Dynamic. Asif Khan.

29 July 2022

Why is LMS support essential for your LMS platform?

We’ve heard all the LMS horror stories. The brilliant course you’ve been up until the wee hours finishing just won’t upload. It should, but it won’t. Your analytics aren’t exporting and a report is due. You need to add a new department and make sure the licensing is all hunky dory before the day begins. But there’s a problem, and it’s one not enough people talk about: awful support.

When you’re working with something as essential as your Learning Management System, excellent support should be as high up on your feature list as anything else. But, all too often, once a multi-year deal is sealed and your money is safely tucked into someone’s sales figures, you get sidelined. Promises of amazing customer service turning into apologies, excuses and missed SLAs.

So, before we inevitably tell you how fantastically client-friendly, transparent and cost effective our support offering is, let’s take a walk through the LMS Support Hall of Horrors, and discover five nightmares for LMS support customers. Apologies if they trigger familiar frustrations.

Slow turnaround making your life miserable

Isn’t it funny how your calls get answered like greased lightning by sales staff before your deal is signed, and how you don’t really get that same energy from support once you’ve committed? Education works on a strict time frame, and you need to know that your LMS support team won’t leave you hanging — and won’t leave your issue until the last second of the contracted SLA. Because when your platform has issues, your tech staff, educators, students and technologists all have issues, and learning stops.

This isn’t 2010, and a properly functioning LMS support service should be fighting to keep your loyalty with rapid, responsive support.

Limited support tickets to discourage you from calling

When you picked up a contract, the number of support incidents seemed like way more than you could need, right? But then one issue turns into five, and all of a sudden you’re seeing a team more interested in selling you support ticket bundles than helping you out of a jam.

You become worried about using up your LMS support allocation, and all of a sudden you’re letting smaller issues go unfixed. It’s not perfect, but you can suffer through them.

This isn’t how you should have to run your organisation. Find an LMS partner whose goal is to make sure that you have the support you need, not to find ways to charge you. In fact, if you’re looking for one with unlimited support, you might not have to look far.

Support staff who don’t know their stuff

You know the old chestnut: you’ve got to wade through two tiers of support to get to someone who knows half as much as you do. So much wasted time, gnashing teeth and stressed colleagues. Perhaps you even wind up assuming you could do it better yourself – but then why should you even have LMS support at all?

Good LMS support should be trying to fix your issue as quickly as possible, and that means you need experts – people who actively develop the platform and know it inside out, without logging a case for someone higher up the food chain, whenever they might be available. Which LMS support services are staffed by dev workers? One certainly springs to mind. Ahem.

Broken things stay broken

As utterly fantastic as a Learning Management System may be, there will be times when an unforeseen bug comes up, or you develop a brand-new requirement. In the case of some vendors, you may be waiting on roadmap features that were promised in order to get your signature on the dotted line.

But nothing happens. You’ve logged countless tickets, been given vague assurances and have to resort to ugly workarounds.

When your LMS support team overlaps with development, things get fixed quickly because they’re getting fixed by those support contacts. Maximum efficiency, minimum tearing your hair out.

Costs are not what they seem

We’ve mentioned before that many providers will try to generate as much revenue as possible from your technical traumas. It’s more than just LMS support incident tickets, you can also find yourself paying based on the features you use and the number of departments you use them for.

The initial price you were offered for the platform – and we’re sure it was a ‘very special price’ that will make someone’s manager oh-so mad at them – suddenly gets overtaken by TCO, the total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the product. That’s going to upset your finance team as well as make it clear that you’re not with an LMS partner that believes in transparency. And you deserve better.

It’s okay. It was all just a bad dream. It’s over now.

Bad LMS support is probably going nowhere. Too many companies make too much money from it. But the good news is that you now have better options.

LMS support partners that are committed to transparency, fixing your problems, adapting with your organisation and making sure that you have no reason to go anywhere else. So next time you’re shopping around, ask questions like: “How good is your response time?”, “Is there a limit on enquiries?” and “What extra costs could we incur?”.

Or, if you don’t fancy running the risk of being disappointed, give Dynamic a call. Because you knew that’s what this was all leading up to, didn’t you?