How to Use an LMS for Customer Education: Driving Success Through Training & Support

There’s no doubt that customer education is vital to a positive customer experience, reducing churn, and creating upsell and cross-sell opportunities. 

Most companies (97 percent) say customer education impacts their business’ bottom line. It’s why 46 percent of organizations have significantly increased the customer education they provide.

It’s easier to execute a successful customer education program with the right tools. With a learning management system (LMS), customers can find the content they need. It also makes upselling and cross-selling more efficient while reducing pressure on your customer education team to provide a one-to-one service at scale.

A customer education LMS can improve the customer training experience, turn customers into loyal brand advocates, and ultimately, help you achieve better business results. 

How is a customer education LMS different?

eLearning platforms are not all the same. The users they’re designed for matters in terms of functionality. 

A customer LMS is built to help companies avoid churn and help end-users see value quickly.

This differs from an internal LMS, which companies use to educate and train their employees—often called an employee LMS.

If you have the following goals, it’s probably time to invest in a customer education LMS: 

• Provide user value through deep product knowledge
• Influence the way learners use your platform
• Serve diverse audiences with different roles and needs
• Inform customers of product updates, new features, and functionality
• Increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities
• Reduce the burden on customer success teams
• Reduce churn and make renewals easier

The Learning Cloud from WorkRamp combines a customer LMS and an employee LMS in a single platform. Designed to support customer, partner, and employee training, the Learning Cloud helps you do more with less. 

“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

8 customer education LMS features

Now that we know what a customer education LMS is let’s uncover how it can help teams create programs that educate and retain existing customers.

1. Customization
2. Learning paths
3. User feedback
4. Flexibility
5. Certifications
6. Content creation
7. Seamless integrations
8. Learner reporting

Customization

Consistency is essential across every touchpoint a customer has with your brand. The same concept applies to your customer training program. 

The best customer training software allows learners to sign into a fully customized LMS. 

The Learning Cloud, for example, allows customer educators to white-label the learning portal so customers get the same branded experience post-purchase.

Plus, you’ll need a customizable LMS to provide out-of-the-box online learning, such as product-specific training or in-person events. 

“With WorkRamp, we can use various content types that complement our videos to make our courses even more engaging for different audiences. Additionally, we can make Hopin Learn easier for customers to navigate.”

 

— Shira Moskowitz, Customer Education & Internal Enablement Manager at Hopin

Learning paths

If users sign into your customer education academy and get overwhelmed, there’s a good chance they’ll exit and never return. 

Learning paths help reduce initial friction and overwhelm. Customers can grow their product knowledge without contributing to their mental clutter. They only see the training material most relevant to them.

Build customer learning paths in your LMS that are segmented by:

• The product(s) they purchased
• The features rated most important to them during the sales process
• Their job title or function

For example, if a customer purchased your SEO software because they wanted help with keyword research, build personalized learning paths to educate them on how to find competitor keywords, search volume, and keyword difficulty. 

Hide other modules so they can focus on the most significant challenge they wanted to solve when buying the software—a strategy bound to increase customer satisfaction and early product adoption.

User feedback

Do customers enjoy learning through your academy? Which type of learning material do they prefer to engage with? Do they feel like they’ve mastered your product after enrolling in a course?

Answer these questions (and more!) with a customer education LMS with built-in user feedback functionality. From multiple-choice quizzes to text boxes, collect quantitative and qualitative data to assess the effectiveness of your customer education program.

Let’s put that into practice and say user feedback indicates customers aren’t completing the learning outcome of your product mastery course. Those enrolled still contact support for advice on using its features. 

Whatever you decide to do next—be that introducing a new module, changing the format, or revamping the course entirely—that simple piece of user feedback can dramatically improve the long-term success of your customer education program. 

Flexibility

Real-time learning is a superb way to build community amongst your customers. Also known as synchronous learning, real-time events (like webinars or in-person sessions) require customers to join the training on a set date at a specific time.

But while these real-time events bring customers together and reinforce learning, they can be inaccessible to some. 

Use your customer education LMS to house pre-recorded live events so more customers can access them. It contributes to a blended learning experience where customers who miss real-time sessions can view pre-recorded content on demand.

Certifications

Certifications are documents that prove your customers have undertaken a specific training course. 

The most significant benefit of certifying customers is that partners can prove their training is current. 

If your industry or product changes rapidly, have your certifications expire after a period of time. For example, customers who need to renew their certifications each year prove their knowledge is accurate and up to date.

Learners are also incentivized to complete the program. Not only does this result in higher course completion rates, but it creates more knowledgeable product users—a key measurement of success for customer education programs. 

Qualified uses WorkRamp’s customer education LMS to certify people through its online learning academy.

Qualified University contains articles, videos, and lessons to bring customers up to speed with the product. The customer earns their “Qualified Pipeline Visionary” certification once they pass the course and corresponding quizzes. 

“At Qualified, we use WorkRamp + Iorad to help technical learners get hands-on with the product without having to provision demos for everyone. This enables our teams to be tactical and address a whole different group of learners. We also use training materials like videos and one-pagers and interactive WorkRamp features like Flip Cards.” 

 

—Tony Vaughn, Former Director of Customer Education, Qualified

Content creation

Creating new content for your customer education program is one of the most time-consuming elements of the entire process but also one of the most important. Forty-two percent of companies say enhancing the learner experience with different types of content has become more important.

Appeal to different learning styles with a customer education LMS that allows you to use several different content formats. 

Examples of eLearning content include:

• Visual content, such as infographics, GIFs, and videos
• Text-based content, such as blog posts, written tutorials, and whitepapers
• Interactive content, such as quizzes, games, and dialogue simulations  

Seamless integration

Customer education is just one part of the retention puzzle. Look for a customer education LMS that integrates with the tools you’re already using. 

You won’t need to manually transfer data between platforms if your customer education LMS integrates with your tech stack. It’ll also provide greater insight into how your program impacts the entire organization and customer experience.

So, which integrations should you look for? 

Popular tools include:

• Sales and support platforms. Integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) system to sync training completion data and get the complete picture of customer health—including your customer education program’s impact on revenue.

• Content management systems. Import content from Box or Guru into your customer LMS and make more robust training materials.

• Communication and scheduling tools. Building a community through Slack? Integrate your customer education LMS to automatically remind people of the training available through your online academy. 

Learner reporting

Monitor how well your content engages and educates learners with an LMS that offers advanced reporting. WorkRamp’s customer training software offers built-in LMS data analytics to measure the business impact of training.

Pay close attention to the following metrics when analyzing customer success programs: 

• Course completion rate
• Learner satisfaction
• Customer churn  

For more insights, tie your customer education LMS data with other business intelligence tools. The Learning Cloud integrates with Salesforce so you can track the relationship between customer education and business/financial performance.

What to look for in a customer education LMS

Not all LMSs are created equal. The same applies to customer education platforms. You need to find the right one for your organization.

Important things to look for when shortlisting potential customer LMSs include:

• Technical scalability. As your product, feature, or service set expands, so does the level of education you’ll need to provide to customers. Choose a customer LMS that grows with your organization. The Learning Cloud’s drag-and-drop editor allows you to produce branded learning experiences at scale, so customers always get a first-class experience with your brand—without relying on design or development teams.

• User-friendly interface. Cater to those who aren’t technologically savvy with a customer education LMS that is easily accessible. This includes responsiveness across devices, communication features to chat with other customers, and smart navigation functions that allow customers to find what they need quickly.

• The right integrations. WorkRamp integrates with the analytics, business intelligence, content management, and communication tools you’re already using. Get the complete picture of how customer education impacts each facet of your company.

Advantage of buying a customer LMS over building

It’s expensive to build a learning management system from scratch. 

Experts estimate that a basic customer LMS—without the premium features that allow you to deliver high-quality training, diversify learning content, and report on success—can set you back up to $53,000.

Costs aside, buying a customer LMS has several benefits over building one in-house:

• Faster time to market. Are your competitors already educating their customers on how to use their products? If you buy a customer LMS instead of building your own, you can launch your customer education program quickly—and potentially snap up the prospects about to invest in your competitors. 

• The product is proven. Delivering a poor customer experience is an expensive mistake to make. Significantly reduce the risk of issues—like downtime, broken features, or overloaded servers—with an already-proven customer education LMS. 

• Tools you need are already built in. Professional customer education LMSs have already been tested vigorously. They include the features you need to provide an outstanding learning experience… and ditch those you don’t. 

Why choose the Learning Cloud for customer training?

A customer LMS makes it easier to manage your customer education program. 

The Customer Learning Cloud from WorkRamp helps you create academies with customized training and content to make customer onboarding a breeze. With customized learning paths and robust assessment tools, you can easily design certification programs to ensure users have up-to-date training.

The best part: with the Learning Cloud, you can also train partners and employees. Scale partner onboarding, training, and certification with a single customizable learning platform.

Discover how the Learning Cloud can help scale your customer education program. Contact us to schedule a free, personalized demo.