Learning management systems (LMS) have been rapidly adopted by businesses of all sizes. It provides a relatively affordable option for employee orientation and training staff. However, learning management systems have so much more to offer.
Businesses tend to think about the LMS in reference to employees and often overlook the fact that they can be a valuable tool in enhancing their customer relationships. If you’re looking to improve your existing and future customer relationships here are 6 ways a learning management system can help.
1. Enhance Your Onboarding Experience
Keeping your customers happy is a crucial task during the onboarding process—a time that is often stressful for customers. Having a great onboarding program can lead to greater customer satisfaction, repeat sales, and recommendations from customers. It allows you to gradually introduce your customer to your product, helping them fully understand what it is your product offers and how it can improve their own business.
Using LMS you can provide interactive courses related to different aspects of your product that will ensure the customer fully understands how to use it. You can do this through online courses, quizzes, games, etc., all of which aim to introduce your product to your customer.
2. Offer Customer Training and Education
LMS can also be beneficial in offering customer training and education. This is especially helpful when there is an upgrade or a new feature comes out. Using the online courses available with LMS, you can teach consumers about what changes to expect with the upgrade and how these changes will improve the functioning of the product within their business.
This can help hedge dissatisfaction and frustrations that often accompany a product upgrade. Using an LMS to educate customers also helps reduce the errors customers experience after changes are made to the product.
3. Give Your Customer Answers to Their Questions Ahead of Time
An LMS can be used throughout the entire customer experience. By offering a well-developed LMS with extensive options available for customer training, you can provide all the answers to customer questions before they even have a chance to ask.
The worst thing that can happen is that customers feel they don’t know how to use your product. Providing this training through an LMS can help alleviate their feeling. Another benefit of using an LMS to educate your customers and answer their questions ahead of time is that it should reduce the number of phone calls for assistance using the product.
4. Integrate with Your CRM
As a company, you are always aiming to improve your product offering. However, once you do an update or an upgrade, the fact is that sometimes there are customers that get left behind. By integrating an LMS with your CRM you can ensure that every customer is contacted whenever a new training is uploaded that is related to the product that they have purchased.
This means that every customer is notified that changes have been made to the product and are immediately provided the training materials to take full advantage of the update. This helps make the most challenging aspect of customer relationship management just a bit easier and ensures that customers are not left behind.
5. Use Your LMS as a Feedback Tool
The beauty of LMS is that they can be highly customized. This means that throughout the entire training process you can have a series of questionnaires and surveys about the customer’s experience, ease of use, customer satisfaction, etc. All of these tools allow you to get feedback from the customer and make adjustments or reach out accordingly.
By being able to collect feedback on a running basis you can address problems as they come up rather than waiting to get the feedback when the customer decides to move on to another product.
For instance, if the feedback through the LMS shows that the customer is still having difficulty with a particular product feature, you could unlock a special training for them or even reach out to have a trainer come and work with them on that specific feature. You can also use this feedback to improve the LMS offerings and product features in the future.
6. Reduce Product Disengagement
Using an LMS as part of managing customer relationships allows you to see when there is decreased use by a customer. This could indicate that the customer is becoming disengaged with the product.
A disengaged customer may be on the path of canceling the service and will likely not purchase again. Getting in front of this is crucial to keeping the customer. When you notice disengagement you can reach out the customer to see if they need any assistance with the product, if they would like additional in-person training, or how you can help them make the most of your product in their business.
Have a Strategy
Learning management systems can be a great tool for enhancing your customer relationships. However, you must have a specific strategy in mind so that you can achieve its maximum benefit. A poorly designed LMS can actually hurt your customer relationship if they feel it is difficult or cumbersome to use or they feel that it is not beneficial in using the product.
Furthermore, your in-house staff must also be familiar with the LMS so they can assist customers with using the system and direct them accordingly. However, once you have your in-house staff trained and a strategy for developing a strong LMS for your customers to use, you can drastically improve both your customer satisfaction and retention rates—something every company strives to achieve.
