Research: LMS use
'LMS Customer
Satisfaction 2005: An Industry Analysis of the Customer Experience'
is a piece of research by Bersin & Associates based on:
- 660 system administrators, training managers, and executives
- 45% installed systems within last 2 years
- 24 satisfaction criteria
- 15 different LMS offerings
The report covers; product, technical support, customer
service, business partnership, and implementation. Split into two
parts, the first looks at customer satisfaction in relation to supplier,
number of learners, application area, in-house or use of hosted
services, industry sector, implementation age, budget, and organisation
type. The second part compares suppliers in four categories; global
enterprise, enterprise, mid-market, and emerging.
Although some of the major systems were not included,
most of the major suppliers did respond, including, Saba, SumTotal,
WBT Systems, Pathlore, GeoMetrix, DK Systems, Plateau, CyberU, GeoLearning,
NetDimensions, KnowledgePlanet, Learn.com, MeridianKSI and PeopleSoft,
External (hosted) rated better than internal
Systems hosted externally rated significantly higher
on customer satisfaction than internal systems. The reasons appear
to be their ability to cut costs, complexity, use of internal resources
and time to delivery.
Market growing but fragmented
Their estimate of suppliers is US biased and therefore
far too low at 70 and therefore the basic finding, that the largest
vendor only has 15% of the market is suspect. However, the conclusion,
that the market is still fragmented is correct. It is also unstable
in that 15% of organisations plan to change their LMS.
New more satisfied than old
As one would expect, those who bought their LMSs some
time ago are less satisfied than those who purchased recently. What
was surprising is that 80 percent of all LMSs are one version or
more behind current releases and 60% are two major versions behind.
There's clearly a lot of old, non-SCORM compliant stuff out there.
Support matters more than features
A strong correlation between good implementation/support
and customer satisfaction suggests that buying a product against
a checklist is less important than buying a product that can be
easily implemented. This also confirms the positive views about
externally hosted services.
Weak areas
One useful finding was the very low satisfaction rating
around reporting. Reporting and analysis received only a 5.97 out
of 10 rating. Other weaknesses were customisation, system upgrades,
and HR/ERP integration. However, there is a tendency for buyers
to want everything from such systems. One wonders whether all of
these reports and sophisticated reporting would ever be used for
serious evaluation.
top
|
