Just because you can simulate something, doesn't mean you should.
Another element of a strong learning strategy has to do with modality selection and, what we call at Bright, experience design.
While your learning program will include more than just simulations and practice, we want to take some time to speak about this more specifically. Most of us have had experience designing classes, webinars, eLearnings and the like. But there are few if any solutions like Bright out there, so we want to help share some intuition for where you should focus your design time related to simulations.
For us this starts with the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle.
This is a concept you can apply in most places in life - it says that 80% of your results usually comes from 20% of your work. It means that a small percentage of things can cause MOST of your results.
For learning organizations facing limited resources - which is all of us - that means we need to be laser focused on the places in the customer or patient journey where practice can actually make a difference.
Many companies have a tendency to boil the ocean with their learning programs. They feel a strong obligation to cover “everything” so that employees won’t be faced with something they’ve never seen before.
The problem here is that behavioral science tells us there are diminishing returns to covering more and more topics - especially in new hire training. Our capacity to learn and master more in a short amount of time is like a pipe - there’s only so much throughput and capacity.
All of this is relevant for simulations perhaps more than anywhere else in your learning strategy.
Practice is a little like exercise. If you only did 10 pushups a week for a few months, you might see a little improvement. But you couldn’t reasonably be surprised when you don’t see results. Because that’s just not how strength works.
The same applies for learning. If an associate only practices a key transaction, soft skill, or problem solving scenario 1 or 2 times before they’re responsible for it with a customer, we can’t be surprised when they don’t deliver amazing results. Because that’s just not how skill growth works.
So this has led to a Bright phrase that you’ll probably hear our team use: just because you can simulate something doesn’t mean you should.
You need to define a meaningful “Day 1 Scope.” This means the first place you’ll focus your new capabilities in order to learn what works best for your organization as you learn to use the Platform. The first few areas you build immersive learning won’t be the ONLY place - but starting small makes sense.
Find the moments in the customer or patient journey where if our associates crush it, we’ll see meaningful improvement in the business metrics we’ve identified. This is where the word ‘moment’ in the platform actually comes from - the moments in the customer or patient experience that matter most.
What we’ve found is that there are 3 places that typically represent places for meaningful simulations.
- First - Frequency. Let’s use the a customer success or contact center team as an example. Most contact centers get hundreds of types of calls. But when you look at those calls, there’s a small number of call types that make up most of the volume. The call types or software transactions in THIS part of this graph would be ideal for simulations that a learner needs to iterate on MANY times. The items in THIS part of the graph may be appropriate, but if they happen infrequently may be better served by some other learning method.
- Another way to identify good opportunities for simulations is Revenue or Cost impact. For this, let’s use the example of a sales team that sells a number of different products. If you have 1-2 products that represent a much greater revenue or profit opportunity, it may make sense to give practice in the customer objections or sales skills related to THOSE products.
Another example may be for a oil change center. If you know that whenever this team makes a mistake it generates a lot of extra costs to re-service the customer and give refunds, training and practice to avoid costs makes a ton of sense. - The last way to look for ideal simulation opportunities is to consider mission-critical items that may be important for your brand or your company’s target customer experience. A great example of this came from some work we did with a large healthcare system. They knew that patient privacy was deeply important to their mission. But there wasn’t an obvious or immediate revenue tie to protecting patient privacy, and there wasn’t necessarily tremendous volume for the areas where they were seeing challenges in protecting patient privacy. But it was just that important to their value. And so it rose to the top of their priorities for practice.
We’ll talk in later lessons about HOW to design and build simulations, but the 80/20 rule and identifying the RIGHT place to use simulations and AI-powered coaching is the first step to getting the full value from your Bright platform.