Matt
My name is Matt Plass. I am the CEO of the US business and I am joined today by my colleague Mark Dorosz, who is the head of the Integrity Ethics and Compliance Training product. Today is an introduction to the launch; a soft launch if you like, because this is almost a sneak preview, of Integrity Ethics and Compliance Training, which we believe is the new standard in Global Compliance eLearning and global compliance training. Some of the people on the webinar will already know that we deliver compliance training products that include customizable titles for a global audience. As we move into 2019 we are about to launch an upgrade of our product, and that is really what today is about.
Mark
Fantastic. So, just to provide some context, we wanted to run this session as an opportunity for you to see what we’ve been working on, but also just to get a sense of what we’ve been hearing in the marketplace. Today, we have 170 multinationals who collectively train 3 million corporate workers in over 30 languages around their regulatory training requirements. As part of that, we want to stay at the top of the pack. 2019 is the year that we are doing a major refresh of our off-the-shelf Global Compliance eLearning offering.
So how do we get to that? I think there are three key areas where we want to work on an ongoing basis.
- The first one is speaking directly with folks like yourselves on the phone today, people who are responsible for running compliance training programs, and hearing what you want in your compliance program; learning how our own training is performing, and what features you are seeing out there in the marketplace that you feel could enhance a program.
- The second one (and I’m going counter-clockwise) is from industry regulators. Several of the firms that we work with have close and constructive relationships with their regulators, and we do get feedback from federal, state, and also New York regulators around what they want to see from a training program, in terms of the learning experience, reporting, and overall strategy.
- Finally, within our own company, we are unique in the compliance learning space in that we are a learning company. So, when we look at 2019, we’ve also put our own shoulder behind this, through providing learning expertise, and then through a partnership with Cordery and Nexxus. Nexxus provides the right legal content to make sure that materials resonate with what you need for a program in 2019. Today, we’re going to be focusing on the core stuff – the new features, the whizz-bang as it were, but in addition to that, this approach has now been applied to a library of a hundred topics. You’ll see them all there. They are each about five minutes long.
But, in addition to the upgrades to the learning experience, we’ve added specialist content for the US market around ADA, government interactions, expanded coverage on HIPAA, new content for environmental health and safety, and we’ve expanded our materials around data privacy.
And then for Europe, we’ve added new GDPR content on customer service and R&D.
So today we’re not talking about simple Global Compliance eLearning content, but about the design we have applied to those 130 topics, and to the substantial additions we’ve made to the actual library.
With that in mind, let’s talk about what we’ve done. When you look at these products, they will give you an insight into what we’re doing differently in 2019. This will also be an opportunity for you to compare your own compliance training, and to think about what features you want to add to your own internally built program in 2019. To do that, we’re going to look at 10 features.
First of all, the inspiration for these changes has come from our clients, regulators, from our own internal people. If there is a feature you don’t see today that you would be interested in seeing we’d love to hear about it, partly because we’re always interested in what our customers want, but also because it may just be something we haven’t thought of yet.
1. Custom Color Codes – your brand colors
One of the first features we’ve added for 2019 is the option for our clients to dial in their own custom color codes. We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for you to make the courses that you take from us look and feel like they’re part of your brand. This is a technology solution, as it usually is today, and it gives you the ability to dial in your custom color codes and immediately, throughout the entire sweep of the courses, see that change automatically applied. What would look originally like an Interactive Services module can very quickly, as you see on the screen, start to look like an Oracle module.
2. Improved Visual Design
Number 2 is we’ve added 1,000 new images and media assets throughout the learning experience. We’ve tried to be tactical around looking at where they’ll add value, how they’re going to work with a global audience, and how we position imagery and other media assets that are really going to resonate with the audience. Anybody who is familiar with our current learning product should see a big improvement in terms of the overall visual design.
3. Full 508 Compliance – as standard
The next one up really is a big one for us. I think we are the first company in the marketplace to offer the full 508 Compliance; that is the piece of legislation here in the US that determines accessibility for disabled people. Our product, straight out of the box, will plug in and have full native support for the JAWS text to speech reader. That’s the technology which supports learners who are visually impaired. It is something we have done for the past two years, but it’s been by special request, whereas with the new product we’ve built it comes as a standard feature. I think what’s most impressive with the programming team is they’ve been able to add support for 508 Compliance without compromising the primary learning experience for the broader population of learners. It’s something that right now is still seen as what I have to call a “Nice to Have”. I think that’s going to change over the next 12 months, and we’re going to start to see organizations mandating 508 Compliance across their training, so that was one of the incentives for us, to be ready for that.
4. Deployment-ready Languages
In terms of the fourth feature, we’ve increased the number of deployment-ready languages that we have out of the box. We’ve almost doubled the number of languages that you can now deploy instantly when you take the library content. We received feedback from Global Compliance eLearning customers in the past that said, although we had some of the languages they needed, they didn’t appreciate the wait for the ones that we didn’t have. We now have what we think is a language pack that will meet 95% of the needs that we see out there.
5. Improved Navigation
The next one, and this really is for the learners, we wanted our Menu screen (which is how learners live and breathe and experience the course, and it’s also one of the first things they see) to provide some basics of data analytics. So, we focused on this concept of ‘my’ progress, ‘my’ learning, and the idea is that at a glance I can very quickly get a sense of how I’ve progressed through the course and how much longer I need to spend on my training, and so I can get a sense of completion as I go through the individual topics. It’s a small change, but we think it’s one of the slicker interfaces that is out there within the learning offering. It really sets the standard for the new learner in terms of the product being easy to navigate. It also makes it very clear as to what is expected of me, and what I need to get through. You’ll see there that, expected in 2019, is a version that scales beautifully down for a mobile device, with one version of the course moving across devices.
6. New Content
For interactions, one of the promises we’ve always made to the learner through our training is that we keep it simple for them. They always know where they are, they always know what they have to do, and we began the journey with a fairly limited subset of interactions and training experiences just to keep that consistency. But we have decided to upgrade those interactions, so when you have a look at our courses now you’ll notice a number of new ones. This is really different ways to present information, different ways to present scenarios, ways of sequencing information or cutting information or allowing greater learner control over the content, so they have a broader experience and they feel like they have a little autonomy over their experience as well. There’s a number of expanded interactions, we’ll be delighted to show you. I think Mark will point a couple of them out when we do the demo, and when we send you a trial version you’ll be able to take a look and have that experience for yourselves.
7. Question Level Tracking
Number seven, this is something that we have supported for the past three years. We do question level tracking, so out of the box, our framework will record each and every click, both in terms of the scenario challenges and the quiz questions. What has changed is we’re seeing LMS’s like Success Factors, Cornerstone on Demand, Litmus, providing native functionality for recording that data. If you’ve got one of those more modern LMS platforms, out of the box we’ll be able to provide question level reporting that will allow you to see how your organization is performing, and will give you a sense of where you should adapt and focus your program in 2020. So yep, we’re already thinking one year out.
8. New Text Editor
If you’ve seen our content before you’ll know that one of the advantages of working with Integrity is that you can edit the content yourselves. We know how important it is to make the content feel right for you, and that could be as simple as changing the words “Compliance and Legal” to “Compliance Department” or it could be a complete overhaul of a scenario, or a quiz, or a piece of introductory information.
We wanted to put that into our clients’ hands. We created a text editor that allowed our clients to open a course, make all the changes they need, and then we can republish that course for them. And we’ve done a few upgrades on that editor tool. It’s been out in the wild for about a year, and we realized there are some opportunities to make it easier. You can now not only edit every single word of text on the screen, but you can also add hyperlinks, and you can also do the formatting, you can edit the menus and the content pages.
There’s really nothing on screen in terms of text that you’re not able to edit and format yourselves. And that again gives greater autonomy to the client. Just as an aside, one of the harder conversations we’ve had as a training company over the years is trying to articulate the effort that goes into making a simple text change. For some of our clients, it seems like the most simple thing in the world. It’s just one word, can we not just change it quickly?
But, of course, it needs to be opened, changed, closed, republished, and retested across all the different platforms. But, by giving our clients a text editor, we’ve taken a huge chunk of that cost out of what we do. And that is reflected in the pricing as well, so again, this is something you can have a play with and certainly something that people are finding very useful in terms of branding, and getting the content just right for the organization.
9. Voice Overs
Number nine. Well, while our courseware has always supported native voice-overs for France, French Canadian, German, Brazilian, Portuguese, a new addition is UK voice over. We actually think while it’s a small change, it’s a pretty strong tactical addition to the offering. First impressions have such a big impact, and a lot of the companies that we work with are US multinationals. Their businesses may well be in 50, 60 plus countries, but their headquarters reside here in the US, so when work is outside of that US market, when we open a piece of training, we want to really make it feel like it’s something that has been produced for them.
One of the things that really touches people, often on a subconscious level, is the voice over that I hear when the course starts, so as part of that new framework, for international markets, you’ll have the option of using our default US voice over, or, if you prefer, you can use a neutral UK Irish voice over for the same content, if you feel that that would resonate better with your learners outside the US. While it’s only a small change, we have found from our experiences that it can make a huge difference in perception. These are little features that we’re actually pretty excited about.
10. Bandwidth Control
As we increase any work with global organizations, whose footprint is often expanding year on year, we’ve realized that we have a need to provide a bandwidth mode, because while most of our customers in the US and Europe have a broadband connection, and we’re able to run content down a fairly strong pipe, many of the audiences are still on a low bandwidth.
For this reason we now have a new feature, which automatically sniffs out the connection, the internet connection, and if it sniffs and sees that you’re on a low bandwidth, it will deliver the content in a slightly different way. That might mean it will give you a slightly low-grade video, which is what happens on a low bandwidth, or it may even replace the video with images and text if that’s what it needs to do to get the content through. What that means is that you can have confidence that the content is going to reach everybody, regardless of where they are and regardless of the quality of their internet connection. This is a huge improvement, particularly for organizations with a global footprint, or for those who might have contingent workers or factory workers where they have very little control over the environments in which people take the training.
Demonstration
Let me walk you through some of the new features that we have presented. When we launch it, it will open up with the multimedia, and you’ll see straight away that we’ve got a course here that is heavily branded for Integrity Ethics and Compliance. We’ve got some fresh imagery that starts the course and then we’re in, and one thing we’ve added is that little navigation screen. We’ve got some beautiful iconography that just gets called out in the beginning, some really simple instructions as to how to navigate through the training.
In this instance, we open up with a video vignette that talks about why you should care about harassment and then from there, we have that beautiful new menu that we talked about. What’s really nice about it is that I can show it running on an iPhone, so you’ll see that it scales that out on iPhone or, if I go back up to my desktop, it’s going back to scale in real-time. While this looks beautiful, what is remarkable about it is that this is the same piece we built for an example of a client branding here. As you can see, we just dropped in their own background image. By default, now you tell us your HEX code for your brand, and every piece of text throughout the course will automatically be branded. You just give us the instructions once. Then, what’s even more beautiful, is when I go up here for the glossary and the transcript, those roll-over in FedEx time.
Little touches, but they make a massive difference. It feels like a product that is branded when it goes out to your learners. As you see, we’re just looking at the stock product here, but we’ve got a glossary which is fully searchable and it looks great, we’ve got a transcript with any voice over, we’ve got a nice resources section in case you have materials you want to use, and then detailed help information that you can set up yourself. When we start the course, they begin with our video vignettes. All these have been refreshed and they just kick-off with why this is important. And then from there, for this US version of the course, you’ll see that we now have actual market-specific information.
If I was taking the UK course, I would have pictures of the Houses of Parliament, but as it knows I’m out in the US I see US legislation and US imagery. And then, once I’ve gone through some of the basics, I jump into meeting this character Imani, who is going to share her story. Once we’re into that, you’ll see that we’ve got these beautiful new question templates laid out, which will scale across any device and again, in the FedEx example, this would default to purple, and so would the text at the top here. After that, you’ll see here an explanation as to why that’s the best answer.
There’s another neat little feature that we’ve built into the navigation. We’ve gone back to simple left to right, which we’ve found for organizations rolling out to 50,000 people the most reliable way of presenting it. I’ve got a nice visualization as I go through the training. And then the scenarios; we’re using a range of question layouts so that I get some variety in my learning experience.
Throughout, you’ll see this key iconography, and then, at the end of it, we’ve got another new question type before finally we get to thanking Imani, and then we have our quiz. I got 100%! – there you go, I get a nice endorsement, and then on my home page you’ll see I get a tick mark, so it’s really clear how far I’ve gone.
This is an extract from a webinar in February 2019. NEW Integrity Ethics and Compliance Training 2019 – US Launch Event
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