e-Learning for the benefit of customer experience

Customer experience has become, in all sectors, a performance issue for companies. E-Learning helps to improve it by training employees (sales people, marketing and customer relations teams, etc.) in the new requirements of customer experience. But e-Learning technologies can also be used directly with customers to improve their purchasing path. This is what the pharmaceutical company Baxter has dared to try, with successful results.

Competitive markets, even saturated ones; digital transformation; new requirements from customers; the weight of social networks: companies face many challenges. In this context, the quality of the customer experience becomes a strong way to differentiate and build loyalty.

Here again, digital options transform the state-of-play by enabling companies to get firmly in the heart of the customer experience, in the BtoB as in the BtoC: by offering an omni-channel relationship, ensuring the continuity of the customer journey, bringing more responsiveness and so on.

To integrate these new tools, the company must change how it interacts with customers and also the roles and skills of its teams. Marketing is reinventing itself, tools are evolving, the salesperson is becoming a consultant, an embodiment of the brand, even an advertiser.

It has become imperative for companies to transmit to all its teams a new “customer culture” and the skills that it requires. For this, the company can count on e-Learning. Beyond its natural advantages (saving time, reducing distance constraints and training costs, facilitating personalisation of content, etc.), e-Learning offers formats that are particularly suited to training in customer relationship issues, such as the Serious Game, which makes it possible to put employees in real situations.

In Retail, tenfold stakes

The world of Retail has been among the most heavily impacted by the new demands of customer experience, and one of the first to adapt to it. E-Learning has shown its relevance. By offering distance learning – as part of a strategy of Blended Learning to maintain contact with teams – general or à la carte, quick to deploy and adapted to different media, Digital Learning can train employees scattered across a sales network and harmonise expertise and practices in record time.

But e-Learning technologies can also be put at the service of the customer, as Baxter, the pharmaceutical company, did with support from ITycom. Resolutely focused on innovation, Baxter is aimed at hospital services and doctors: a demanding, expert group – with little time to spare. So, to launch a new product in 2016, the company asked ITycom to design an equally innovative device based on the strengths of e-Learning. David Nepote-Vesino, Marketing Director at Baxter, says: “Medical conferences are key moments for us: doctors are together, they are more available in these “outside clinic” hour. To effectively present our new hemodialysis therapy, we designed an interactive wall combining 3D presentation and videos as  well as Serious Games using a touch screen. ”

This interactive wall replaces the traditional sales brochure and is at the heart of the dialogue with the doctor. The device that also enables Baxter to stand out as an innovative company, reaffirming its leadership by compelling everyone to look at them. “Thus we achieved consistency between style and substance,” summarises David Nepote-Vesino.

The success of Baxter’s interactive wall is such that the first two are not enough: there will be a total of 9 deployed at conferences around the world. But Baxter continues to innovate, imagining another use of e-Learning technologies: “A prescription tool for doctors, in the form of Serious Game, is being tested in the medical sector. Currently on tablet, it will eventually be integrated into the dialysis machine, which is a real revolution, ” says David Nepote-Vesino enthusiastically.