Out With The Old, Save With The New

In the earliest days of planning Certiverse, I would ask my testing industry network, what’s holding back your program? All of the answers had a common thread in their responses. It took me a while to pull on that thread to analyze it, but ultimately there were two things that were holding back the launch and growth of new certification programs: Cost and Time.

The time factor was one that I knew my team and I could solve. Then I asked my network, what are the items that take time? As they described the process for developing an exam, it was death by a thousand papercuts. JTA to exam development was an inflexible process, mired with synchronous ceremonies, that required up-front planning and added a lot of cost to the process. We fixed that issue pretty easily with our Certiverse Asynchronous Exam Development model.

But a bigger problem than time is cost. What I learned is that legacy providers were dictating the pricing model and made it extremely difficult for new programs to launch. They extracted all the revenue out of a program, turning most certifications into cost centers. Anybody who delivers with the legacy providers knows exactly what I am talking about. Go and pitch a new certification program to your leadership team and the first thing they’ll ask is, “how much will it cost and what is the loss for the next 12 months?” New ideas are DOA.

Of the few options given by the legacy providers, one is to contract with multiple providers – content systems, proctoring, reporting, vouchers, security, etc. At the end you think you have a best-of-breed solution, but in reality any upfront cost savings are pretty much eliminated when you realize that you have to hire more people to manage all of these vendors. Integrations, support costs, oh and when something goes wrong, like delays or integrations not working, etc. – the more hands involved, the more behind the scenes finger-pointing 👉👈.

The best analogy that I can think of – other than parasite/host, which my marketing team will not be happy with – is the utility provider 😉. Every possible element of exam development and delivery can elicit extra fees, even if they’re normal, expected, and even essential parts of the process.

• Implementation Fees
• Integration Fees
• Connection Fees
• Publishing Fees
• Psychometric Reporting Fees
• Typo Republishing Fee
• QA Fees
• New Feature Request Fee
• Reporting Access Fees
• Data Access Fees
• Exam development
  • JTA / Blueprint
  • Exam development workshop
  • Standard setting workshop
  • Form equating, selecting items 

Add the ludicrous delivery fees to that and you’ll have to price your certification exams above market just to break even. You go against your instinct and increase the price under pressure from your leadership and your program’s volume drops by 50%. Ouch.

It may sound hopeless, but it doesn’t have to be. Our pricing model is Certification Program friendly. We have three pricing tiers driven by how many administrators are using the platform: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. Every client benefits from our Business Intelligence reporting, unlimited integrations, unlimited exam development, and exam publishing. Our delivery pricing is even more simple. One rate includes scheduling, scoring, data reporting, API exam launching, Secure Browser, results reporting via API, Score Reports, etc.

With one exception (SSO is only included with Professional and Enterprise plans), all tiers include everything on our platform. That means that your program has the same access to features that our $3 Trillion client has. We feel that the size of your program should not be a factor in what features you have access to, and we believe a program of any size should have the ability to grow without being smothered by add-on fees.