If you work in support or customer education, you've likely encountered this question before. It's fairly common for the business functions of customer support and customer education to get mixed together or confused by your internal stakeholders. Customer education teams set up a standing triage session with your support team to discuss incoming content requests and make sure the correct form of content is being made. Collaborating with your support specialists can prevent the embarrassment of realizing that a separate team has already created a virtually identical piece of content.
Beyond cross-collaboration between support and CE, you can also educate your internal stakeholders on the difference between a help center and a learning management system. Fortunately, there's a simple analogy that can get your point across.
A help center is to an LMS what a library is to a school
Think about the purpose of a library. It's where you go when you know what you want to learn. The most important two features of a library are the quality of information it contains and the searchability of its content. A help center is the same way. You want it to contain articles that are accurate and easy to browse. When someone comes to your library on their own, they probably have a topic in mind. And if they don't know what they need to learn, your CSMs can always recommend books.
A school is where you go when you don't know what you need to learn, or when you need additional guidance on a topic. Schools follow a curriculum designed to help students achieve benchmarks of academic success intended to translate to real-world success. Your customer education program should do the same thing. Identify key business outcomes you want your customers to achieve and communicate these outcomes at the start of each course*. Like a school, your LMS keeps student records, including records of their achievements if you run certification programs, which you definitely should.
You don't go to school to learn every piece of information you could possibly learn. You go to school to learn what you need to know to be a successful member of society. There's definitely such a thing as too much school, and customer education programs should likewise be wary of creating too much content, especially considering the cost of upkeep. Help centers should also be wary of creating too much content, but they should easily have far more information than your LMS. Unlike books in a library, help center content is likely to have a fairly short lifespan, and just like eLearning content, it requires upkeep. While both tools are a fixed cost that will help your business operate at scale, they perform distinct, equally necessary business functions.
*These outcomes should connect to tangible results, like time back in their day, increased operational efficiency, and ultimately money back on their balance sheet. Learning outcomes should convey why the customer should learn your product.
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