Corporate employee training it’s not something that most of the people will consider interesting, but it’s something quite necessary and companies invests a lot of money in it (if you don’t agree with this, just think at the last incident you had with that rude bank teller).
The traditional method is to have in-person classes with a trainer, but this is not scalable and costs a lot, so nowadays most of the corporate training migrated to online (77% in US). In 80% of the cases, this means delivering PowerPoint presentations plus a quiz to check trainees acquired knowledge.
The right way to do this, is to emulate the real situations and teach the trainee what’s the best way to act or what to say. However, building interactive, non-linear, scenario-based trainings is difficult and expensive. There are no right tools for that.
Sergey Snegirev, the CEO of BranchTrack (based in Riga, Latvia), had this problem while working at his previous company, developing e-learning courses for corporate clients. As he put it, “We were building a lot of scenario-based interactive training and we lacked efficient tools, so we build our own toolset.”
The big winners of How To Web Startup Spotlight 2015, BranchTrack is an online authoring tool for scenario-based training. It allows to quickly and easily create training that is engaging, interactive and meaningful. And it requires ZERO technical and design skills – it just works and looks good out of the box.
“Say you need to train a 1000 sales people every year on how to handle angry customers. Face-to-face training is too expensive, and emailing a PowerPoint to everyone does nothing. What if you built a simulation, a game that allows them to face a virtual angry customer and explore different conversation tactics? That’d have much more impact. But it is damn hard (read: expensive) to build. Unless you use our tool!”, explain Sergey.
Seems that’s working just fine – the company received a 50k seed investment from Imprimatur Capital (UK) in 2014 and they made almost $100k in revenue in the past 15 months, selling annual subscriptions (SaaS) starting at $2900 / year.
They’re taking on a big market too – the global eLearning Market is evaluated at $107 billion, according to this study. Also: “Corporate training market is $130 000 000 000 (that’s 130 billion!) and most of it produces crappy content using outdated tools. Kinda like web design in 1990s and we are the future.” declares Sergey.
So next time you have to deal with an inexperienced or unprepared clerk, you may as well send a suggestion to their company to try BranchTrack’s product.
