PiiQ by Cornerstone vs. iSpring Suite

Well suited for:

• A busy environment where you want learners to be self-sufficient and to be able to access learning solutions at a time that suits them.
• For anyone who wants to access learning using different platforms such as iPad, mobile, PC, etc
• Anyone who needs a more in-depth learning solution rather than an overview of key learning points.

Incentivized

This is one of the best authoring tools in the market. As a strong user of most of them, we ran across iSpring Suite years ago when the product was still evolving. Who would have thought that having these tools embedded inside PowerPoint would make such an impact? There is nothing I can't do with iSpring Suite that others claim is unique to their authoring products, and some things that I can do even better.

• 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.

Incentivized

• iSpring integrates with PowerPoint extremely well and enables the user to develop training in PowerPoint with ease.
• iSpring characters are fantastic. They continue to add more regularly features regularly.
• The voice recording and ability to integrate music is a very easy process.
• Customer service is fantastic. They are quick to respond and their training is easy to follow.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Adding audio narration to interactive slides is easy, but still perhaps a bit repetitive/clunky
• The way you add playlists works well, but wish it was "project/course specific", instead of carrying over from project to project. Easy to delete playlists, tho.
• If you have a common set of learner resources to make available over many courses, you must manually add the URLs and/or PDFs manually each time. Would be so nice to be able to create a "reference list" and import it to each course with a click or two. This is the most annoying thing I can think of about iSpring.

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.

I would give it 10 but I also like to try new solutions.

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.

Incentivized

The software integration was appealing to our department--particularly to the faculty who had not, prior to the pandemic, taught online--because it integrates with an already known entity: PowerPoint. Furthermore, iSpring's assessment builder with its wide variety of questions is extremely easy to use--basically plug and play--for any level of comfort that a faculty member has in terms of online teaching.

Incentivized

So far 100%.

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.

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.

Incentivized

I had a difficult issue where iSpring just stopped working. It turned out to be a Microsoft Windows/Office issue. The iSpring Support team continued to contact me until we got the issue resolved. A support team that does not wait for the customer to call back is EXCEPTIONAL. I can not think of any other vendor that was this devoted to finding a solution! My compliments to "Dana" and the rest of the iSpring support teasm!

We bought training provided by 3rd party – it was fabulous.

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

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.

Incentivized

Therer are several other interactive video creation tools out there, such as Camtasia, Adobe Captivate and even PowerPoint on its own, but none of them come close to offering the galaxy of features that is served up by iSpring Suite, and it's the easiest to learn and use with affordable price tags

• 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.

Incentivized

• We allow potential customers to sample training and feedback is our offerings differentiate us from our peers.
• Having the ability to offer an accessible training catalog and self-enrollment is also something our customers comment on positively.
• The training developed in iSpring has allowed our customers to prepare for further interaction with our processes and projects on their own timeline, and has positively impacted the ease with which we are able to execute project rollouts.