After four years of measuring customer satisfaction with learning management systems, the results remain disappointingly low.

Our latest satisfaction measures come from a January 2009 survey, in which  customers were asked to rate their overall satisfaction with their LMS, as well as to provide ratings on a number of different factors. The study found that a significant proportion of LMS customers – fully one-quarter of customers – are dissatisfied with their systems and say they are likely to switch vendors within the next year. 

This is a lot of unhappy customers!  Comparing these results to those from prior years, we find that satisfaction scores, while not good to begin with, have declined even further over the past four years.

Why is it so difficult to satisfy LMS customers?  Is it the complexity of the systems?  Is it the ever-changing needs of corporate training?

Today the LMS is no longer just an application for the training department.  In fact, learning management systems touch every employee in the company and tie directly into a company’s HR and business applications.  It is no surprise, then, that customers rated “ease of use” as one of the most important aspects of the LMS – but one of the areas needing the most improvement in their current systems.

Reporting functionality also continues to be a major sore point for customers, who can’t get the information they need from their systems.  Many have abandoned the reporting features provided by their LMS in favor of customized or third party solutions.  Our upcoming research on the state of training and HR measurement further illustrates this point:  only 23% of organizations feel they are getting the data and reporting they need from their LMS to adequately measure their training programs and operatoins.

But vendors need to do more than just evolve and improve their products; they need to significantly improve their customer service and support as well.  Customers rated “vendor technical support” as one of the  most important factors, yet gave vendors  extremely low scores on their current support capabilities.  This is particularly true of the leading LMS vendors. The more customers being served, and the more complex the implementation, the harder it is to provide good service and support. But this is no excuse. This is an area that  vendors can, and should, address immediately to improve the customer experience.  Only then may we begin to see customer satisfaction start to rise. (Stay tuned for more details from our 2009 LMS research, to be launched at IMPACT 2009.)

http://marketing.bersin.com/Learning_Management_Systems_LMS2009.html