Skip to main content

A customer education experience

  A few days back I received a mail asking me to download an app for customer learning that promised to teach me to invest wisely. Being the curious types, I actually downloaded the said app and decided to take it for a spin.

Here are my observations :

First, it asked me for my personal data. Now already, for me, this is not customer education any more - it is about creating a sales pitch. #Fail

Then it introduced a rabbit as a mascot. Why rabbit? There did not seem to be any logic. Atleast nothing that did anything for me to recall the purpose of a rabbit and associate it with investing. 

Then it promised to show me interesting videos. I saw two videos. Topic 1: Inflation - and asks me to beat investments by investing in mutual funds. The rabbit came and offered me a badge - well begun.

Topic 2: Compounding: Using the example of a mango tree - asks me to invest in mutual funds. The rabbit came and offered me a badge yet again. And a quiz. And a debutant badge somewhere along the way with some thoroughly uninteresting quiz questions - balloon themed - yay.

By stage 2, they have given up on videos and instead use a set of glorified flash cards to make me (the user) understand Saving versus investing and Impact of inflation. The quiz here was a gambling table set up with playing cards (really?) and a Dr. learnit likes my enthusiasm or something. Who is this Learnit? Must be the rabbit I suppose. And I get a listener badge.  

The next quiz is themed on an island. Why? For the treasure as points - yo!

 And after another module the balloon quiz is back.

And I am a scholar now and learnit applauds. 

Compounding using the moon as an example - not sure I understood it fully.  Now I have to swipe to answer the quiz. And I became awesome. 

The next module text is decidedly tiny. I demand free glasses. And now its an archery quiz. And another lame swiping session later I get a jumping rabbit image, a certificate that looks like a doctors prescription that I am asked to share. 

Tired, well worn graphics, vectors and text. A spinning wheel as a quiz next. 

My view: The personal data at the start came across as a sales pitch. How to do this smartly?  Possibly ask for indicative rather than exact details - this ensures that it doesn't come across as an "in your face" sales pitch right at the start. 

The rabbit and I presume its name learnit, the badges, the multiple types of interaction all felt like a gimmick to me from a learner interaction perspective. And interacting with this app set me thinking what would customer education look like given that this is a constant problem. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero to One

Zero to One by Peter Thiel is a nice read. (Yes - if I sit down to write a book review - the book has to be worth it - and usually good - so most of my book reviews are about good books.You can stop here if that's the information you seek.) Where this book scores is in contrarian thoughts and contrarian questions that make you think. It starts with a four big lessons learned from the 90s dot-com crash that is, Make incremental advances, Stay lean and flexible, Improve on the competition and Focus on product, not sales. Just as you warm up to it, he says, the opposite rules are more correct - which are: It is better to risk boldness than triviality. A bad plan is better than no plan. Competitive markets destroy profits. Sales matters just as much as products. And finally leaves with a simple definition of contrarianism - it is not to oppose the crowd (or follow a smaller or newer or older crowd) but to think for yourself. "All happy companies are different"...
Post a Comment
Read more

Anti networking year

I dont usually go out of my way to network. But over the last few years, I ensured that I spend some time creating new connections. It is a small fragment of my time that goes into it, but what I realised was that some of those networking events were not really working out. I also took time to post about the things I do (mostly on Linkedin) and here (nobody reads this - this is more of a note to myself).  It seemed to be the same set of people saying the same set of things. So, this year I have decided to step back.  Unless it is a truly unique event, I wont be going to any event - and thats how the unconference happened.  Unless it is a really significant update, I wont be posting about it.  And spend time creating and doing the things I like to do. Perhaps read more. Or write more. It is April now and I have done well so far.  Managed to read a few books. Actively working on a few creations. And then some. Lets see.  So for all I know, I might write less ...
Post a Comment
Read more