Simulation Approach Doubles Rate of Sales Productivity
at British Telecommunications

By Reinhard Ziegler

Excerpted from:
e-learning Magazine December, 2001

"…suppose you're a major international telecommunications company with over 17,000 sales and marketing professionals. … traditional services are being replaced by e-business. Your company needs to move beyond being a communications organization and become a true "Internet Services Telco."

"One other thing: you realize that your customers are becoming much more savvy.. You need to develop e-business capabilities in your people…and fast."

"BT's solution embraced … the power of simulation-based e-learning."

"There is an experiential, simulation component called "eXperience the e-Customer." Through the use of highly realistic, simulated telephone conversations with clients, workers can gain deeper skills about how to recognize a customer's needs, how BT's solutions match those needs, and about how to interact with the customer in a mutually beneficial manner."

"… like a "flight simulator" for business."

" The simulation-based approach doubled the rate of sales productivity, producing millions of pounds (dollars, too!) in efficiency gains.

The number of BT customers who feel that customer service agents were "extremely" or "very" knowledgeable jumped 20 percent.

BT eXperience reduced training time by 50 percent, freeing up 11,250 hours of agent productivity time, and 1,215 hours of sales manager productivity time. …BT's managing director of sales said: "experience is the best approach I have ever seen to educate sales and service personnel at speed and scale."

Creative Approaches developed our first "simulated telephone conversations" project in 1995. After-the-fact, supervisors could monitor "live" student responses to "canned" customer questions and complaints. The training even permitted the student to take the training at their workstation using their existing headset and microphone to interact with the training. Contact us for additional information.