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.
$8
per user per month
Skilljar’s Customer Education LMS Platform
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Skilljar’s Customer Education LMS Platform is a solution to educate, engage, and retain everyone a business interacts with. Skilljar is an external LMS that is purpose-built for customer and partner education. It enables the user to build courses, design learning paths, monetize training, and improve the customer experience through actionable analytics. Turn new buyers into successful users: Skilljar’s external LMS helps onboard customers and partners and turn them…
Skilljar is fantastic for structured onboarding processes. If you're looking to streamline and standardize the onboarding experience for your customers, especially for software or complex products, this platform is a gem. It allows you to create step-by-step courses guiding users through functionalities, reducing confusion and accelerating their learning curve.When you need versatility in content delivery, Skilljar is spot-on. Whether it's video tutorials, interactive quizzes, downloadable resources, or live webinars, the platform accommodates various formats. It's perfect for accommodating different learning styles and ensuring engagement.
For scenarios that demand highly complex simulations or immersive learning experiences, Skilljar's capabilities might fall short. While it supports interactive elements, extremely sophisticated simulations might require additional specialized software or platforms.
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.
Unlimited courses, learning paths, quizzes, pages, plans, and certifications
Ease of use for students, administrators, and content creators
Customer Success and Service are top notch. The CSMs are genuinely committed to helping you achieve your metrics and goals
Asking for and listening to customer feedback for enhancements
Developer Center where people with little to no coding experience can learn how to use and apply HTML templates and code snippets to customize your site
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
Would love to see parent/child courses so that when something is updated in the parent course that change is automatically reflected in the clones of that course.
Features that allow for the translation of content to allow access to content across languages.
Re-onboarding process when the usage of Skilljar changes hands within out company in order to address knowledge gaps.
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.
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.
The learning curve for Skilljar is not too steep, and I've renewed our contract twice now. I've been able to add additional administrators and get them up to speed on platform functionality within a day. Plus, Skilljar provides awesome resources to help you learn how to use is. The Help Center has articles for almost everything, and when in doubt, their amazing CSMs (like ours, ...) provide exemplary support/advice.
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.
I have opened several support cases in the past and at times felt like little was being done to resolve the issues I was having. For example, when searching the use against a training credit, Skilljar said the code was fully used, yet only 1 had been used. The support team seemed to not have interest in learning why this was happening and ensuring it does not happen again. The issue was resolved with this particular case, but I have no idea if it was the only training credit having this issue. At times I feel like the issues we encounter do not seem as important to the support team
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.
Skilljar provides stronger customization features, more code snippet options, more styling tools, and more effective integrations. These include Credly, Salesforce, and SCORM. Additionally, the catalog is all part of the same system, making it easy to manage. The analytics tools are also more robust, and the customer service is much more helpful and responsive
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.
Our customers seem to be getting onboarded efficiently. Giving our customers a good experience helps us retain them longer.
So far, we are still not able to come up with solid metrics that it provides evidence of ROI. If Skilljar could somehow come up with clear, actionable metrics about customer success and how that relates to ROI then I think it would be vastly better. To be fair, we roll the cost of using Skilljar in the overall price, otherwise, we would charge customers and have a revenue stream to measure.
