Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.
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PiiQ by Cornerstone
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Cornerstone’s PiiQ is an SMB offering formerly known as Sonar6. PiiQ is aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses and includes core learning management and performance management systems, including content creation, mobile accessibility, and in-product reporting.
Our integration experience was very well managed. We launched on-time, and only had to do basic end-user training because the system is very user friendly and intuitive to use. The customer support is exceptional, we have an assigned Customer Success Manager we meet with and talk to regularly. They are very responsive and have helped us optimize our processes to get the most out of the system. Because the system is easy to use, we have very few user issues or tickets we have to support. 90% of user problems are resolved by using the FAQs we provided when we launched the system
Customer Service - Our CSM, Kirsten Spak, provides friendly, timely and high quality help and has helps us to understand and efficiently use the system.
Course Creation - We have been able to create custom courses with a wide range of features, including branding, audio, video and assessments.
Reporting - Absorb LMS offers a robust reporting function which allows us to understand our users and meet the needs of our partners when user information is required for their projects.
Enables employees to draft work goals and collaborate with their supervisors on a final version - improves mutual understanding right up front.
Combines performance goal ratings with competency ratings and provides a blended score. Simplifies the goal weighting so you don't have to do any calculations.
9-box matrix provides useful definitions and descriptions so managers can prepare development notes or plans for individual employees.
Reporting needs some additional help, especially the Course Activity Report. It would be great to see the description of the course on the header of the report.
The courses on the smart devices look wonky and sometimes the videos don't show up, yet you can hear it.
The Absorb LMS phone application also needs a lot of work. It does not show all the tiles that are available in the browser version.
Would be good to have have a virtual "top level" (eg board) user built in to allow senior execs without a direct manager to be able to be set up with KPIs instead of having to create a dummy user
Reports have difficulty downloading if pop ups disabled or in some browser environments
When competencies are updated while a cycle is open, any changes don't effect that open cycle but only future ones. Would be nice to be able to have the option to apply changes to existing "open" cycles
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
Absorb LMS is easy to use from both a user experience and admin experience. For users, navigating the site to complete assignments or finding courses to develop new skills is very user-friendly. As an admin, the course creation tools walk you through each step simply, but have a ton of functionality to support any of your training needs.
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
Absorb LMS's performance is very reliable and consistent. Pages load quickly. Report are generated within a reasonable amount of time (even with significant amounts of data), etc. Nothing seems to slow it down.
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
Absorb LMS's client service managers have been extremely responsive, efficient, and available. While we pay for a higher level of support, we have found it well worth the investment. We've been less pleased with the accounting side of the organization, but that has little impact on the delivery of training to our clients and employees.
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.
I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
hands down favorite in look, function, cost and service. Others were close but could not meet our external and internal cases. Our current one (we looked at them again) did not have 40% of the functionality or value, despite the bargain cost, it was not worth it to continue. Only new hires used our LMS for onboarding because they had to; no one went back for more training. With Absorb our classes are more dynamic and targeted.
Lesson.ly has been great to work with but it is a very clear and simple, user-friendly system that anyone can pick up with very little training as it is self-explanatory. It also has a great mobile interface and lots of different features that are easy to add for the admin but really impactful for the user.
This is one of the main reasons we chose Absorb as our LMS. It is a very user-friendly application that is able to be deployed across multiple departments in geographically dispersed locations. It works amazingly well for us.
Absorb LMS's user-friendly interface and interactive learning features contributed to a 150% increase in learner engagement levels. The platform's ability to deliver engaging content and quizzes enhances employee participation and knowledge retention at retail
With Absorb LMS, we are looking to streamline our remote employee onboarding process, and tracking to reduce the time taken for new hires to complete training modules by 30%.
It's tool and it's only as good as the person wielding it. The investment in PiiQ was accompanied by a quarterly cadence and manager feedback training. We feel like our employees are given regular feedback and bonuses are tied to objective accomplishment.
