Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
Issue link: http://elmezine.epubxp.com/i/133739
Businessof Learning Mobile, Mobile, Mobile HOW CRICKET DEVISED AN E-LEARNING STRATEGY THAT PLAYED ON THE COMPANY'S STRENGTHS. BY JOE DIDONATO A t our recent virtual event, John Moxley from Cricket University laid out a framework for creating a mobile learning experience for remote sales personnel. Like all of you that attended the event, I was really impressed with the elegance and simplicity of the user interface and experience. To keep that experience from being lost, I thought I'd do a short case study on Cricket Communications for you, seeing that mobile is topping the investment strategies for a very wide swath of our readership. And if you missed this event — and like what you're about to hear — we've asked John to do an entire workshop at our ELCE 2013 event in Anaheim, Calif., on August 28th. So what is Cricket Communications? For those of you who don't know, Cricket is a nationwide wireless provider, with a wide range of services and unlimited rate plans for voice, text, Web and broadband. It also doesn't have any contracts, and its subscriber base is around 600,000. Its sales are through company stores, dealers and national partners like Best Buy and Walmart. And of course, it's competing with the "big boys" in this arena, so it has to be much more agile and smarter about training employees and partners. Enter its mobile learning strategy. PROBLEMS FACED One of the recurring problems that Cricket faces is getting to sales people when all of the PCs on the sales foor are occupied. Other problems around accessing training are that point-of-sale terminals are not appropriate for training, and pulling sales reps of the selling foor is both inefcient and a scheduling challenge. On top of all those issues, Moxley felt that Cricket wasn't really leveraging its core technology. THE LAUNCH At that point, Moxley decided to create a mobile learning strategy. Te core elements that he needed to teach included product knowledge, selling skills, customer service, point-of-sale systems, job responsibilities, and a range of professional skills like listening, giving feedback, teamwork, collaboration and consulting. So with that, Moxley took the frst steps. He did three proofs of concepts, decided between a mobilefriendly Web page and an "app" approach, and then experimented with QR codes for in-class assessments and sign-ups via smartphones. He and his team decided that they needed a mobile platform that stressed a single point of contact for the mobile user, a delivery platform that was separate from the content being delivered, and an app (provided by Cellcast) to synchronize with the cloud for local storage, as well as provide comGovernment Elearning! April / May 2013 19