Over the years we’ve seen many guides and articles on steps to prevent buyer’s remorse towards enterprise learning systems. In our experience these four questions set the stage for any engagement with a vendor to maximize your learning project’s success.  

1) What are the top two current learning headaches in my organization which keep me up at night? Can my vendor easily solve them?

There are probably more than two! For example, your headache could be; “It takes too long and too many resources to use my current LMS or learning system” or “We have an employee turnover problem, too many of them are saying they don’t feel engaged and a big factor to them leaving”. Limiting to two or three top pains makes it clearer to you and easier to see which vendors are really able to solve them. 

When we say the vendor can “easily” solve your key headaches we mean there won’t be a consulting project proposal accompanying their quote to you. Solving your key problems should already be in their wheelhouse. Be sure to also ask them for references to clients like you where they’ve solved the same headaches.

2) Will my new learning system prevent the following discussion between two employees from happening? 

Employee 1: “How do I do this —– task?”

Employee 2: “I learned from our learning system and my manager showed me how to do it this way…but I found a shorter way which I’ll show you….”

Regardless of the reasons you may have to get a learning system such as to meet compliance goals or drive engagement; the above dialogue should terrify you. It’s not bad enough “Employee 1” is asking his peer, “Employee 2” how to do a job and perhaps crucial to the company’s safety, industry compliance and credibility, “Employee 2” is going to perpetuate bad and incorrect advice on performing the job and because its shorter this “bad advice” will likely be spread to others. 

Unfortunately, if its easier for “Employee 1” to ask “Employee 2” for the answer versus a compliant learning system, this type of interaction won’t stop. 

This is why we made our learning solution Feathercap easy for any employee, from any device to ask for the answer to their job question as asking a peer or manager. You may not be able to prevent the spread of bad advice between employees, but at least you can be given a fighting chance if employees can instantly have the answers to job questions and procedures.

3) Do I or my team really want to use this on a daily basis?

In our experience, a big universal issue all learning professionals face is lack of time. In spite of many new learning systems use of “AI” driven systems to make learning system management easier, proof is in demonstrated results. Is it really easier to use and administer? As above, always check relevant references. Newer learning solutions shouldn’t take any more time to use and administer than necessary. There is a learning curve when ramping up to go live but the ongoing rigor of maintaining and updating content and making sure the right people see the right content and achieve the desired learning outcomes should be as easy and fast as possible. Going live in days or weeks should be the goal instead of months or years which sadly, still happens today for some learning system deployments.

In the past, verifying this was difficult since most trial solutions did not allow access to all features and could not easily be configured to how the system would behave when live. Today, many SAAS based systems let you try before you buy or encourage starting with a paid/ live system with only your group and let you scale as you like it to the whole company. At Feathercap, we’ve found our customers really appreciate starting as a small pilot with an easy way to scale as they see success with the platform. 

4) Which learning vendor according to their clients has the best support?

This is one of the most important question and goes beyond SLA or response time statements. Since after you’ve chosen the vendor, your entire line of communication, help requests, midnight messages to the support desk will do more to affect your learning project to either being a success or failure.  

Finding the answer to this through client testimonials as well as current client references are the best ways. 

About us: Feathercap is an AI driven employee answer platform that lets everyone look up answers to their job related questions from all their existing learning content, documents and videos.