Add These Five Essential Tools Τo Your LMS
One of the things we're passionate about here at Administrate is empowering training managers, the often unseen force behind a successful training session. We believe that software can be the leverage they need to help them save time and achieve more than they otherwise could. We also believe that the classic Learning Management System isn't enough to deliver amazing training - a few more tools are required.
Here's a few common components that we believe you should consider adding to your Learning Management System.
1) Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
One of the main missing ingredients in every Learning Management System is a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to help you keep track of all the people involved in your daily workflow. A simple student profile isn't enough, and isn't built to hold all of the things that you should be tracking about your students. Can you LMS support the addition of custom fields to track things like dietary requirements for in-person training sessions? What about saving and displaying all email communication to a student in their profile so that you can quickly get up to speed when engaging them in a sales or support conversation? These extra pieces of data are probably being tracked today in your organization but they're being tacked in spreadsheets or in other systems, and probably aren't easily available. Why not get some software to help your admin team out?
2) Powerful Reporting
Reporting is always included in any Learning Management System, but truly flexible reporting that can cover the range of data you have available in your organization is a rarity in most LMS packages. Can you quickly run a report to see which training sessions or courses you held last year were your most profitable? Can you see why they were most profitable by drilling down into the associated expenses in just one click? What about building a report of those students who just missed passing their last class, or are due to renew their certification, or even a report to find out which classes your students tend to take together so you can assemble that awesome package deal? These kinds of reports need to be easy to create, they need cross the boundaries of data that's typically held within an LMS, and they need to be available to your entire staff in order to be effective. If you can't quickly build reports, you're probably missing a huge competitive advantage.
3) Seamless Integration with Marketing Tools
Marketing is the lifeblood of any business, but many smaller organizations struggle with maintaining a comfortable marketing rhythm. In our experience this is usually because it can be extremely difficult to run through the steps necessary to complete even a simple marketing activity like a monthly newsletter.To send an email newsletter, you need:
- A list of customers / students to send to.
- The content and template.
- Reporting on how the activity performed.
The first and last requirements are usually where people get discouraged or struggle. Most Learning Management Systems won't help you manage this at all, yet this can be the difference maker between success and failure!
4) Team Collaboration and Sales Tools
Lastly, there's a whole group of tools to help your training coordinators and administrators collaborate and manage the sales process for potential students. LMS packages won't help here, but these are key components that need to be addressed in order to have an efficient operation.
5) The Solution: A Training Administration System + Your LMS
There are plenty of systems out there that solve each of the above challenges, but they won't work well together, or will at least take plenty of time and effort to integrate. Instead, think about adding a training management platform (software built to help YOU, not your students) into the equation. A quality training management and administration system will solve all the above challenges and supercharge your LMS and your staff by giving you additional tools to manage your operations.
