The implementation of modern technology or updating available tools is never an easy task. The precise strategy to migrate to a new learning management system (LMS) can differentiate between easier or more complex learners. Seemingly, the multidimensional organizations, enterprises, and SMEs are approaching the LMS integration process as they would do with any other projects using a project management framework. It constitutes initiation, planning, execution, monitor, control, and closure.
Hence, the integration aspects of LMS services shouldn’t be done completely without thinking about the entire procedure with every phase and considering the best steps to ensure making an efficient process across the entire project lifecycle to leverage the outcome of the integration. Most distinguishing possible users integrate your learning management system (LMS) with your business tactics and external stakeholders or service providers.
Likewise, the global LMS market size is projected to leverage over $38 billion by the end of 2027. Initially can be used as a standalone solution for L&D programs, LMS has now become an integrated workforce tool for the organization across the globe. Hence, the typical use cases of the LMS consist of facilitating employee onboarding, leadership training, enabling sales, and vice versa.
LMS can create, manage, and produce learning content, track employee progress, transform behavior, nurture team collaboration, and vice versa. According to the research, 72% of the organizations that focus on LMS offer them a competitive benefit that results in a thriving force within their dedicated organization. Hence, the usage of LMS as an important business system software is rapidly increasing over time.
Making the most out of your learning technology with its integrated tactics can increase employee productivity and efficiency of the business resources. Hence, Let’s dive into the discussion of the LMS Integrated Services in Corporate Sectors, Businesses, and Organizations:
What is a Learning Management System?
A Learning Management System, shortened as LMS, is a software portal where users get accessibility to get technical training or improve their skillset. In simple terms, an LMS enables you to create, deliver and report on training courses and programs. There are billions of LMS programs to choose from, and each of them offers various features and capabilities. And with multiple options, the businesses can find selecting an LMS that will meet their particular needs a versatile amount to challenge.
In particular, choosing an LMS is an essential aspect of how you plan to deliver training sessions, then always match your organization’s need to an LMS that enables the corresponding features. It is also important to understand and examine that no LMS will have every single feature, and if it works well, it would be classified for usage purposes. For Example, LifterLMS, LearnDash, evidently, and myCred LearnDash are valuable and famous learning management systems for learners and instructors.
Types of LMS
The term “LMS” is a versatile tag attached to many various tools and resources. Under closer terms and conditions, such tools have major differences and are quite different for the users. For Instance, an LMS is used by an organization as critical software that can be used by the software company. Let us examine some of the key factors that will determine the types of LMS required.
Small Medium Business (SMB) vs. Enterprise
There is a little difference between an LMS for a small organization and a large one, but similar features are often showcased, and the interface may even look at the same glance. The major difference is, of course, scalable and reliable. An SMB requires a reliable and robust tool to create and deliver training as the primary focus is generally the execution of the training.
These organizations comprise 500 or several employees and provide training to customers, associates, and sometimes the general public. It leverages the user count in a dramatic order, and the LMS they choose needs to be engineered from the ground up to handle the huge volumes of information and complexity across the globe. After you hit a specific point, task automation, users segmentation, and integration with relevant tools are needed to keep things in an operational and functional environment.
Commercial or Open Source
Open-source LMS are classified as ‘free,’ and commercial ones will incur a cost, and Open Source LMS needs installation, hosting, maintenance, and instant updates to ensure their execution process. It can simply prove to be more expensive than a subscription or license to a commercial LMS.
Installation vs. Cloud-Enabled (SaaS)
The preferred choice is to install an LMS on your organization’s hardware or use a cloud-based service or resources. It has become less and less prominent as most organizations have completely transformed over to the cloud. And some of the organizations move towards the path of an on-site installation to adhere to particular industry-based legislation or network-based requirements.
Seamless Integration
The question arises that can you integrate the LMS plugin with the relevant software? Modern LMS considers an organization’s currently available software and systems and then integrates them for a robust, powerful user experience and data exchange rate. The most common integrations consist of webinar tool integrations, payment gateways, and CRMs such as salesforce.
Course Creation or Not?
How can the LMS create training content or not? Most modern LMS enables you to create courses and distribute them. The users can take the content such as presentations, documents, graphics, videos and correspondingly arrange them as a course development tool. There are also standard file types that are specific to eLearning, i.e., SCORM and xAPI.
All the LMS’s are compliant with such standards that allow you to upload such files and launch the predeveloped courses in the LMS. In certain cases, an LMS may not be a course builder, and you have to simply rely on the standardized files instead of having an option to use both types.
Benefits of LMS Integrated Services
The following are certain benefits of the LMS integrated services that are as follows:
Decreases Learning Curve of Systems
If you’ve integrated your LMS with the current tools in your business and reduced the number of new tools required, you’re nearly helping to keep things simple for your target audience. The sole focus is on the learning factors only using the new LMS functions and methods, which results in an enhanced learning curve. For example, they don’t need to learn to join an online lecture, as they already know and understand using their personalized video conferencing system.
Leverages Employee Performance
A decreased learning curve and improved accessibility leverage the learning engagement metrics. It results in higher employee performance on the job. An LMS integration can automatically add new employees to your learning platform and ensure they receive the necessary training.
It will shrink the time it takes them to integrate within the company and reach their complete productivity and potential. Why is it important? It is a seamless onboarding program that has improved companies’ productivity up to 70% across the globe.
Increased Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Improving employee performance has a wide range of positive advantages. For instance, the employees feel their contribution is more valuable, and their self-worth increases. They tend to stay in the company for a longer action. The seamless onboarding programs have resulted in improved employee retention rates up to 82 to 90%.
Improved Sales & Customer Support
With the integration of LMS with your CRM system, you can make the company product or service-related learning available to the customers as a part of your sales process or customer onboarding aspect. For Instance, you can share the product fact sheets and case studies with the prospects at a particular stage in the destiny to buy your products or set up a tutorial with your customers who have purchased your product.
Also, you should use your integration to address the learning needs identified in your CRM on your LMS system. It can help you to leverage your employees’ sales and performance metrics of your customer.
For Instance, you can enroll in sales employees instantly for your product features that benefit presentation updates. Particularly, the redundant customer service inquiries or complaints can be prompted to your employees’ enrollment to build a course of resolution. The entire course constitutes a knowledge repository and skills development tools that address internal and external known customer issues.
Collaboratively Facilitates Team
According to the survey, it has been estimated that over 97% of the employee’s and executives’ lack of alignment within a team impacts the result of a task or project. Your LMS can be integrated with your existing social and collaborative tools, such as Facebook and Twitter. You can avoid splitting the user’s attention and provide a seamless and robust social learning environment. The integration of your calendar application enables the identification of available slots to schedule the training sessions.
Particularly, by integrating the video conferencing platform, you can use a familiar environment for the conference-style learning events. Also, integrating with your preferred instant messaging platform builds a course of interaction as an important aspect of your company’ s internal collaboration.
Streamlining Learning & Development Tasks
The LMS integration will help your learning and development task to streamline their work and explore enormous opportunities. For Example, the range of gathering learning content from the third-party providers creates rosters and vice versa. At the same time, the accessibility of the relevant data from multiple systems, admin, and backend developers don’t have to give remarks to the SSO integration individually. It also helps you reduce time and effort. In particular, they can easily collaborate with the project designers, monitor sales of courses, and identify the redundant issues that have to deal with customer satisfaction.
Eliminates Redundancies and Human Errors
To work with multiple business systems in which a particular organization can result in data integrity issues and other problems. The regular data syncing or one-off migration processes within the different systems can be very difficult and time-consuming, resulting in errors and inconsistencies.
The LMS integrations can help eliminate the duplication of input and errors. For Instance, if your LMS has direct access to the user, data has been gathered from your HR system. It can also be used to track their performance and progress.
Also, all the required data is available for a few clicks, even if it works with multiple cloud providers. It also makes it efficient for the admins to insert or retrieve information regularly. It also offers the management all the important information required to make decisions considering the learning and development elements.
Make Actions Based On Business Insights
Business Systems can provide essential insights into which all the needed issues or problems should be overcome. For Instance, the CRM system can simply identify the forthcomings based on how the customer relations can be controlled.
Hence, integrating an LMS with a CRM system allows you to take multiple actions immediately and prepare a learning plan for your employees. With multiple business system integrations, there are multiple opportunities for insights and corrective actions based on discrepancies.
Identify the Efficiency of L&D Actions
Primarily, by the use the data or business insight, the integration with the business system can link the actual business results to train the effectiveness and reliability of your business. For Instance, The Academy LMS’s reporting dashboard can help you to obtain an in-depth understanding of how your employees respond to your L&D programs. According to such information, administrators can simply modify or upgrade the availability of the training sessions to meet the destined goal or objective.
Improves ROI for Learning
Building employee engagement or customer learning tactics is an expensive investment for financial purposes. Luckily, using an LMS and improving its functionalities with seamless and robust integrations to your existing systems decreases the cost and the investment and leverages the learning and performance metrics.
By integrations, there isn’t any need to develop or set up internal services which are readily available and can be used outside the LMS. It also reduces the overall cost of learning, making it faster to deploy and allowing more effort solely to focus on learning the contextualization.
Hence, all of the benefits make the learning more collaborative and conducive to performance on the job. It also improves the overall “return” aspect of each return on investment.
Final Words
With the rapid increase in the number of available business cases, the degree of efficiency may vary, as there is an ever-increasing range of possible integrations. For Instance, you can easily decide to integrate with your HR management system to leverage the performance of employees, customer satisfaction, and retention, or along with your CRM system to leverage employees’ sales and customer support metrics. Hence, every aspect of integration will draw endless benefits for your corporate venture.
