Digital Learning Case Study
BUSINESS IMPACT WITH GAMING!
A two minute game saves a company 800+ man-hours annually at a critical juncture. A true out-of-the-box solution that saved extra manpower, additional training and infra-investment and solved the problem quicker.
BUSINESS CONTEXT
Environment instruments is a leader in air pollution monitoring in India that manufactures Air Sampling instruments. One of their products, PM 2.5, saw unprecedented surge in demand after a government notification was passed which required all polluting industries in India to start measuring this parameter.
The instrument gets shipped in boxes and goes with the text heavy user manual which explains how the instrument can be set up by customers.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Customers after receiving the instrument would call up the company asking for a service engineer to come and set up the instrument and show them how it runs. It was not so much of a problem for the company to extend this service in goodwill to customers when the orders volume were manageable, but now the volume was many times over.
The company did not have adequate service bandwidth for this situation.
LOGICAL SOLUTION
Hire a new team of installation service engineers and train them on setting up and running the instrument and respond to customer requests. This solution posed some more challenges:
Recruitment Costs: Quick manpower recruitment
Infrastructure Cost: It required heavy infrastructure investment to manage this new team.
Training Cost and Time: Needed time for the training of these service engineers.
Time Taking: It would take couple of months for this to be operational.
OUR DIAGNOSIS
We understood that customers were being sent the information through the text heavy manual but they were reluctant to follow it as it was very boring and looked very tiresome to go through the manual and be able to assemble the instrument themselves.
We decided to make a process of learning where customers learnt how to set up the instrument themselves.
We helped the customer redefine the problem from 'How to gear up resources to help customers set up the instrument?' to 'How can I get the customer to set up the instrument with ease in an exciting and fun way?'
THE SOLUTION
We designed a two-minute game that would place the instrument parts on a virtual platform and asked the learners to assemble these parts in the correct sequence virtually.
We made it fun and quick as the learners enjoyed dragging the parts virtually on the assembly platform and get feedback on their every action to learn nuances. There was also a hint wizard which prompted the customer on what to do in case the learner was unable to attempt.
We also included in the game a brief description of different parts of the instrument and its function to increase familiarity with the different parts of the instrument.
DEPLOYMENT OF SOLUTION
It was a complete change management cycle. We had to make the customer believe that this will work by testing waters and observing initial response.
As the calls started coming, the service and sales team was trained to forward this game link to the customer and tell them the following:
The setting up of instruments is extremely easy. We have created this two-minute game where once you play you will learn everything you need to know about setting up the specific instrument. We request you to kindly look at this game. It will just take two-minutes of your time. If you are still not able to assemble the instrument, we will be glad to send our service engineer.
Handling Installation Request
Customers were ready to try this two-minute approach because it was quick and could result in immediate resolution of their challenge. Requests for sending service engineer was reduced drastically.
CUSTOMER EMPOWERMENT
A more detailed video training was developed on maintaining and running off the instrument on a dedicated new portal which the customer could use any time. This video training was sent as an accompaniment with all products shipped, thus giving the customer offline access.
Multilingual Training on setting up, running and maintaining the instrument was developed on a dedicated portal.
Offline DVD shipped with the Instrument
Solution Impact
1. Saved the company from hiring new team of service engineers
2. Saved them the cost and time of training these new hires
3. This approach provided immediate relief to their most pressing challenge
It was estimated based on volume sales that some 800 man-hours of service engineer’s time on-site was saved/avoided by using the solution!