5 Factors That Can Decrease The ROI Of A Value For Money LMS

5 Factors That Decrease LMS Value For Money
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Summary: When using an LMS, ROI is important. Is your Learning Management System delivering against your objectives? Is it really giving you your money’s worth or is it hurting your bottom line? In this article, I’ll highlight the top 5 factors that negatively impact your LMS ROI.

Pay Attention To These Negative Factors On Your ROI When Choosing A Value For Money LMS

An LMS business case is a balance between price and value. You need to ensure you’re getting the features you need to realize the benefits of technology. But to meet your cost-saving objectives around online training, LMS implementation must be smooth. What are the factors you need to consider to make sure you’re satisfying this delicate balance? How do you define the impact of User Experience against the associated costs? Here are 5 of the top factors decreasing your ROI when opting for a value for money LMS and how to avoid them.

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Discover all you need to know about the importance of finding a value for money LMS platform that offers the best ROI.

1. User Experience

  • Poor eLearning assessment and interactive capabilities
  • Lack of social elements
  • No learning path individualization
  • No responsive LMS

ROI is essential when assessing your value for money LMS. If User Experience is not increased by the system, ROI cannot be achieved. The LMS must be the global hub, the integral heart of the learning environment which has a tangible impact on training completion. Any of the above User Experience elements impacting the LMS would detract from satisfaction levels. The system couldn’t then enable the highly-skilled workforce that’s so essential to the business case. Ensure that all these elements are factored into your assessment of the LMS before you make your decision.

2. Online Training Administration

  • Poor reporting
  • Lack of customization
  • Complex integration with other systems
  • Difficulty migrating existing materials and users

Your support team needs to be able to accurately and quickly extract reliable and consistent reports. This might be on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis, or they might need a dashboard they can look at quickly. If the reporting capabilities of an LMS aren’t suitable or customizable, analysis to determine alignment to the learning goals will be impossible. This will make it very difficult to establish the effectiveness of your value for money LMS. Similarly, if other HR colleagues can’t easily use the LMS to support their analysis, the benefits will be hard to realize. Smooth integration with HRIS and Performance Management systems is essential.

3. Design Elements

  • Unintuitive interface
  • Weak interactive capability
  • Poor testing and assessment tools
  • Failure to support different languages

There are so many design elements to take into consideration when you’re implementing a new LMS. Some of the most important are around ensuring the User Interface is intuitive both for the L&D team and corporate learners. Learning should be all about the eLearning content, not the tool! It’s the same for administrators, who don’t want to be inhibited by a system that’s difficult to navigate.

Another important consideration for designing immersive, engaging online training courses is the ability to create interactive content. Whether it’s a mini-quiz, a video, a comic strip or a game – interactive elements make eLearning come to life. Consider your audience when you’re thinking about design features. If you have a global workforce, then you need to make sure the LMS supports multiple languages. Teams in all locations should be able to extract data in exactly the same way. Corporate learners should also be able to access the same online training content, regardless of where they are in the world.

4. LMS Implementation

  • Too high an investment in terms of time
  • Difficult to roll out and train
  • Difficult to move your resources quickly
  • Large support team needed

When considering to get a value for money LMS, the investment in both time and cost must be considered. An LMS that requires a large investment in training, software rollout, and data migration would be a disaster. The benefits of using a value for money LMS are sometimes hard to define as they take some time. A skilled workforce becomes a benefit in terms of profitability only after time has passed. The impact of differentiation via higher customer and employee satisfaction is not instant. Therefore, an LMS with significant upfront costs but benefits realized only years later, will be difficult to justify. Ensuring the system will fit smoothly with your existing environment will vastly enhance your business case.

5. Support Services

  • Lack of vendor-provided tools to maximize functionality (i.e. online training tutorials).
  • Slow response times to trouble tickets that lead to diminished ROI.

LMS vendors must be able to provide you with the level of support you require to get the most out of your value for money LMS. The issues associated with inadequate support can be costly and time-consuming. For example, your L&D team must handle coding errors and programming glitches in-house. Or the LMS vendor isn’t able to provide you with personalized support to set up the system and train your team on its features or functions. Speak with the LMS vendor beforehand to ensure that they can accommodate your needs and provide ongoing assistance. For example, do they have an active user community where you can find helpful insights? Are you able to call your point of contact directly to address issues when they arise?

Delivering Value For Money

Whether you’re looking to move to an LMS from a classroom environment or upgrading your LMS, value for money is essential. Gaining support for the corporate eLearning project from senior leaders is essential in terms of financial approval and to model behavior. So, if you can avoid the LMS implementation pitfalls, you can more easily describe the benefits of the change. Have you and your L&D team considered the implementation implications of your corporate eLearning project? Does the system have all the design elements in place to offer outstanding User Experience? Will the LMS fit smoothly alongside your other HR systems, and can you migrate your existing resources easily? If you can answer “yes” to those questions, then your LMS will deliver that all-important value for money.

Download our guide on Value For Money Learning Management Systems for tips to find an LMS that delivers the best value for money and helps you fulfill your business objectives. It also features a step-by-step walkthrough to calculate the ROI for your new Learning Management System, as well as insider secrets to evaluating your current platform.

Originally published on August 25, 2019