Your Guide to Creating an LMS Training Portal for Customers

Everyone knows that to run a successful business, you need to focus on marketing and selling products.

But did you know it’s also very important for businesses to focus on education as well? 

Why? Because your customers need to know how to use your product or take advantage of your service to get value out of it. 

This is why creating an LMS training portal (aka a customer academy) for your customers is so important. 

Here’s what you need to know: 

What’s an LMS Training Portal? 

An LMS training portal, or more commonly referred to as an online academy, is a place customers, employees, channel partners and gig workers can go to learn about a product or service. An LMS training portal is also where internal learning teams can organize content and ensure their target audience is realizing value. 

What Are the Benefits of an LMS Training Portal?

• Simple Content Creation: An LMS makes it easy to create and upload educational content for your users. It also makes it easier to maintain the content by updating and scaling it as your customer base grows or your business needs change.
• Engagement Tracking: Using an LMS training portal \can make it possible to track and analyze the ways your users are engaging (or not engaging) with your courses so you can make adjustments as necessary.
• Customization: The best LMS training portals are highly customizable, meaning you can tailor the learning experience to each users’ needs. Features like personalized learning paths and custom interface design can help ensure every learner receives a unique experience tailored to their learning needs.
• More Time for Your CS Team: When customers know how to access LMS resources, they can become self sufficient customers who understand your product’s value and place less strain on your customer service teams.
• Retention: Informed customers are the best customers — and the best customers stick around for years to come. Said another way, if you can continually demonstrate product or service value, you’ll have an easier time retaining them.

Creating Customer Training

Creating customer training courses using an LMS is one of the best ways to set up an online academy. 

Here are some basic steps you can follow to help your education program get off to a great start:

Set Goals

The first step of using an LMS to create a stellar product education program is to decide on your goals. Sure, your goal is to educate users about your products, but why are you educating them? 

Do you want to reduce customer churn? 

Do you want to create brand advocates?

Do you want to free up more of your customer support staff’s time? 

Decide on your end game first so that you can build your education program with your objectives in mind. Remember to consider both customer-centric and business-centric goals.

Assemble Your Team

You need the right team of people to put together the best learning content for your product training academy. Most of the time, a good team consists of a project leader as well as a subject matter expert (SME) and an instructional designer. 

Your SME should be someone who knows the product and its features like the back of their hand. They should also have a deep understanding of your customers and what they need. 

Your instructional designer should be someone who can develop all that knowledge into effectively-designed courses.

Create Content 

Next, you can work with your SME and instructional designer to start planning and building the actual content of the training courses. 

Remember to keep the content you're creating fully aligned with the goals you set in step one. Once your content is ready, you can launch your training academy so customers and employees can start using it.

Related Reading: 5 Instructional Design Best Practices

Track and Analyze

One of the best parts about using an LMS to design your product education courses is that once you’ve launched your academy, you can track how your users are interacting with it. 

This can give you valuable insights into which parts of your courses are working and which parts are failing to engage or inform your users. 

Then, you can make adjustments so your academy continues to improve and provide even greater value.

LMS Training Courses: A Few Best Practices

Now that we’ve gone over the best way to use an LMS to set up your training academy, let’s narrow in on some best practices for building the individual courses or training modules. 

• Focus on One Subject Per Module: Keep your modules coherent and to-the-point by focusing on one feature or skill per module. You should design each module to be a single stepping stone in the user’s journey toward total product expertise.
  
  When building modules, ask yourself: “What’s this module about?” and “How does this module fit into the user’s learning experience?” Both questions should have clear and obvious answers.
• Use an Instructional Designer: It’s one thing to have the perfect content planned out for your module, but you still need to present it to the user in a digestible and actionable way.
  
  This is where an instructional designer can be helpful. Make sure each module is designed to be as seamless and intuitive a learning experience as possible.
• Ask for Feedback: It’s important to analyze the success of your product education program as you go, and this analysis starts at the individual module level. Keep track of which modules users are succeeding with and which they are struggling with. 

If there are certain modules that are getting higher levels of engagement than others, investigate why this might be and update the design of the less engaging modules to be more effective. 

Measuring Customer Training

As we’ve mentioned, one of the most important parts of designing a product education program is establishing the goals of the program. 

Setting clear training objectives for your courses is essential for achieving both positive customer outcomes and positive business outcomes. 

For customers, a clear objective is a great motivator. Customers are more likely to remain engaged with training content if they know its purpose and what they can expect to get out of it. Whatever the goal of the course content, whether it's customer onboarding or an objective that comes later in the customer journey, it needs to be clearly communicated to the customer.

On the business side, establishing clear goals and measuring customer training is one of the keys to improvement. You probably have specific business objectives you’re aiming for (if you don’t, you should). 

For example, the goal of your education program might be to improve customer retention. The best way to assess whether or not you’ve met these goals is to measure customer learning with metrics like:

• Knowledge: Are your customers aware of basic product features?
• Comprehension: Do your customers understand how to operate the product’s features?
• Application: Is the customer able to put their understanding into practice and solve problems with the product?
• Analysis: Does the customer understand how the product’s individual features work together?
• Synthesis: Is the customer able to independently apply their product knowledge in new ways?
• Evaluation: Does the customer understand the product well enough to make an accurate judgment of its total value?

Best LMS for Training

In most cases, an LMS is the best tool for building an effective product education academy. However, every scenario is a little bit different. It’s a good idea to carefully evaluate exactly which learning platform is best for your business’s needs. 

Here are a few important considerations to keep in mind when you’re evaluating product education platforms:

• User Experience Design: It’s important for your learning content to be easy for your users to navigate. By removing friction from the learning process wherever possible, you can create a seamless learning experience that encourages users to seek help from your online training resources.

• Ease of Access:  One of the most essential aspects of an online training academy is the ease of access. It has to be simple for users to log on and find the information they need. The whole point of the learning academy is to make it easier for users to get the information they need to use your products effectively. This hinges on the learning content being easy to locate.

• Customization: No two products are quite the same, and no two users learn in quite the same way. That’s why it’s important to be able to offer users personalized learning paths that guide users through the most relevant content. Customizable courses can also be tailored to blend seamlessly with your brand image to create a cohesive experience for the user.

Looking out for these features can make it easier for you to find the best LMS for training your users according to their specific needs.