To my colleagues at Financial Services and our supporting teams,

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Echo acquisition by Colibri (the acquisition of OnCourse Learning and Becker Professional Education).  I think it’s fair to say this acquisition has had a transformational and fundamental impact on all of us- of how we see ourselves and how we see our future as the leader in financial services professional learning.  We came from different places but were bonded together through our passion for student success.  We found we were more alike than different, that while our tactics and tools may not have been the same, we approached our work in a  similar way. And we found common glue in Colibri values:  Love, Joy, Boldness, Teamwork and Curiosity.  While we used different words at OnCourse Learning, we learned that affinity and common bond was strong. 

Seems like a lot of fluff, right?  Most likely, your day-to-day has not changed. You still serve up energy, expertise, and a spirit of partnership in every interaction you have with students. And you are likely still focused on your core markets and customers. And this is exactly as it should be.  We are stronger together because we bring our own collective strengths, market perspectives and love for learning every day.  We are strong because you care so deeply about securities, insurance, mortgage, and banking success.  But our success goes deeper than our focus on our markets.

I’d encourage you to think of the transformation of how we approach our future.  Think of how much we have accomplished in the past year.  We have aligned our sales, marketing, leadership and learning teams, started sharing content and tools across our groups, and have seen how strong we can be as an aligned team.  We executed on plans to bring together our Learn Mortgage and OnCourse Learning team, are working diligently to bring our solutions to common platforms, like XCEL moving to OnCourse Direct and Salesforce, and shared best practice and learning across our teams. Cross-sales are beginning to accelerate, as our B2B partners understand we are stronger together, and we continue to move forward in our vision- that by bringing these market leading assets together, we can make it inconvenient for professional financial learners to work with anyone else.

We know this has been hard. Change always is, and I ask that you continue to approach our integration with the open mind, can-do spirit and partnership that has made it a success. We don’t succeed without you, and I thank each one of you for your contributions.

There is so much more to do. But I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished in our first year.  We are One Colibri, and we are stronger together in Financial Services. Over the next few days, you will receive an invitation for a virtual toast- to celebrate our collective success and one year of accomplishment.  I do hope you can join us.

All the best,

Josh

Voice of Customer (VoC) is a term used to describe the process of capturing customer feedback and using it to inform business decisions. The goal of VoC is to gain a better understanding of the customer's needs, expectations, and experiences with a product or service. By doing so, we can improve customer satisfaction, increase retention rates, and drive revenue growth.

Voice of customer feedback is critical in all stages of the product lifecycle. An effective program is built with continuous improvement in-mind to ensure methods and frequencies are capturing the right data at the right time in right context. It is critical to apply effective means of VoC throughout the product management lifecycle.

Below are some of the methods we use to capture the voice of the customer today:

• Live and OnDemand course surveys
• Target market surveys
• Account management check in calls
• New business prospecting and demonstrations
• Third-party market surveys
• Customer service feedback
• Contextual design
• Social media/message boards
• Client advisory boards

Some types of VoC data we collect:

• Product purchase data
• Customer purchase habits
• Website interactions (behaviors)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Completion data/pass rates
• Course usage/completions
• Purchase decision drivers
• Customer satisfaction (course, support interaction, other)
• Product enhancement and feature requests
• Win/loss reasons
• Much more!

These methods may be conducted on periodical, proactive ongoing, ad hoc and/or reactive cadences based on need and source.

Gathering quantitative and qualitative VoC feedback data is only part of an effective VoC program. Effectively leveraging the feedback is critical to gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage.

Here are some of the ways we leverage the data to drive decisions:

• Informs our platform and course product roadmaps
  • New products
  • New feature
  • Feature enhancements
• Message to market
• Product positioning and pricing
• Customer service and support practices
• Class format
• Speakers/instructors we use
• Bundling

Leveraging the voice of the customer is critical to our ability to meet and exceed our professional customers’ expectations in the competitive markets we serve. Effectively collecting and analyzing feedback allows our teams to make informed and decisions that better align our product and service offerings to meet, and exceed, customer expectations. It is not as simple as just acting on every piece of feedback but involves analyzing the feedback and developing creative solutions to solve those problems in innovative ways.

Ultimately, serving our customers better than our competition and helping them grow as professionals and achieve their desired business outcomes positions us down a path to achieve our vision to become the most admired professional learning company in the world.

Migration of Insurance Courses to Absorb – The following insurance courses were migrated to the Xcel’s Absorb platform in Feb: AZ, DE, IA, KS, LA, MD, MT NE, NH, NM, OK, UT, WY, D.C. The end of life for theses states on common will be February 28th.  A communication was sent to all affected students on January 23. We will migrate the last group of states the first week of March: AK, GA, ID, KY, MA, ME, MI, NJ, PA, RI, SC, TX and VA.  These courses will no longer be offered on common on March 6rd and existing users will need to complete their courses by April 10th.  

IAR CE – The new six hour Ethics and Professional Responsibility module has been launched on STCUSA.COM. In addition, we have launched a self-service tool that allows Certified Financial Planners (CFPs) the ability to earn FREE CPE credits for 14 of our IAR CE courses. This link exists within each course that is approved for credits.  Students can simply click on the link and request free credits. Curriculum is working on the final six Product and Practices courses and we anticipate that we will go live with them in March.    

Qualtrics Implementation – We are in the process of updating questions within the feedback button located on student dashboard.  We will be gathering CSAT scores by Series (7, SIE, 66,etc ), as well as by product (progress exams, final exams).  Students will  anonymously share the voice of the customer with us, and we will monitor their detailed feedback and undetected bugs more quickly and identify future student dashboard and purchase journey enhancements.