7 LMS Support Features You Can’t Afford To Be Without

These LMS Support Features Will Help you Decrease Learner Complaints!

Nancy likes her job. It’s her inbox she can’t stand.

Every morning, Nancy clocks in at the hospital where she coordinates CME to find email after email complaining about LMS support issues:

• “I can’t log in. The system won’t let me reset my password.”
• “Hate to bother you, but the video in this module doesn’t play.”
• “I was 80% through the course, but when I logged on last night it didn’t pick up where I left off. Did it lose my progress?”
• “I spent DAYS authoring that course you recruited me to write for radiology, and now our system won’t even upload it!”

Can you relate?

How Competently Does Your LMS Support Your Organization?

The Brandon Hall Group finds low satisfaction across the board with learning technology; “the highest score equates to a C,” they report. Poor learning management system support doesn’t account for all that dissatisfaction… but it accounts for some!

Many LMS owners “can’t get sufficient assistance from customer support,” e-learning expert John Leh writes in a recent blog post. Craig Weiss, another industry leader, has called poor support the #1 most common LMS end user complaint.

To too many people, “LMS support” sounds like as much of an oxymoron as “jumbo shrimp” or “instant classic”!

Despite this frustration, a surprisingly small 5% of organizations cite support as an important factor in choosing an LMS, according to Capterra. Functionality placed first (53%), with price taking second place (32%). Why does support lag so far behind—especially when 28% of organizations said inadequate support prompted their LMS switch?

What LMS Support Features Are A Must-Have?

Nancy and her staff can get some learners up and running again (though it steals precious time from the bigger picture of charting the hospital’s future CME). But many LMS issues really are problems on the vendor’s end.

Nancy feels her learners’ frustration. When she again brings up the possibility of switching vendors with the CME director, she’s going to make sure the hospital works with a company that has at least these 7 LMS support features in place:

• Unlimited business hour telephone support – Emails don’t always cut it. Nancy wants to call and connect with a knowledgeable, helpful LMS support specialist who treats her like more than another support ticket number, and who’ll talk and work with her as long as it takes to get the problem solved.
• Online case management – When Nancy can’t be on the phone with support, she wants to be able to track progress toward a problem’s solution in real time on the web. When learners or the director ask her what’s being done and how long it will take, Nancy can’t afford to tell them, “I don’t know.”
• 24/7 monitoring – Hospitals and other healthcare organizations don’t observe the workaday 9 to 5, and glitches don’t respect regular business hours. Nancy needs to know that the LMS website, application and server are constantly monitored, so problems don’t catch her or LMS support by surprise.
• Automatic security patches and updates – Nancy’s tech-savvy, but she’s not a programmer. She wants a proactive LMS provider who keeps tabs on her organization’s system and applies only needed updates and patches, as soon as they’re available, so that the system runs securely and smoothly with minimal service disruption.
• Full and fully accessible documentation – Nancy’s not opposed to fixing problems she can fix on her own, but she expects complete and easily-accessible documentation to assist her. Online manuals, video tutorial and help video libraries, a fully searchable knowledge database, and a regularly updated list of known issues will all equip Nancy and her staff with the information they need to help more learners in less time.
• Online user group – Whether on LinkedIn, Facebook, or a dedicated website, a community of fellow LMS customers can go a long way toward answering questions and solving problems. Nancy will find out whether vendors host or participate in such a group (or even both) as she leads the hospital’s learning management system comparison.
• Content support – Because Nancy realizes things can go wrong that aren’t issues with the LMS itself, she seeks a company with a deep understanding of and expertise in instructional design, course authoring tools, and more. She wants a vendor that views itself as a problem-solving partner—not someone looking for the first opportunity to wash their hands of her organization as soon as they’ve sold the software.

Let EthosCE Support Your CME Success

At EthosCE, we provide all the LMS support features Nancy is looking for—and probably the ones you are, too.

Call us today at (267) 234-7401 or visit our website to request a free demonstration of our award-winning learning management system software, and to discover all we can do to keep your inbox from wrecking your mornings!