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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. 


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