LMS Buyer’s Remorse:
How Your Washer and Dryer Is Like Your Learning Management System

Most Learning Management System purchases often follow a predictable script. Companies canvas popular vendors. Those vendors demo systems, focusing on AI-powered content recommendation tools, adaptive learning paths, gamification engines, predictive analytics, and skills-mapping algorithms. It’s all very impressive and state-of-the-art. The buying committee compares checklists, scores capabilities, assigns points in a spreadsheet, and signs a contract with the vendor who can do the most. 

Then, as the honeymoon ends, problems emerge. Eighteen months later, that same organization cancels the contract, not because the platform couldn’t do enough, but because it was exhausting to run. 

This is the central paradox of LMS purchasing: companies buy based on features, but they leave based on service. 

This isn’t just an issue with LMSes. Here’s a personal example. At home we have owned three sets of washers and dryers, each with internet connections, fancy displays, multiple modes, smart phone apps — and each broke within a few years, failing to simply wash or dry a load of laundry. Every time, the repair bill was nearly the original cost of the washer or dryer. The ownership experience was not good. 

We selected washers and dryers because of cool features and got rid of them because of the frustration of actual use. And problems re-occurred because, when shopping for replacements, we fell back into our predictable purchasing pattern and didn’t make the effort to look beyond the brands with the best marketing to track down the brands that would deliver real value. 

Understanding why this happens, and what it means for how organizations should evaluate a platform, matters more than any single feature on a spec sheet. 

Why Purchases Are Made on Features 

LMS vendors compete in a crowded market, and feature lists are the easiest way to differentiate during a sales cycle. It’s simple to check off the features an LMS offers. It’s much harder to compare how each vendor will handle a support ticket at 4:45 PM on a Friday, six months after the contract is signed. 

So vendors optimize for and market what’s comparable and easy to demo: more integrations, more automation, more AI-driven personalization, more dashboards. None of this is dishonest; these features are often genuinely capable. But they are also, by design, aimed at the moment of purchase rather than the years of ownership that follow it. 

This is a tricky path. Every feature added to a platform adds complexity and decision points somewhere in the interface. A gamification engine means new settings screens, new permission structures, and new settings that can be configured incorrectly. A predictive analytics module means new data definitions that admins must understand before they can trust, or explain, a report. 

Individually, each addition seems justified. Collectively, they create a platform where core, everyday tasks, such as enrolling a group of learners, generating a compliance report, adjusting a due date, can be buried under menus and settings that exist for capabilities the organization rarely touches. Without disciplined development, the interface, terminology, and system behavior become inconsistent, because features built by different product teams at different times rarely follow the same design standards. 

Features also add costs. The development costs are built into the price of the LMS. The more sophisticated the LMS, the more it costs to support it, so the customer pays for that as well. It’s all hidden in the licensing fee, but you are paying for features you don’t need. 

Yet features typically drive buying decisions. This isn’t a failure of judgment on the buyer’s part — it’s a structural reality of the purchasing process. The people evaluating an LMS during procurement are comparing capabilities against overly simplified use cases and working from demos, marketing materials, and RFP responses. Feature comparison is the only reliable, apples-to-apples signal available at that stage. 

Why Cancellations Are Made on Service 

More importantly, feature-driven purchasing is also a distraction from what really matters. Once a platform goes live, evaluation criteria change. The questions become operational: Do administrators actually understand the system? How fast does support respond when something breaks? Does the account manager understand our business, or are we starting from zero every time we call? Is documentation useful, or does every question require a ticket? When the platform updates, are we warned, or do we find out because something stopped working? 

These are the moments that determine renewal. Frustrations bubble up in the organization. An admin team that feels stranded — untrained on new complexity, unsupported when something goes wrong, treated as a ticket number instead of a customer — will eventually make the case internally to switch, regardless of how many features the platform has. Leadership hears about frustration, delays, and the sense that the vendor relationship isn’t working. That’s what triggers the cancellation conversation, not a feature gap. 

Smart Shopping for an LMS 

We often see RFPs with spreadsheets listing hundreds of required or desired features. And then there are a few questions on how support works, mostly about response times, hours of service, etc. This is backwards. The LMS market is quite competitive and many LMSes provide the features most companies need, forcing vendors to develop esoteric features to distinguish themselves. This is seductive, and buyers don’t always look past it. It’s like walking into Home Depot and oohing and aahing over the fancy digital displays on the dryers and not considering the top-load mechanical appliances in the corner that will run for years.

We’re not saying that advanced features and powerful LMSes are bad – we are just advising concentrating on the factors that will matter in the long run. So, if you are LMS shopping, do your due diligence on features, but focus on what matters after the sale: 

• Prioritize features you truly need and ask critical questions. Do you really need a complex domain structure for learning objects that may support some edge-case learning assignments but complicate everything else? And consider the learner perspective — they mainly just want to launch and pass their courses before the training deadline, just like all we really wanted was to dry a load of laundry. 

• Get to know the team that will be supporting you. Partnership matters here. Will the sales team hand you off to a support contact after the deal is signed, or can you get to know the support team during the sales process? Can you reach them, and do they respond? Do you need to go through a complex ticketing process to get an issue resolved? Are they responsive to feature enhancement requests? Do they crowd-source issue resolution to user groups? Does the support team have direct access to the development team? Is the support team stable? Do you trust them? Do you like them? 

• Insist on a free trial, and take it seriously. Set up courses, import learners, build learning paths — do the things you would do when using the LMS for real. Demos are a good introduction to an LMS, but a demo is a rigidly controlled environment. You’re seeing what the supplier wants you to see, and nobody in a first demo can predict all the daily frictions that will emerge under actual use. There’s no substitute for dedicated hands-on time with the LMS. 

• Contact references and compare their use cases to yours. Ask about support quality and responsiveness. 

• Ask about onboarding. What does onboarding look like for a new admin, and how long does it typically take? A lengthy onboarding process is a sign of an overly complex LMS. 

• Ask about support SLAs. What are the support SLAs for response time and resolution time — and are they contractual, or just aspirational? 

• Ask about account management. Do you get a dedicated account manager, or a general support queue? Will the same person know your history each time you reach out, or are you starting over with someone new every time? 

• Ask about retention. What is the vendor’s customer retention rate, and do they disclose why customers leave? 

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Knowledge Anywhere is a full-service e-learning provider. We were founded in 1998 and are based in Seattle, Washington. Our learning management system is currently used each month by over 80,000 learners from a variety of clients worldwide. We also do custom course development. Our clients include Ford, Siemens, Costco, the US Navy, Extended Stay Hotels, and many others. 

If you want to talk about Learning Management Systems we would love to hear from you. Contact us.