The New Age Customer Education LMS: How does the next generation of learning management systems look like for your customers?

Everyone wants to be the next Netflix or Pinterest. A common trend that can be noticed in the companies that are beaming in the spotlight of high growth is that they have released a product innovation, cue stories in Snapchat, and Netflix tweaking its offerings and taking off from the growth runway.

Knowing that you are one feature away from a skyrocketing revenue figure would help you sleep better at night, but this can’t be far from the truth.

In their attempt to acquire more, these companies chase more revenue and forget the leaky bucket of churn that slowly widens the chasm between their expectations of a bottom line and their actual bottom line.

Customers once acquired with dreams and hopes of a better future using your product are forgotten in the quest for new customer acquisition. Before correctly understanding your product offering, these customers wean off due to a lack of education about your product.

What is a Learning Management System?

A Learning Management System, also known as LMS, is a resource for all your learning material. It is a place to create, manage, distribute, and track training programs. They can be used for internal employee training or external customer training.

In this article, we’d be looking at a learning management system tailored for your customers to help them with continuous learning. We will be looking at the benefits of customer education programs, how to improve customer support costs, and the future of customer training programs.

What is a customer learning management system or customer training LMS?

A customer education LMS provides a platform that helps your business educate, manage and train your customers to make the most of your product or service by providing them with tailored learning paths. The content delivered on this LMS can be live, on-demand, video, or text, transpiring across multiple mediums with the core need to educate the end customer who uses the tool.

Your customer education LMS is different from any other LMS. It is tailored for your customer groups and supports modern learning management systems to equip you with best-in-class education standards for your customers based on their personas.

Traditionally customer training or customer education has restricted itself to academy solutions pivoting online learning and courses as its main features. However, at Trainn, we foresee the future of customer education programs as a more diverse all-inclusive LMS for educational collateral spanning across mediums and channels.

Benefits of Customer Training

A study by SuperOffice in 2022 stated that responses to customer support requests took precisely 12 hours and 10 minutes to answer. Let’s look at this from a revenue point of view.

If the cost of acquiring a customer is $100 and every minute a customer waits for your customer support team’s response is a lost dollar, you start making a loss on each customer after the first hour and twenty minutes.

Now 12 hours is probably an irretrievable ninth circle of hell, after which you never see your customer again.

But what if you gave your customers the freedom to resolve their tickets? What if you automated basic FAQs, embedded tooltips, and videos guiding your user across the journey?

This would reduce the need for a human to be present and respond, affecting customer experience in a positive way. It also helps with customer retention. A customer education strategy accounting for these details would help the LMS retain customers by providing timely knowledge for the ones in need.

What to look for in a customer education LMS?

To understand the future of LMS, it is important to understand what businesses are looking for when it comes to finding the perfect customer education LMS.

Back in the day, it was easier to launch with an LMS, even a plug-and-play LMS, as, without one, the company had to manually manage and analyze the data from training programs.

Today there are multiple solutions within LMS, that for SaaS businesses, it is important to find the one that works best for their particular needs.

Moreover, the future of customer education LMS, as we see, would have features beyond academia or compliance training.

Some of the main features to seek in a customer education LMS would be

• User experience,
• Content searchability or discoverability,
• Intuitiveness or data-based results.

A good customer education strategy should help increase customer satisfaction, help with quick product adoption, and reduce support costs.

What is the future of customer education LMS?

With various LMS vendors spewing different LMS features, the sea of customer education becomes a tough one to sail through. We need to look for a customer education LMS that caters to our unique business needs and would fall in the sweet spot of customer support, customer success, online training, and cloud-based and social learning.

In a quest to find the elixir of customer education LMS, we needn’t have to look far. We spoke to the founders of Trainn, a video-first customer education software, Sumana, and Vivek, to understand what they think the future of customer education holds.

1. Next-gen content management for customer education

Marcus Eisele, a software engineer from Daimler TSS says that developing software is about the people. It is seldom about codes and more about human empathy, making compromises, solving people's problems, and convincing people that your solution is the best at all these stages.

People today are used to software. The novelty of learning a smart tool has slowly eroded in a hyper-productive world. That is why it is more important than ever to think about a customer education strategy that helps people learn about the software in their comfort.

It is also about being where your customer is present. Businesses should create multiple content types and distribute them on various mediums to educate customers from Day zero. This might mean sharing customer educational content on product emails, embeds, knowledge repositories, LMS, tours, tooltips, etc.

When your customer education strategy has learning paths spanning multiple avenues, it quickly leads to a problem of informational overload.

There is so much information out there that the sheer volume of information intimidates your customer from taking the first step toward learning about your product. On the other end of the spectrum, there is not enough information for every use case of your customer problems.

This brings up two main issues within customer education programs,

• Personalized content
• Content discoverability.

With GPT3, a pre-trained, auto-aggressive language model, content creation has become easier. There is also talks that GPT4 would take the world by a storm with its advanced offerings.

Trainn predicts that there will be more involvement in AI-led content generation regarding customer education.

Tomorrow’s customer education will use a mix of Digital Asset Management systems (DAM) and Curated Content Management Systems (CCMS) to design a machine that creates an automated supply chain of up-to-date content that continuously educates your customers.

At Trainn, we developed a system where you can create playlists of custom product videos that you can share with your customers. Imagine the power it gives you to create a personalized mix tape of your product features based on your customer requirements

2. Intuitive learning with automation

Building on the previous point, an underrated element that differentiates a successful customer LMS from an unsuccessful customer LMS is the intuitiveness of the LMS platform. While content creation and content management on LMS are vital, a key element is also how this learning fits the learner’s level of knowledge of your product.

The human’s role in the tools has changed and continues to change. Statista reported that the Natural Language Processing (NLP) market could magnify 14 times in 2025 than in 2017—around a 40 billion US dollar increase.

This technology helps machines understand human speech, and this sort of communication will get more sophisticated. We strongly believe that machines can never replace humans but would aid customer communication.

Trainn also believes localization would play a key role in customer education LMS. Just like advertising or marketing taps into localized messaging, customer education would also move closer to the customer by addressing them in their local tongues. Field training is more prevalent among customer groups who are not tech savvy or where there is a lack of localized resources for sharing it with the customers.

This level of personalization would help the company stand out in an oversaturated market.

3. Focus on learner metrics using integrations.

Integrations on B2B SaaS tools are a reason for your customers to say yes. It is a quick way for them to understand that they can hit the floor running with your product by placing you seamlessly in their tech stack.

Colin Crowley from Freshworks stressed the importance of point solutions or smaller companies using more integrations to appeal to larger ecosystem players. This helps your company grow with your customer and ingrain them into their system, improving the LTV.

But today, the integrations have a limitation. When we talk about metrics in integrations, it has always been about API metrics on how quickly an integration was adapted or how it has helped DevOps smoothen their functions. But tomorrow’s integrations would have a long way to go if they are to stand out.

Imagine a potpourri of tools that are being used to engage your learners.

You have,

• Rocketlane for onboarding efficiency,
• followed by Hubspot for in-depth data on the user,
• a Zendesk support system,
• an Intercom chat facility,
• Trainn for customer educational content management,
• a Mailchimp nurturing flow,
• Whatfix for in-app help and
• Freshdesk for continuous customer support.

Each tool throws data on different aspects of the customer funnel. What if we had one intelligence system, the mother of all integrations, that digests all the data and provides a comprehensive dashboard for all these metrics?

The future of customer education is not only about finding the next shiny tool to help customers learn but also about building transparency in how these tools work in unison to help deliver a well-rounded customer experience.

What else do you think would be the future of customer education? Let's chat!