Bersin & Associates LMS study

Bersin & Associates, a research and advisory firm focused on enterprise learning, recently released a study on customer satisfaction with learning management systems.

"LMS Customer Satisfaction 2005: An Industry Analysis of the Customer Experience" is the result of input from 660 system administrators, training managers, and executives on 24 satisfaction criteria across 15 LMS offerings.

A few findings from the press release:

--Externally hosted LMS customers are significantly more satisfied than those who run LMSs internally. Outsourced LMS systems reduce cost, complexity, and resource requirements and are much more likely to be completed on schedule and within predicted budgets.

--The LMS market is in a high state of churn. Approximately 15% of organizations are planning on switching LMS vendors or replacing their systems.

--The LMS market is growing fast and still very fragmented. Although the LMS market encompasses more than 70 vendors, the largest has only 15% market share. Forty-five percent of respondents installed their systems within the last two years.

--Older customers are less satisfied then new customers. The study shows that customers with systems more than four years old are most likely to plan on switching vendors. This finding is likely related to the fact that many older implementations are running on old technology platforms or are using outdated software versions (80% of all LMSs in use are at least one version behind and 60% are two major versions behind).

--Overall satisfaction is highly correlated with a vendor's implementation and support services - and far less correlated with satisfaction with product features. Of those respondents who are highly satisfied with their LMSs, 83% are highly satisfied with their vendors' implementation services and 82% are highly satisfied with their vendors' support services.

--Of all products areas evaluated, reporting and analysis received the lowest average satisfaction rating (5.97 out of 10). Reporting is a notoriously difficult area for LMS vendors because of the wide range of data and varied needs of report users. Other areas of customer dissatisfaction are customization, system upgrades, and HR/ERP integration.

The study also rates vendors. For more info, see the press release.