If You Read 1 Article About LMS Free Trials. Read this One.
We’ve created this article to help you understand how to maximise LMS Free Trials and understand the ROI of eLearning.
When choosing an LMS it’s important to go in with a solid game plan. Understanding each and every element of not only your training/learning requirements but also the features you would need to automate or simplify your tasks.
Get L&D Decision Makers Together
There’s going to be a number of individuals involved with the LMS decision process so you need to have everyone together, right from the beginning.
Start with a brainstorm of requirements — some individuals will have experience of using great LMS platforms and others will know what they need to deliver effective training, this is a valuable and massively time-saving when discuss features and requirements.
Once you have finished with the brainstorming ideas — rank the features/requirements from most important to least, moving on to the worksheet below.
Readiness Assessment in 33 Questions
This worksheet was designed to help businesses better understand how ready they are for an LMS.
The resource makes you ask hard questions so that you need to really think about the entire process of searching for an LMS, deciding what you require and ultimately knowing what to test and look out for during the free trail.
Import Real Data
Once you have completed the worksheet above you can either start to test multiple platforms or work with your shortlist of providers.
You should create a small batch of data that you would like to import into the new system. The best way to test functionality would be to export your data from the existing platform or any tracking tools you have and try to import it into the LMS.
Once you have imported this data be sure to give all of the platforms features a test run — start with your list of most important features and requirements, eventually getting to the ‘cherry on top’ features.
If the above does not go well right away, which often happens when a new platform is adopted due to muscle memory and learning curves, you can test out the tip below.
Test The Support Claims
Most platforms tend to have some form of customer service and support portals designed in a Wiki format to help you get to the bottom of any issues right away.
You should also try all of the support channels and make sure that every decision maker in the process also test runs this.
Measuring response time, how effective the support was and any other details will help to save on a lot of wasted time if the support service is not up to par.
Invite the day-to-day Users
Even though you have all of the key decision makers involved early on, the end user still needs to have a say and provide valuable user feedback.
Part of the real-data experiment should include setting tasks and gathering feedback from users. This is incredibly important to consider during the free trial.
The last thing you need is to have daily users unhappy with the platform once contracts have been signed, data imported and tasks set which would be a massive driver of disengagement and ultimately negative ROI.
Recap the Free Trial
Gather everyone that was involved in the test of the LMS, before the free trial runs out make sure that you spend some time going over any confusion or problems that anyone experienced.
Whilst you could contact the LMS platform it’s still good to all discuss together, this sort of Q&A will be able to collectively build an idea if the LMS matched all the requirements and what the next steps are.
But, how do you measure the ROI of eLearning?
Lets understand what you would include when calculating the costs of online training.
- The cost of developing eLearning Courses.
- The time and costs associated with using experts to develop the content as well as the team who will be running the entire development process.
- The delivery of eLearning — Platform, tools, and support.
- Other costs that may need to be factored with an updated eLearning program.
The above is value-adding to your business and employees but turning that into a ROI metric is where things get tricky.
Employee Engagement
Running simple NPS surveys will help you to determine how well the course was received, also helping to benchmark figures which over time will help course creators also understand their audience.
With the NPS metric it’s actually quite an easy but incredibly useful metric to get, if early on in the courses lifecycle there’s a low score, you can help to fix it right away, measuring upcoming courses to compare improvements.
Learning Outcomes
Assessments at the end of the course will be essential in understand the success of your training. Even with a positive NPS score as above, if the lessons are not sticking or not improving performance then there is really no point in following this route.
Remember that the learning outcomes also need to be split by company/legal requirements but also what your employees want.
Commercial Impact
This is where the magic happens as they say. The deal or no-deal moment — Measuring how much difference has been made to your commercial goals post training.
This would include:
- Productivity goes up.
- Quality increases.
- Fewer complaints.
- Improved reviews and shortened time to review.
The above list is just for ideas as the commercial impact will be dependent on the department, the business, the industry but should be specific for your commercial goals.
