What’s the best Learning Management System (LMS) for customer training?

Selecting an LMS for customer training is more a matter of finding something that suites your needs. I know…duh. But it’s important. Especially since most LMSs are designed for the employee training use case, which is much different than customer training.

Ask yourself at least these questions:

1. Will you offer just self-paced online presentations/tutorials?

2. Do you want offer live, virtual training courses with an instructor so customers can benefit from asking questions? Will you want to integrate with a GoToTraining or Webex, etc.

3. Will you want to create learning tracks that combine both self-paced and live training in a “packaged” pathway for different user roles, for example?

4. Will you charge for training? And will you want to integrate your LMS with a payment gateway? (If you are doing customer training, you should charge for it. Customers (enterprise) expect to pay).

5. Will you use training in the pre-sales process? (for lead generation or to speed up the sales cycle).

6. How about using training to generate leads? And will you want to integrate your LMS with Salesforce?

7. Do you want your LMS to be white-label integrated with your website, so your customers do not even get a hint that they are being taken somewhere else for training or are you OK with your customer education being on someone else’s domain?

8. Do you want your training to be SEO-friendly and discoverable on Google or otherwise to be found by customers and non-customers? Or do you want to gate your training and only make it available to customers. In other words, I think you have an opportunity to be known for being the go-to place for business leaders to learn to be data-driven in pipeline management rather than just for training on your product.

I am not making a specific product recommendation here, but I do think that as you evaluate LMSs, you should ask each vendor at least these questions, so you can find a good fit.

I hope this is helpful.