3 Out-of-the-Box Ways to Use Your LMS Analytics

Picture this: Your learning management systems (LMS) is overflowing with data you can use to unlock the full potential of your customer education strategy.

The key, however, requires you to look beyond content effectiveness in a silo and instead shift your attention to how the learning data can help you personalize the learning experience, identify pain points and knowledge gaps, and mitigate churn. 

Let’s dig into three more out-of-the-box ways to use the data in your LMS to drive better customer outcomes.

Jump to Content

• Personalize the Learning Experience
• Identify Pain Points and Knowledge Gaps
• Find Upsell Opportunities and Fight Churn
• Don’t Discount the Extra Value of LMS Analytics

Personalize the Learning Experience

When it comes to getting customers to immerse themselves in your academy, relevance is king; if customers don’t feel connected to your content, their experience suffers, they struggle, and courses are left incomplete.

Here are some stats to illustrate the importance of personalization and relevance: 

• 72% of business buyers expect vendors to personalize engagement, while 67% have switched vendors for a more consumer-like experience.
• 80% of respondents to a survey said they’re more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences and 90% indicated that they find personalization appealing.
• 83% of B2B customers are willing to share their data in exchange for a personalized experience, indicating that they value personalization.

Clearly, personalization and relevance are important. 

So, how can your LMS help you deliver these personalized experiences?

• Identify struggling customers: Two of the most pertinent data sets you should look at are completion rates and areas of difficulty. By analyzing these two analytics, customer success managers (CSMs) can quickly identify the customers who’re having the most difficulty learning and provide them with personalized support and additional resources to help them get across the finish line feeling good about how to use your product.
  

• Understand content preferences: Examining LMS data is also a great way to discover which types of content your customers prefer. By identifying these preferences, a CSM can then get to work on tailoring the learning experience in a way that best suits each individual learner’s needs, setting up your digital academy so that each customer learns the material in a way that works best for them.
  

• Target areas of interest and expertise: Learning management system analytics can also tell a CSM where each unique learner’s area of interest and expertise lies. Armed with this knowledge, the CSM can then deliver more targeted content surrounding these topics, which keeps learners engaged and motivated to learn more.

Identify Pain Points and Knowledge Gaps

Learning management system analytics do more than show CSMs what’s working with their digital customer academies—they also help them see what isn’t working, which can be key to taking a negative customer experience and turning it into a positive one. All you have to do is know which data to look at.

• Course completion rates and progress: At what rate are your learners completing the courses you’ve meticulously outlined in your digital customer academy? Every CSM knows that the occasional customer won’t finish a course. But when there’s an outlying course that sees a lower completion rate than others, a problem has been identified, and a solution can be implemented. This lets them know where a knowledge gap exists and gives them the opportunity to improve the course or provide their learners with additional support.
• Assessment scores: By looking at assessment scores, CSMs can uncover pain points and knowledge gaps. These scores highlight the topics that cause the most struggling and frustration within their digital academy, enabling them to revisit the content or provide supplemental support to improve said scores. For example, if your academy has a quiz where learners’ scores are consistently low, a CSM can surmise that the customers are having difficulty with that specific content or the related product feature.
  

• User activity: Monitoring user activity can be extremely advantageous as well. These data points can quickly clarify which parts of your program are popular, as well as the ones that are rarely accessed. With this information, a CSM can go through the academy to locate the topics that customers are finding the most interesting, then attend to the topics which might need greater attention to ensure customers spend time with those.
  

• Feedback: People like to know you're hearing them. Your customers are no different. CSMs can source feedback from customers to pinpoint where the learning experience falls short.

• Course progress: By understanding how customers are moving through courses, CSMs can gain insight into the overall structure of the content and academy. They can then identify snags and optimize the content and courses for a more seamless experience.

Find Upsell Opportunities and Fight Churn

The fluctuating economy can make revenue projections difficult. And even in good times, acquiring new customers is challenging. 

So, how can you increase revenue without solely focusing on new customers? By increasing the lifetime value of current ones (CLTV). Learning data can help. 

• Upsells and expansion: Analyzing your data can be used to locate customers who represent upsell opportunities. When a CSM sees that a customer has completed a significant number of courses, they can shift that customer’s information over to the sales team to determine if that customer’s ready for an upsell. The customers most likely to be receptive to purchasing advanced features or new products are the ones who’ve already demonstrated a high level of engagement with the digital academy.
• Churn mitigation: Churn is the enemy of every B2B company, but LMS analytics can help you identify those high-risk customers and turn them in the right direction before they shift to a competitor. For example, if a CSM sees a customer hasn’t completed any courses over a long period of time or has consistently provided negative feedback, they can take measures to bring them back into the fold by personalizing the academy to better match that customer’s needs or providing them with supplemental content to improve their learning experience.

Never forget that the point of creating a digital customer academy isn’t just to make it easy for your customers to learn, understand, and realize the potential of your product. It’s also to create brand ambassadors and turn smaller customers into bigger customers by demonstrating how you could help them with additional products or by unlocking extra product features. And your learning data are key to making that happen. 

Don’t Discount the Extra Value of LMS Analytics

Your learning management system comes with a wealth of data that can be mined, and too many companies aren’t realizing their full potential. More than just a way for you to grade the content you’ve created for your digital customer academy, your LMS data can be used in various ways to do so much more for your customers and company. 

You can use it to personalize the learning experience for your customers at an individual level, ensuring they get the support they need. 

You can use it to identify pain points and knowledge gaps, then go back and provide better information or present it in a more engaging way. 

You can also use it to better your company’s bottom line by uncovering more upsell opportunities and minimizing customer churn.