Gaining Traction: Personalization in e-Learning
For a few years, I have been harping about the need for instructional designers to borrow trends and information from other disciplines, to "take a marketer out for lunch - and learn." My early work in the confluences between marketing and learning focused on marketing's "buying process" - and I appreciate the feedback I've received on that work. For a few years, behind the scenes, I've also been working on means that allow learners to personalize - introducing a toolset (Modifulate) that allows rapid reconfiguration of e-learning builds, introducing targeted assessments of knowledge and motivation in courseware, and introducing a website personalization framework (Qromium). I've advocated more work on learner journey mapping, and created a toolset to support that (Journifica). And I've followed drip marketing and marketing personalization. This article makes the case that learning personalization is here to stay - now we just need some of the tools to catch up.
5 Great Customer Experience Recommendations
It's a short read - but conveys 5 great tips for enhancing customer experience. Perhaps the best tip of all - have a plan. To have that plan, understand the customers' experiences. Here's my shameful plug - to understand customer experiences, create and validate customer journey maps.
Customer Loyalty Warrants Boardroom Attention
This article looks at the challenge for attention that customer loyalty is encountering in the boardrooms of major banks. It points out that customers are more savvy, demanding more, and are pretty easily frustrated with efforts that fail to reward loyalty. Loyalty is a long-term play that comes from intimacy with the client's worldview; it focuses less on short-term business outcome optimization if it is to be sustainable. Notes the author, "...We found that people are driven by experiences, so offering a range of aspirational and lifestyle rewards will have a far greater impact than pure discounts or cashback. Access to exclusive events, destinations, restaurants, hotels and services are increasingly important for affluent middle-class consumers."