PiiQ by Cornerstone vs. Trakstar Learn

Great for managing medium sized teams of people spread over geographically dispersed offices. Not so good for small teams (less than 15). Requires a degree of time and effort to set up correctly to provide useful data for management and a good experience for staff members, but once that effort has been made the results are great.

Incentivized

I believe Mindflash is perfect for corporate training in any industry. It's quick, efficient and provides an unprecedented platform to provide training information digitally. Especially when you do not have enough resources to provide in-person training that requires detailed attention covering a massive territory.

• Excellent customer service - when all else is equal, customer service will win the day.
• Ease of use helps us get everyone on board with the goals and ratings.
• The analytics are helpful to senior managers - we can compare how managers rate as well as how employees perform.

• Mindflash is very clean and user-friendly. Very easy for learners to navigate and understand.
• Mindflash’s reporting tool is unmatched. You can pull any type of report you could want or need.
• Customer service is top-notch. From our Sales Executive to our CSM, all the way up to the VP, our experience has been amazing.

Incentivized

• Being able to select more than one person when approving goals.
• Options to identify which people managers haven't approved goals, dine a review etc...rather then having to mimic each manager to see how they are going.
• 360 Feedback to stakeholders outside the business.
• Being able to remove a role that isn't being used in the organization anymore.

Incentivized

• Admin: They only allow one admin account, which can be a headache. Instead of logging into my personal Mindflash I log into a shared user, that makes and assigns all the videos.
• Agent UI: It isn't the prettiest UI and can be hard to navigate for beginners.
• Certificates: The certificates for passing a course are just dumb. I have them all turned off and I could never see that being useful.

Incentivized

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 am extremely likely to continue using Mindflash for a few reasons. One, Mindflash has increased its capabilities dramatically during the year that I have been using it. Like any good business or service provider, Mindflash seems to have the desire to constantly improve its users experience. I know in another year, Mindflash will be better than it is today. For example, I know that Mindflash is at least exploring the possibility of adding language support to its capabilities. As someone who works in many non-English speaking countries, this would be a huge benefit to me. Additionally, I have been very impressed by Mindflash's customer service. They have always been very helpful and gracious.

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 interface is just so simple to understand. It's clean and efficient. We showed Mindflash off to the Safety group, who are not computer gurus and they were beyong excited to use it.

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

Any problems or questions we have had with Mindflash have been handled promptly and effectively. I normally use the online chat option but have had to correspond with them through email and phone as well. We have never had an issue languish for weeks or months with Mindflash. They either fix the problem or let you know that the software isn't capable to handle the need at that point.

Incentivized

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

If you're going to develop a short course to demo the product internally, don't bother avoiding your own topics. Mindflash rolls whatever content you create during the trial into your production environment when you decide to buy. The time taken to go from not having a system to being live with Mindflash is virtually instant. What you'll be wanting for is time to develop content and people to test it out.

We did review other systems when we purchased PiiQ but I don't know what these were due to the member of staff no longer being with the company, however, I do not that we chose PiiQ as it was simple to use and that it also had the Performance option available in addition to the learning platform. we knew that this was something we wanted to have in the future which is why we purchased it.

Incentivized

The only other training platform similar to Mindflash that I have used is RedVector. However, we use that platform entirely differently than Mindflash. RedVector has a very large available library for our users to stay current on their PDU/education credits for their PE and PMP licenses. It does have the option to build training within it as well, but we have not used that feature because it is more focused on providing external training for others.

Incentivized

• Reviews are generally taking managers less time to prepare because the essential infrastructure is in place. Past reviews are easily retrievable for review if needed.
• HR administration of the system takes less time than the previous version of Cornerstone (CSOD). HR is still responsible for training new users, but the built-in user guide is more thorough and easier to use.
• We're starting to see - slowly but surely - more (and hopefully better) interaction between manager and employee.

Incentivized

• Mindflash has had a positive impact on our business because it allows us to train more new users with less effort, and ensure that trainees have access to the course materials for a period of time after they have started using our software to do their daily jobs. Review of the course materials allows them to get answers to common questions without having to submit requests to our support team, thereby reducing the administrative burden on our resources.

Incentivized