6 Reasons Why SaaS and PaaS Companies Need a Learning Management System

The IT industry is nothing if not fast-paced—and within it, two areas synonymous with rapid and drastic change are SaaS and PaaS (“Software” and “Platform as a Service” respectively).

For SaaS and PaaS engineers, today’s norms could be outdated within a matter of months.

The average employee must be kept informed about a wide range of bug fixes, system upgrades, new integrations, new architectures, and new facilities, as well as the policy changes, new hires, acquisitions, and change management processes that people have to reckon with in any industry.

With so much to keep track of, employees in the SaaS and PaaS sectors would benefit greatly from a learning management system capable of pulling everything into a single place.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges they face, and what the LMS’s role could be in overcoming any and all obstacles.

1) An LMS Can be Used to Educate Everyone About New Product Upgrades

As a successful SaaS or PaaS company grows, the number of clients grows with it—and the complexity of managing the product also increases. Furthermore, in order to stay competitive with the wider market, continue client growth, and retain existing customers, the product itself must grow. That’s why SaaS and PaaS products are regularly upgraded to meet the expectations of the market, with new features added at least annually, but possibly quarterly or potentially even more regularly than that.

Because SaaS and PaaS products are “in the cloud”, users may not even realize there has been an update—features are simply available the next time they log in. While this is convenient, SaaS and PaaS businesses must place more emphasis on making sure employees, stakeholders, partners, and customers are aware that new features have been made available, and how they can use them.

In addition to a marketing push and tips in the platform itself, an LMS is an ideal venue for learning modules that can teach people about new upgrades—after all, many within the business need to know about these functions even if they’re not regular users of the tool itself. This could take the form of a quiz, Q&A, or video—whatever helps the business best connect with its audience.

2) An LMS Can be Used to Support Market Penetration

Many SaaS and PaaS products have numerous use cases, and they can be used to address key problems in multiple business segments. The same tool may be repackaged, customized, and marketed differently to better suit a particular industry or company. Though this makes it easier for potential customers to understand, it can be more difficult for the business itself to offer support, as features get diversified and the scope of the software gets greater.

Support documentation can become particularly bloated in this scenario—it becomes overwhelming to go through an entire document every time you need something in particular. A learning management system can again be a huge help here—you could build a whole library of simplified learning modules addressing key capabilities. A fun and interactive module could be more memorable than one delivered in a static document or intranet page—and by tracking user progress through each resource you may uncover insights about common queries and overall employee understanding.

3) An LMS Can be Used to Keep Employees Informed About Policies and Procedures

It goes without saying that every modern corporate company always has plenty of policies, guidelines, and procedures to follow, whether imposed by external agencies or by internal stakeholders. No matter how hard organizations try to simplify this aspect of corporate culture, different management levels and diversified company structures inevitably overwhelm employees.

The bigger the company, the more complicated these policies and procedures are. An LMS can not only help organizations present this information effectively, but it can also provide analytics features that make sure that employees are reading the content and passing knowledge checks and quizzes.

4) An LMS Can be Used to Help Sales Teams Win Business

The words “I’ll get back to you” have saved many a consultant and salesperson covering for a lack of quick recall on product knowledge. It’s always best to give an immediate answer to any question that doesn’t require further analysis—quick answers are likely to make your product a preferred choice. It’s therefore always worth working to raise product awareness so that your people are less likely to feel they have to fall back on such delay tactics.

To this end, you could create learning resources specifically targeted at salespeople, addressing things they’re likely to need to know about the product. Distributing this kind of content is easier within an LMS, where it’s possible to assign individuals to specific learning streams that are relevant to them—rather than overwhelming them with every piece of learning you make available.

5) An LMS Can be Used to Help Partners and Resellers Secure Sales

Getting your own sales teams up to speed is one thing, but many SaaS and PaaS companies will also rely on sales coming via partners and resellers. Helping these external teams to reach the same level of understanding can involve significant time expenditure and requires the development of dedicated resources. It’s therefore important to have a platform in place that’s easily accessible to both your internal and external sales teams. Through this LMS, they should be able to learn more about the product, enabling them to present well and sell more.

6) An LMS Can be Used to Improve Customer Support

Support teams are required to have an even greater understanding of the finer detail of a product. They need to not only identify the problem but also think of potential solutions to solve the problem. Those solutions may be incredibly simple, or especially complex. The better the training the support team receives, the faster client issues will be resolved.

An LMS can help support SaaS and PaaS organizations in providing a comprehensive range of training for these teams, as well as a means of checking that the knowledge has been effectively retained. An LMS also has an important role to play as reference material—even the best support teams can only retain so much information about a complex platform. Provided they know that the information they need is easy to search for or find in a specific module, organizations can be confident in their ability to respond to support requests quickly.

An LMS can also play a more direct role in helping customers find answers to their issues. In most businesses, the majority of support tickets raised by clients have been answered before and deal with quite basic issues. By offering customer training resources through an LMS, perhaps via a link within the product itself, organizations could offer quicker resolutions and free up their support teams to answer more complex queries.

Why Open LMS Is the Best Choice for SaaS and PaaS Companies

Open LMS is a learning management system built upon open source technology and is uniquely positioned to be integrated with any other platform without any limitations and to your exact design specifications. Plus, our development resources can scale to your business requirements. If you’re interested in discovering how our custom-built solutions can address your key challenges, contact us today using the links below.