Creating a customer simulation
November 8, 2013 12:00 AM
Hi everyone!
My company had to build a course on sales skills for a cosmetics retail chain. To make things more relevant for the learners, we decided to add a branching scenario game. Basically, learners had to meet a customer, read what he says and choose one of 2 or 3 reply options. Depending on their choice, the converstation developed towards a sale, an upsale, or an ultimate failure.
Our instructional designers were really excited about it. Look at this script! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11433463/trivantis/bt/sim_script_excel.PNG
The client loved it, and it was easy to build in Lectora. However, the end result suffered from a number of issues:
- not being able to see the branching structure (like the above Excel chart) lead to errors (wrong links and broken links)
- manual work of moving changes to the script in Excel into the actual course - reviews were painful
- overall "PowerPointy" feel because each page was just it - a separate page
- finally, Lectora's infamous flicker between pages
So next time we invested into a Flash-based engine that we inserted into the Lectora course. It looked much better with smooth animations, making changes was easier (we used XML for all texts), but a lot of the above problems remained unsolved. Also, Flash became obsolete pretty quickly.
We spoke to a lot of people and found they had similar problems. So we solved it with BranchTrack.com (yes, you knew I was going to pitch something, didn't you?)
You can look at the customer dialogue game that was built in a few minutes here: http://www.branchtrack.com/projects/on029pq6
It's pretty easy to insert into Lectora, too, so these dialogues can become an integrated part of your courses. It makes any customer-oriented e-learning so much more effective while leveraging all the power of Lectora.
What do you think? Does anyone need a sample Lectora project or instructions on how to do this?
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