce and Zendesk 
• Communication systems like Slack, Zoom, and Google Calendar
• HR platforms like Workday and Bamboo HR

Integrations eliminate silos and improve data accuracy, increasing efficiency and productivity. 

Say goodbye to copy and pasting between tools, and hello to an interconnected enterprise LMS that works with the platforms already in your tech stack.

Personalized learning paths

When you’re training a large group of employees and customers, you’ll have different training content for each one. 

Take the segment of internal employees, for example. Everyone in the workplace needs health and safety, diversity and inclusion, and compliance training. But people in certain job roles also need training specific to their responsibilities—like sales managers who must fine-tune their coaching and goal-setting skills. 

With WorkRamp’s extended enterprise LMS, you can design learning paths that are personalized to each learning persona.

Examples of common traits grouped by learning path include:

• Employee training: Job role, level of experience, and existing skill set
• Customer training: Products purchased, pain point, or total amount spent
• Partners: Services offered, product use case, or company size

Personalized learning experiences reduce friction and overwhelm. Everyone gets the training content most relevant to them—even though company-wide training materials are stored in the same extended enterprise LMS. 

Read more: The Indispensable Power of Personalized L&D

Benefits of using an extended enterprise LMS

Increase profits and reduce expenses

An extended enterprise LMS provides a scalable platform to train a large number of internal and external learners simultaneously.

Instead of relying on resource-intensive manual training processes, you can repurpose and recreate new learning material in the same platform—no extra costs required.

By providing training and education to external stakeholders (such as customers and partners), an extended enterprise LMS helps everyone get a consistent understanding of a business’ products, services, and processes. This consistency can contribute to 33 percent more revenue. 

Delivering consistent and scalable training programs reduces the time and effort required to train and onboard new learners. Extended enterprise LMSs streamline operations, increase efficiency, and free up resources that can be redirected to other important tasks. 

Ability to track training progress

You might think you’ve produced the best training materials, but your L&D efforts could be wasted if learners aren’t progressing.

An extended enterprise LMS gives you the tools to track learner progress. 

With WorkRamp’s advanced reporting features, you’ll find metrics like: 

• Learner retention rate
• Course completion rate
• Assessment or quiz scores
• Achievement of business goals 

We can see the value of training tracking with a scaling organization that’s training customers. The business has three core products, each with its own buyer persona. Two of the three customer training courses—those predominantly video-based—have learner retention rates of 80+ percent. The final one, which is text-based, has just 50 percent.

Combine this with qualitative data from learners who’ve enrolled in the course but haven’t finished it. You might find learners drop off because there is no interactive element to keep them engaged or because text-based video doesn’t grab their attention as much as video content. Use these insights to fine-tune your materials and improve training progress. 

Read more: Interactive Training Sofware: Types, Advantages, & Tips to Create the Best Interactive Training

Simplify training for external partners and reps

Effective partner training helps you build relationships and empower partners to succeed. 

Choose an extended enterprise LMS that offers certification features. When partners complete a training course and pass the end-of-module assessment, they’ll get a certificate to prove their knowledge. 

Certifications help you build a reputable network of partners with evidence of completing your partner training courses to a high standard. It also helps customers find approved partners they can trust.

Increase customer loyalty and reduce churn

Customers who’ve enrolled in your customer education academy are given the learning materials they need to feel confident using your products. This can lead to higher satisfaction levels, increase customer loyalty, and reduce churn.

Plus, by tracking customer education progress within your extended enterprise LMS, you can identify areas where customers may be struggling or require additional assistance. 

With this insight, you can respond with tailored training materials and customer support. Ensuring that customers have the necessary skills and knowledge to get the most out of your product. 

Eliminate repetitive tasks

How much time do you spend each day on repetitive tasks? With an extended enterprise LMS, that time could be cut significantly.

Take your customer support team, for example. An extended enterprise LMS allows you to create self-paced online courses, tutorials, and knowledge bases that customers can access anytime and anywhere. Users can learn at their own pace, reducing support requests and allowing your support team to focus on tickets that need a human touch.

The same applies for L&D managers who are creating new content as their business’ feature set expands. Instead of creating training materials from scratch, you can duplicate existing content, work from a library of prebuilt courses, or create new content using artificial intelligence with WorkRamp’s AI Assist feature.

Mobile LMS systems

Not all learners prefer to engage with training materials on a desktop computer. Some 68 percent of the world’s population have smartphones, contributing to a mobile learning industry expected to be valued at $155 billion by 2026.

Cater to these learners with an extended enterprise LMS that goes beyond responsive design. 

WorkRamp offers advanced mobile features designed to engage learners and improve retention, such as:

• iOS and Android-compatible mobile apps
• Push notifications 
• Microlearning opportunities
• Course gamification 

Get the All-In-One LMS

The best extended enterprise LMS allows scaling businesses to train customers, partners, and employees from a single platform. 

Use the checklist of features we’ve shared to find the best fit for your business. From admin dashboards to advanced reporting and analytics, WorkRamp’s All-in-One LMS includes the must-have features—and more.

The Learning Cloud from WorkRamp is an all-in-one LMS for scaling organizations. Schedule a free, personalized demo today and see how your employees and customers can benefit.