How to Select a Customer Training LMS

The LMS market is full of options. Selecting from them can be a daunting task. In this post, I’ll talk about how to select the right LMS for your customer training program.

Varieties of LMSs

First of all, despite sharing a name, there are several different types of LMSs and they aren’t interchangeable. Vendors that sell a particular type of LMS tend to specialize in functionality that is important for their use case. For example, an internal training LMS needs to have a robust HRIS integration so that new hires are automatically provisioned to the LMS and assigned training based on their role.

Probably the three most common LMS types in the SaaS world are the customer training LMS, the internal training LMS, and the sales training LMS. Customer-facing LMSs are for training your customer base on how to use your platform and important concepts pertaining to your product. They require a different set of integrations than internal and sales training LMSs. One of the most important components of a customer training LMS is user provisioning. Unless you want your customers to have to create a username and password for both your platform and your LMS, you’ll probably want them to be able to single-sign on with their platform credentials. Ideally, you’ll be able to remove the sense that they’ve gone to a different website altogether, either through a headless LMS or branding and site design that imitates your platform well enough to create the illusion that the user hasn’t gone anywhere.

If you haven’t gotten this question yet, you will. Why not just use one LMS for internal training, customer training, and sales training? While there are vendors that position themselves as a ubiquitous solution for all of these use cases, the majority of them fail at being viable for all three categories. What you’ll end up with is a partial solution that misses a crucial requirement of one or more of your training needs. And yes, a partial solution with a lot of workarounds for an internal training LMS is unacceptable. But let’s face it, a customer-facing LMS is part of your product. Any flaws will absolutely be noticed and someone will pay for it. That’s why it’s vital to understand the risks of attempting to implement an LMS for multiple use cases. Until we come up with new acronyms, be prepared to explain to accounting why your company needs two different LMSs.

Before Vendor Selection

Before you begin talking to vendors, you want a few things already in place. You’ll need to identify the major stakeholders for the LMS outside of the L&D team. You’ll also need to create technical requirements for your LMS and prioritize them in terms of their relative importance. If you are attempting to address multiple use cases, make sure the teams responsible create separate technical requirements documents. You’ll need to work out your content strategy during this time period as well. After all, there’s no point in purchasing an expensive piece of software if you don’t have anything to do with it. Ideally, you or your team members will already have a sense of what your customer-facing curriculum will look like. This is also important for completing your technical requirements. Lastly, you’ll need to estimate how many users will access your LMS every month. You can start with your monthly active users for your platform, but don’t expect every active user to access the LMS.

Identify Major Stakeholders

First, make sure you’ve talked to all the major stakeholders. Do sales need to include LMS access in their SOWs? Will marketing be involved with branding the LMS? What are the CSMs doing now that will hopefully be easier when the LMS goes live? Implementing an LMS is a major transition for a SaaS, and a lot of people in your company have a stake in its success. Make sure you know who they are and make them feel involved in the decision. You may have to manage up to make the best use of their time and expertise.

Create Technical Requirements

This is the fun part. Before you begin looking at vendors, define your requirements in as much detail as possible. What integrations do you need? Most good customer-facing LMS integrate with other tools customer training teams use, like Zendesk and Salesforce. Figure out what kind of data you’ll want to pull from the LMS and where that data should live. You’ll also need to decide on how users will be provisioned to the platform. Setting up SSO can be one of the hairiest steps of the implementation. Are you doing SAML or token-based? What kind of data do you need associated with the user when they are provisioned to the LMS? A common approach companies take is to separate learning paths based on their role in their companies, so that managers see a learning path tailored to managers and individual contributors see a learning path tailored to them. If you set up your SSO with the right rules, you can suggest or assign a learning path when they first access the LMS. Another important factor to consider is what types of training you’ll offer. If you need the LMS to host instructor-led training, it will need a Zoom or Teams integration that can take attendance and send out links to join the training in an automated email. I haven’t run across an LMS that can’t handle eLearning files, although many vendors only host SCORM 1.2 or xAPI files. If you need to use a certain type of eLearning compliance, you’ll want to include that in your technical requirements. Also, look at your curriculum. Do you have prerequisite courses or certifications? You might need to create drip learning or gate certain courses by role or group. You might want the LMS to post the users certifications to Linkedin. A final consideration is design. Different vendors will give you different levels of control over the design of the site. A configurable LMS allows you to change just about anything. A customizable LMS will give you slightly more limited control. I haven’t heard of a customer training LMS that won’t let you change branding colors and logos. Find out if your company has the resources to recreate your platform site’s design on the LMS, and if full configuration is a requirement.

Estimate How Many Users will Access the LMS

This step is only necessary if you’re implementing your company’s first LMS. If you are migrating to a new LMS, you can just look at the number of users on your old LMS. When you begin talking to vendors, one of the questions your account executive is going to eventually ask is how many users will access the LMS. Most LMSs base their pricing in part on your monthly active users. When the time comes to talk pricing you’ll want to find out how their pricing plan works. You can start estimating by looking at your platform’s MAU count. This number is your absolute most. You’ll never have more users take training on how to use your platform than the actual number of users currently using the platform in any given month. Typically, you’ll only have a percentage of your platform MAUs converted to your LMS MAUs. So how do you calculate that percentage? One method is to look at attendance for webinars or other virtual training events you might be hosting outside of an LMS and finding the variance of attendance per month over a period of a year. You can also look at how many new users are provisioned to your platform on average each month. This number won’t tell you how many of your old users will choose to take training, but it will give you a sense of how many new users will need training each month.

Vendor Selection

Begin by creating a list of vendors to choose from. You can try running a search for “top customer LMS”, but be wary of the results. Canvas and Blackboard are excellent LMSs, but they are mainly used in academia. If you see these vendors on a list, that list probably wasn’t made with your use case in mind. I’ve run across this problem on fairly well-regarded eLearning review sites. You can also look on G2 or Capterra, but again, they will return LMSs that aren’t built for customer training. In order to be sure you’re looking at the right results, look for the names Thought Industries, Northpass, and Skilljar. These are all customer training LMSs. Docebo markets itself as a swiss army knife, but it began as an internal training LMS and took steps to support the integrations it needed to function as a customer training LMS.

Integrations Tell a Story

Once you have a list, start by visiting their integrations page on their company website. It’s the fastest way of crossing out non-contenders. If they don’t mention a Salesforce integration, they might be new to the customer training world, so even if a Salesforce integration isn’t a dealbreaker for you, regard them with suspicion. After looking at a few integrations pages, you’ll get a sense of what technologies the big LMSs are integrating with, and you’ll be able to spot an amateur. Although depending on what you need, that might not cross them off your list. Just because they don’t advertise a certain integration doesn’t mean they don’t support it. As long as they check most of your boxes, reach out for a demo.

The Discovery Call & Demo

Share your technical requirements during the discovery call. Explain your content strategy and ask if they can share LMSs that other companies have implemented through them. If they seem like a good fit (and you seem like a serious buyer), they’ll send you an NDA to sign and set up a demo. You can also ask for a sandbox to play in so your LMS admin can get a sense of how easy it is to manage. During your demo, be sure to ask how to perform specific functionality. Look at their analytics. Look at how to set up your integrations. If live classes are a requirement, look at how to schedule an event as well.

Next Steps

After the demo, you’ll start to talk about pricing plans. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to give them an estimate of your MAUs. Ask them for a price sheet that explains their pricing model and estimates cost based on your user size. With a purchase of this size, you’ll probably need executive sponsorship to get budget approval. Having a price sheet ready for them makes everything easier.

Next, ask them what their implementation process looks like. Implementing a customer training LMS takes longer than everyone expects it to. It will take much longer if you go with a vendor that has poor professional services and project management. You can gauge the quality of their professional services by the responsiveness of your account executive. They should show you a timeline with milestones and a hard go-live date.

After you’ve eliminated most of the contenders, ask the remaining vendors if you can speak to customer references. By now, your account executive will probably have asked you to share which other vendors you’re considering. A smart account executive will pair you with a customer reference that also considered, or even worked with the other vendor you’re talking to. That’s why when you speak to their customer reference, ask them what vendors they’ve used and why they made their selection. Also ask them about their use case. If they have a similar content strategy, that’s a good indication that this vendor has done their homework and isn’t hiding anything about their functionality. Take notes to support your argument for your selection later.

The Final Decision

You’ve viewed a demo, you’ve seen their pricing, you have an implementation timeline, and you’ve spoken to a customer who emphatically thinks you are in good hands. It’s time to make the decision. At this point, there should be one frontrunner that your whole team agrees is the best selection. If you’re still encountering disagreements, revisit your technical requirements and your notes from your customer reference calls. State your case to all of the major stakeholders and your executive sponsor. Provided they are in agreement, it’s time to apply for budget approval. If everything goes well, congratulations. You’re officially finished with the easy part. Now it’s time to implement.