Author’s Note:This blog entry is the second in a series I started to capture what I thought were important points from the April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting. The discussion topic of this Roundtable meeting was Building a Better Relationship with your LMS Vendor. Here’s a link to my first entry in this series.
The April 2013 Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders meeting topic addressed the question of how to build a successful relationship with your LMS vendor. During the sharing of tips, both our vendor representative and our audience raised the question of support. Everyone agreed that defining and understanding the support to expect to receive from your LMS vendor was important. In discussion, the following list emerged as questions to ask your vendor to help you understand what they mean by support.
Questions to ask to probe the support question:
What happens after I sign?
- What does implementation look like? Specifically:
- What is the timeline for implementation?
- What are your expectations of us?
- How does integration of our business processes to the solution work?
- What does the support look like?
- Is there one number I can call and expect to get an answer?
- Will you stay (the sales person) stay in touch with me?
- What about upgrades, releases and/or version changes?
- What % of support calls are addressed to resolution the first time I call?
- What type of optimization support is included?
- What type of integration support is provided?
- Once implementation is done, what type of support is available and is there additional cost?
Are there other questions that you’ve used when trying to understand the support question? Please share them in the comments below!