Recommending a Great Bottle

Needs Analysis and Stakeholders

In this project, the client expressed a need to ease scheduling needs during peak season (in this case, the winter holidays). Through interviews with store owners and site managers, we identified that one contributing factor was the high level of support that part-time or seasonal staff required from full time staff when it came to helping customers choose specific products. This meant that those "high knowledge" employees were unable to perform other necessary tasks and also needed to be scheduled nearly constantly during their busiest season.

Design and SMEs

To alleviate this issue, I worked with permanent salespeople and store managers to identify the types of recommendations that part-time and seasonal employees would most frequently be asked to make. This would allow part-time and seasonal employees to answer the most frequently-asked questions and provide assistance to a wider variety of customer - without overwhelming new employees with too much information.

We decided to create an eLearning course in Articulate Rise because of the need for rapid deployment and the lack of a formal LMS. Additionally, Rise courses are easily viewed on a mobile device on the sales floor or behind a register in the event that the employee needs to reference it as a job aid. I also suggested creating two print job aids to keep behind the register - one with top-selling products in each category and another with an "FAQ" for product terms.

Course Organization

I chose to begin by providing a framework for answering basic questions about the more complicated product categories the store offers, then by providing a set of four "go-to" recommendations for four of the most common customer profiles.

For the first section, I chose to begin by talking about a product that most employees are already familiar with due to extensive prior training. By reviewing this information efficiently and specifically referring back to the prior training, I encourage the learner to incorporate the upcoming information into that existing schema. I mirror the structures and visual language used in the first product category when discussing the other - and probably less familiar - categories later. I also chose to discuss all three categories through one lens they have in common - the effect aging has on the product. By tying unfamiliar terms to a process they're already familiar with, I make it easier for learners to recall this information later.

The recommendations section of the course is significantly shorter than the first section. While it is useful for the learner to have a broad base of knowledge to facilitate conversation with customers, I felt it was important to narrow the scope here. I did this to account for learning fatigue as the course progresses. Furthermore, learners are much more likely to remember two pairs of items than six or seven "best-sellers" from across the store.

The assessment for this course consists for a series of simulated customer interactions. The learner is presented with a customer who has a general idea of what they want, but don't know the vocabulary that the learner has been reviewing throughout the course. The learner is asked first to identify the type of product needed, and then to identify the correct product from the previous section. The assessment was created in Storyline and imported into Rise, rather than using the built-in Scenarios feature, in order to allow the interaction to be graded & for feedback to be provided upon completion.