Find the best Hospitality LMS

Have you ever been misled by a restaurant about your favorite item on the menu? Let me tell you my least favorite pasta story.

One time, I called one of my regular takeaway places and asked for pasta with veggies. But when I got my order, it was just pasta and cheese! The veggies cost extra. Turns out that the employee I'd spoken with was new. While I was frustrated, the incident gave me an insight into the hospitality business and the need to train the staff.

If you're part of the hospitality industry, you know that good customer experience is critical. A satisfied customer is more likely to recommend your services to others and become a loyal and repeat visitor in the future.

To provide your customers the best service possible, you need a great tool to train your diverse, dispersed, and/or large workforce. This can be done using a hospitality learning management system (LMS). The tool helps you manage, assign, track, and collect feedback on the training modules that your staff undertake.

This guide aims to help you select an ideal hospitality LMS for your establishment. We've included all the vital information about the LMS market in this guide.

Here's what we'll cover:

What is hospitality LMS?
Common features of hospitality LMS
What type of buyer are you?
Benefits and potential issues
Market trends to understand

What is hospitality LMS?

 

Hospitality LMS is a platform that hospitality establishments use to design and manage courses on different areas such as customer service, communication skills, procedures, etiquette, quality assurance, logistics skills, and workforce management.

The tool allows users to update and edit learning content, host online training, assign training based on an employee's role/responsibilities, and automatically track their performance. They can also collect feedback after each training to improve the learning modules for future training needs.

The learner dashboard in TalentLMS

Common features of hospitality LMS

The first step to selecting the right hospitality LMS for your business is understanding its features. Here's a list of the most important software features to check out.

Course tracking	Allows you to track the progress of your trainees in each course. Also, record employee feedback on the training sessions and send them reminders about upcoming, pending, or incomplete courses.
Course management	Lets you organize, reuse, and share the course files in your LMS library with select users. You can also combine the training modules to create an onboarding bundle for new employees.
Course authoring	Helps you build e-learning courses using elements such as text, video, images, and practice questions.
Learner portal	Provides a learner portal for your staff. They can sign-in and access training materials at any time from anywhere.
Assessment management	Lets you create your own assessments such as in the form of gamified quizzes and online tests. The LMS lets you save the scores of each module that your staff undertakes.
Certification management	Helps you design your own certifications, which have specific validity periods after which the knowledge needs to be renewed or refreshed such as information about health codes. Award the certification when your staff completes or complies with the module.
Communication tools	Lets staff members communicate with each other via personal messages and on discussion forums.
Mobile learning	Allows users to access and undertake training programs on Android and iOS devices.
Learning paths	Lets you define a linear path for completing the training modules. You can also customize these paths for each employee based on their role.
Reporting	Provides data on the success and failure of a training module. Find out which courses were successful or unsuccessful in terms of the dropout rates, time taken, quality of content, and other such parameters.

What type of buyer are you?

The next step in the software-buying process is understanding the type of buyer you are. Different types of buyers have different challenges.

Here are the buyer types that we have classified based on market research:

Small, native hospitality businesses: If your business is restricted to a single location/country, you are more likely to focus on training for everyday work-related tasks. You need a simple solution with core features such as course management, course tracking, and course authoring.

Large, global hospitality businesses: If you own a multi-specialty business that operates in different locations/countries, you need a solution that simultaneously disseminates modules and tracks training progress across all locations. Look out for software that offers communication tools in addition to the core training features.

Benefits and potential issues

Deploying a hospitality LMS has many benefits, the chief of which is developing your staff's skills. Some of the other benefits are listed below:

Attract and retain top talent: Training your staff helps build/improve your brand, for customers and potential employees as well. It positions you as an employer who values employee growth and skill development. By providing skill development programs, you will be able to successfully retain your current staff.

Establish a culture of continuous improvement: When you encourage your staff to participate in training programs, you foster a culture of continuous improvement. This practice inspires them to keep improving themselves and focus on delivering quality.

Onboard staff faster: The software facilitates faster onboarding of new hires. They can complete the mandatory training modules at any time (even when they're on the go).

However, despite these great benefits, there are a couple of issues that userscould face. We can't ignore these, and have listed these out for you here:

Too much time spent on training: The flip side of using a hospitality LMS tool is that your staff may actually spend more time on training than with customers. You could monitor the time spent on training but it doesn't always work, especially when you want to establish a culture of continuous learning.

Need for an L&D officer: You can save the time spent on onboarding by using video tutorials. However, you need someone to take charge of learning and development so that they disseminate training to the right employee at the right time. Without this process, your staff may feel overwhelmed and lost trying to finish all the courses.

Market trends to understand

Based on our research, here are the key trends in the hospitality LMS market:

Gamification in LMS to boost staff performance: TalentLMS found that 87% of employees feel more productive, 84% feel more engaged, and 82% feel happier as a result of gamification. The technology can boost staff engagement in the hospitality sector too. Employers should use it to help the staff perform better and stay updated about the business. It will directly impact customer service and boost business growth.

Virtual reality to improve learning: The global AR and VR market is expected to grow to $209.2 billion by 2022 and the hospitality sector is experimenting with these technologies. They are recreating complex situations using VR, so that staff can learn to adequately handle real-life situations with customers. The simulated experience in VR improves knowledge retention and recall.