As a consummate change-maker and a Games-based learning pioneer, Ken Thompson writes, speaks and deploys Games to teach corporate teams, the consequences of their decisions and help them manage change in business processes. He is the managing director of BioTeams Design and Swarm Teams.

RD:> Are you a gamer?

KT:> My kids are fanatical gamers. They humiliate me all the time, when I play with them. In fact they no longer include me even when they play Xbox soccer. So! I would not describe myself a gamer.

RD:> How did you get into Games and stuff like that?

KT:> I am a social mathematician. My educational background is in mathematics. Then I worked for more than thirty years in change management. I wrote books about teams, social networks and change management. I gave a TedX talk about high-performing teams.

Over  two decades, as a hobby, I have been building these models, simulations and games. In the last five years or so, my clients started asking me to commercialize these simulations and games.

Some are pure simulations. For example, I have a simulation that optimizes how one organizes a sales process; another is about determining ROI from social campaigns.

Many are games and are based on immersive-learning principles. Most of these games are paper and pencil and role-based games, i.e. hybrid or blended learning game. Typically, a game runs for a full day with a leadership team.

RD:> I completely relate. We did those for twenty years prior to starting PAKRA.

KT:> Yes! In these games, I add:

(1) Realistic and relatable constructs i.e. stories with artifacts.

(2) Then there are, what I call, “golden rules”. By “golden rules” I mean: You should “Always do this” or You should “Never do that”.

(3) Basic resource constraints.

(4) Dilemmas and conflicts. Dilemmas, such as, “I want six pack abs” and “I love chocolates”.

(5) There are, of course, roles and metrics.

(6) The component of social learning where I facilitate in-person or online.

They typically play these games for 3 rounds. The first round is to normalize the mechanics and at the end, the players will be supremely confident. Then in the second round, the unexpected happens; for example, the suppliers increase prices, the market demand collapses, competitors eat their lunch, Euro spins out of control etc.  In the third round, the innovation happens. Almost all participants find these blended experiential learning as the best way to learn.

CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson recently interviewed me.

We discussed how PAKRA applies gamification approach to increase accountability in the customer service processes and reduce learning curve of service agents.

Here is the interview: How Gamification Can Accelerate Service Agent Training: Inside Scoop with PAKRA CEO Rini Das

Visit us at https://store.mypakragames.com/products.html

Barbara Giamanco recently interviewed me.

We discussed how PAKRA applies gamification approach to increase accountability in the sales process and reduce learning curve of sales reps.

Here is the podcast:

Gamify Baby: A Social Sales Mastery Interview with Rini Das

Visit us at https://store.mypakragames.com/your-customers.html

 

• Do you want to increase your customers’ experience tenfold?

• Do you want to increase your employees’ work performance by 20 percentage points?

• Do you want to reduce your learning curve by half?

Your Long Wait is Over!

We are thrilled to announce the grand opening of our webstore store.mypakragames.com.

We are offering affordable and results-based learning solutions for both individuals (Professional package) and teams (Group and Enterprise packages). It is a skills-training platform.

Create a free account.

Explore. Buy. Play. Learn. Share.

Read more about our announcement on Michael Schein’s blog So Why Should I Care About This Gamification Stuff?

As an Agile and Lean expert and a Gamification pioneer, Michael Hugos writes and speaks passionately about Game mechanics that help enterprises achieve their goals and adapt faster to new processes, new initiatives and new technologies. He is the managing principal at SCM Globe and CIO at large at the Center for Systems Innovation.

RD:> We engaged in a conversation via LinkedIn, and I read your book, Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business. How do you learn?

MH:> I approach a subject with playful curiosity. This works extremely well for me. There are different ways to approach, such as grim determination, rigid discipline — or you can flee in terror after the first try. If you approach it with playful curiosity, learning retention is better and faster.

RD:> How did you gravitate toward Games, as not only the way to improve business performance, but to sustain those improvements?

MH:> I was trained as an architect. I came to Chicago to be among architectural masterpieces such as  Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings within the Loop and Oak Park. During my work as an architect, I took up computer modeling, which led me to become very interested in designing simulated complex systems. In the early ’90s, for a multi-billion-dollar company, we designed a sales-enablement system using Game mechanics, Game metaphors and simulation techniques. This project exceeded the expectations of the executive team. And it made me realize this is the best way to engage salespeople, teach and change behaviors. It led to faster adoption of behavioral changes and to sustaining those changes.

RD:> Your architectural background came through in your book.

MH:> Thank you for saying that. It helps me find the vulnerabilities that lead to a better design.

RD:> How would you measure the worth of a digital bit of information, (a) for an employee, and (b) for a business?

MH:> I think we must keep it simple. To an employee, the leadership should communicate 3–4 important objectives of the company. These objectives are typically business-performance metrics. In this context, the value of information from a digital bit is how effectively employees can achieve the performance targets by using the information. By the way, this is where real life provides design ideas for an enterprise Game.

RD:> In your book, you discuss voluntary participation and feedback loops. Can you discuss the importance of “roles” in Game design?

MH:> Roles define the types of actions a person can take. The designer needs to balance between flexibility and easy logic. If the roles are too narrowly defined, the behaviors displayed are too rigid, and the players will not get the nuances of a complex problem. If the roles are too broadly defined, it introduces unnecessary confusion. Also, allowing the roles to evolve over time is a good design principle to consider.

As a learning futurist, an educational hacker, and a game designer, Maria H. Andersen speaks passionately about how technology, Serious Games and social media are making us learn and engage faster and how these are making “learning” free to anyone who is connected digitally. Maria is the Director of Learning and Research at Instructure.  She will be teaching a Canvas Network course on Social Media that starts later this month.

RD> Thank you so much for your time today. I met you on Twitter and have been actively following your posts ever since. So! Are you a gamer?

MHA:> I am a casual gamer. I don’t play hard-core games like World of Warcraft. But, I have a ton of Casual Games on my iPad. I am a sucker for the resource management games like Airport Mania, Diner Dash and the rest of the PlayFirst Games. I also like playing some of the good logic games like Contre Jure and World of Goo.

In these games, I do things, I make decisions, I work with resource constraints, I get rewarded, I learn from my mistakes and I can correct the course. This is the right mix for me. Ironically, I am not a big fan of Angry Birds - I get frustrated when I can’t throw the bird the way I mean to. It reminds me of Golf: if you can’t get the swing right the game is not very much fun.

RD:> I completely sympathize with your sentiments about Angry Birds. How do you learn?

MHA:> I learn a lot by reflecting and creating things. I enjoy the reward I get from “Figuring it out”. For example, sometimes when I want to learn something, I agree to give a presentation on the topic in six months time. The process of figuring out how the pieces are related, what is important — finding and exploring all of this information is very appealing to me. The best part is the last week before the presentation, when suddenly everything gels and you really get it.

These days, I use Social Learning a lot. For example, when I wanted to learn about game design, I found game designers in all spectrums and followed them on Twitter. I read their blogs. I learned who they engaged with, what they read, which conferences they go to, what game mechanics they liked, the words they use, and how they designed games.

By immersing myself in their world, I learned faster. Social Learning provides me that value of mentoring without a formal mentoring program.

RD:> This brings me to my next question, what skills does a learner acquire from Serious Games or Games-based Learning (GBL)?

MHA:> I think most games teach the basics like critical-thinking skills and logic skills. Well-designed Serious Games test your ideas in the immersive environment that they put you in. Unlike traditional learning, when your ideas don’t work out, there are pushbacks in the game and an opportunity to try again with a new theory of how the game works. Replaying and #failfast are the ways by which the gamer learns. Certainly some games teach additional skills like teamwork or good vocabulary skills – it just depends on the game. Unfortunately, about  95% of educational games are NOT Games. They are often just some variety of flash cards or multiple-choice questions with pretty graphics and the word “Game” in the title.  I call these “lame games” and I refuse to have anything to do with them.

RD:> Don't get me started on Lame Games. We get many requests to create games that are indeed glorified multiple-choice questions. We now maintain a list of flash/flex developers and whenever we get such requests, we recommend those developers to customers.

However, this brings me to another question, on the opposite side of the spectrum, when traditional game-designers engage in GBL, do you find issues with them?

MHA:> Yes! Bingo and Jeopardy are probably the worst, because those have no strategies that a player can use in order to learn. For example, in Bingo-based games, the only person who knows whether they have mastered the learning is the person who wins. The rest of the players don’t have any positive or negative reinforcement. In Jeopardy-based games, the only person who cares about the game at any given moment is the one who is currently playing. Even when kids play on a team, it is usually just the smartest one who is playing and everyone else is just along for the ride. Games that rely on Jeopardy or Bingo-type mechanics are also examples of lame games. Real GBL requires a delicate balance between learning and games.

RD:> This brings me to my next question. What are your recommendations to organize one's digital learning self? There is so much clutter and noise on the web today. What’s your advice to navigate?

MHA:> Filtering is a really important skill to develop. When I was first getting started with Twitter, I made a decision to ONLY follow people whose information-stream was valuable to me. If someone I followed was just retweeting someone with a more valuable tweetstream, I would move up the chain and follow that person instead. Even today, I actively review who I am  following on Twitter and stop following those people I do not learn from. Some people say to me, “Oh! I don’t do social media because I don’t want to know what you had for lunch today.” In the professional world, these so-called “lunch Tweets” are the exception rather than the norm.  If someone is only tweeting about their meal, then don’t follow them! Learn to filter rather than being a non-participant.

RD:> In March 2011, at ACU ConnectED Summit you discussed about the need for a Button and the importance of assessment. Can you elaborate on that and have you found the Button?

MHA:> The Button is this idea that I should be able to go any web media content (text, audio, video or game) and then after consuming the content, I might decide that I want to retain some aspect of it in my biological memory. So there should be a Button where I can indicate, “I want to learn that” and go into a personal learning system where I can take steps to learn it and share that event with others.  That’s the basic idea.

I see bits and pieces of it slowly emerging. The Tin Can project has developed an underlying framework that could work behind a Button. Learnist and StudyBlue and Anki are all moving in the right direction. We have all the right technologies – we just need to put them together in the right way now.

RD:> Our data show that by using Bloom's Taxonomy/Kirkpatrick Level 4 methods to teach skills, resulted in reducing the learning curve (This is measured from the day a learner gets the first exposure to the content to the day they become a "high performance" employee) — sometimes as high as by 50%. Are you surprised with such results? Can you tell us about research that shows immersive and Social Learning leads to better and faster learning retention? For example, if we had a Button, then the shares, the clicks, to who, by who, from who — can measure and assess the value of Social Learning.

MHA:> Oh! Those are great questions and points. I am glad your company is measuring effectiveness as part of the offering. As you know, measuring the effectiveness of learning modalities, especially games, is very difficult, as controlled experiments are very difficult to conduct in real world. I think longitudinal evaluation studies are needed for all kinds of learning. However, I can conjecture that some patterns will emerge if we start with the Button and then mine the associated data.

RD:> What new games are you building?

MHA:> I’ve recently come out with several Algebra games for iPad: Algeburst and Algeboats can be purchased in the iPad store. It has been fun to watch students play these games and push their calculators off to the side as they engage in the gameplay. You should check them out.

RD:> I will play indeed. Thank you so much Maria for your time and for sharing your insights.  It was great to chat.

MHA:> Great talking with you as well.

Wish you a very happy and prosperous 2013.

Let us join together to make 2013 the best "customer experience year" for everyone.

Thank you for a fabulous 2012.

As a veteran sales leader at Linkpoint360.com and gamer, Jeff Eskow is passionate about enhancing customer experience and having a trusted advisor relationship with prospects and customers. He has helped small to medium enterprises grow. Prior to LinkPoint360, he sold variety of products and services for companies such as All-State Legal, Ultimate Office, and Paige Box Company.

RD> Jeff, thank you for taking the time to chat with us. We met on LinkedIn and over time built this wonderful relationship of being a mutual trusted advisor. What are the biggest differentiators for Linkpoint360?

JE> Our customers say that our ability to listen and respond to customer needs quickly (i.e. agility) and the personal touch behind all forms of interactions (whether it be chat, email, phone, web self-service or social) helps us acquire and retain customers. Our customer base includes large enterprises such as CocaCola, Dell, Adobe, Prudential to individual sole proprietors. Our company has done extremely well in creating the importance of personal touch.

For example, when you buy our products, an automated email goes out to the buyer, but I follow up with a personal email providing my availability and contact information and how we can help them configure and set it up correctly. Also very early on, our company recognized the value of being agile in responding to the changing needs of the marketplace. The product development, sales, implementation and customer support works hand-in-hand with complete feedback loops and no visible bureaucracy to the customer.

RD> I completely relate to what you just said. Lately you and I have been discussing on LinkedIn, how consumers or users like you and me are finding customer experience to be really so bad that we feel lucky whenever we actually experience something seamless and trouble-free.

JE> It just continually amazes me that in this economy and with all this technology, how companies accommodate sales reps or customer service reps, who don’t return phone calls, and when you call them, they say, “we will get back to you” and proceed to give a scripted non-answer” — all with an attitude “good luck with that”. It really does not take that much effort, to say, “I don’t know the answer to that, let me look into it. I will reach out to within X hours. What would be a good way to reach you?”

Sometime ago, I was installing a sprinkler system for my new house. The salesperson drove to my house to collect the payment. Then few days later, construction came to a halt because of the malfunction of this system. It took more than 5 different calls and call transfers and hours before they could find someone to talk to me. When it comes to money, they were all there with their personal touch but when it came to answering a question, it took such a long time with impersonal touch.

I see a lot of discussion about sales versus marketing misalignment. That is not the debate. The question should be, how can your company have a single-point of accountability in the entire customer experience, i.e. viewing it from a customer’s perspective. It is customer relationship in CRM not sales relationship.

Every bit needs to be aligned from buyer going to your website and calling you, to negotiating sales, to selecting you as a solution provider, to implementing/launching your product or service, to receiving customer service, to having questions answered, to having issues resolved and continuing to buy more from you. From user’s standpoint, you — the vendor have only 1 face (not 10 different faces, not 5 different departments). Accountability does not end with signing that contract and meeting your own sales quota. Best part, having this 1 face, is neither hard nor a costly effort. It is what agility-driven companies (and mind you, not dependent on the size of the company) can do very well and very effortlessly.

As a Social Marketing thought leader, triathlete and Head of Sales Solutions at LinkedIn.com, Ralf VonSosen is passionate about Technology enabling more meaningful and productive relationships among professionals. His experience spans from industry giants such as Siebel (now Oracle) and SAP, to a series of smaller companies including MarketLive, and most recently InsideView. He is a pioneer in the area of social selling and continues to be not only an active evangelist for Social Selling, but instrumental in creating the next generation of Social Selling solutions.

MD> Ralf, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. We would love to hear more about your thoughts on the future of Social Selling and insights regarding LinkedIn.

RVS> Having lived through the evolution of CRM, and seeing how social media is changing CRM and also how social media is effecting online collaboration, I find that there is enormous opportunity for improvement.

There are great collaboration tools (and everybody uses something different) such as WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, and Skype.  My theory is that, there is enough human interaction in these kinds of collaboration software, that’s it’s time to throw all the processes out the window.  People logging on and off, some use the phone, some use the computer, different screens/one screen, different channels etc.  There is enormous need to unify the interactions and have a new CRM mindset.

My passion is for the technology being able to create more meaningful relationships.  Now, we can have these meaningful interactions and conversations and this technology enables us to get a better picture of each other and follow the relationships.  They provide a new level of trust and background with that person and that can change how we approach and do business.  It adds humanity and integrity to the process.

We all move on and leave behind the people we worked with in the past, but now we can have meaningful conversations with them and grow our future contacts.  Technology keeps us up-to-date and reminds us of the person and our previous interactions.

MD> So true.  My first question to you:  Are you a gamer?  If so, which are your favorites?

RVS> (Laughs.)  I’m not really a gamer, but the one thing that I do play with on an intermittent basis is the Game mechanics app FourSquare .  When traveling, I can take pictures and keep track of where I am going and what I am doing.    My brother-in-law updates his during his travels, too, and I try to beat other peoples’ high scores.  A trip to the East Coast with my family gave me a great opportunity to beat my maximum points, and now my kids wait for me to check in on FourSquare.

MD> You are competitive!  I am getting a better picture of you and have an idea of how you might answer this next question:  How do you learn?

RVS> I learn through doing and interacting:  very experiential.  I empathize with people and kids in school who learn that way.  I am starting to use sproutsocial to manage all the social feeds.   I was recently on a one-hour webinar where they were presenting a demo of the product and I realized I just needed to start using it hands-on and playing around with it.

What I think is so exciting about LinkedIn is that you are trying to create a new experience within the sales process. On an individual basis, you are talking about something that people are already using and are familiar with.  That’s one of the things, in trying to get user adoption, is that you get this concept of “this is intuitive and they are already using it”, rather than having someone learn the nuances of another software program or system.  It certainly makes life a lot easier.

MD> As you know, we effectively use LinkedIn as our primary channel of doing sales. In fact, we were discussed in a case study in a recent edition of Harvard Business Review. Last time we chatted, you and I were discussing the drawbacks of cold-calling since we can now use social tools and learn more about our potential client and how to meet their needs.  That led to a conversation about using CRM programs. Can you tell me more about the connectivity of LinkedIn and CRM programs?

RVS > We provide connectivity with Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.  You can integrate the two, right within your CRM, as you are working with a contact or opportunity with the account.  You see all the information we have available on LinkedIn about that individual within the context of the CRM record.  It really brings the two together and gives you a more unified view and message.

MD> PAKRA uses salesforce.com in which InsideView is a great value-added feature.  All of this innovation has made for a much neater sales process.

You recently were brought in to lead the Sales Solutions’ marketing initiative for LinkedIn, what information can you share about the Sales Solutions?

Business relationships are not this intuitive (though I contend they should be), but let me ask you this (if you’re in a long-term relationship, think back to when you were single).

When you started dating, you had opportunities to begin and pursue relationships. How did you make the choice of which woman/man to pursue? Was it the best looking? The smartest? Maybe the most accessible or one you thought would say yes? And if you were lucky enough to have several people from which to choose, into which relationships did you invest your effort? Was it with the cutest partner? The one who seemed most likely to succeed? The one most likely to commit to you?

I’d be willing to bet you made these decisions based on some form of intuition. You probably agonized, analyzed and got lots of advice from your friends and family, but some sense of the “right” choice probably made itself apparent, and off you went.

Do you know why your customers renew their subscriptions or services? Do you know how to predict whether any given customer will renew? I suspect you probably have an answer something like, “Well, yes, but it could be better.”

So let’s make it better.

And let’s make better marketing investment decisions by doing so.

Here’s a scenario that will disturb most of you: You are happily in a long-term committed relationship. Then you meet someone interesting, attractive and with a personality similar to your current partner. You figure your current partner isn’t going anywhere, so you spend lots of time developing a new relationship with this new person. You spend time together, you spend money on gifts and activities, and you find you have common interests. You end up in a relationship with this new person. Are you still assuming your first partner hasn’t gone anywhere? I think we can all agree that’s a pretty bad assumption.

So why do we treat our customers this way?

Why would you let as much as one-third of your revenue walk out the door every year? And knowing it will, why include it in your forecast, and consider it a “success” as long as it’s no more than one-third?

This is exactly what many companies with subscription-based business models are doing.

The move to subscription-based business models has accelerated in the past decade, led by technology-services companies moving to cloud-based offerings. Most companies that have made this shift have benefited from having a recurring revenue stream and the ability (generally) for more automated sign-up and service options for prospects and customers.

But we missed something.

Recurring revenue means it’s critical to ensure that customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year. Put another way, it means the value of renewing your customer’s subscription is just as high as starting the subscription in the first place.

A few of you who are doing this right may take exception to this, but in most of the organizations with which I’ve worked, the effort devoted to renewing customer subscriptions is not even close to the effort put into acquiring the customer in the first place. Ask yourself this: In your organization, how much of your budget and staff are devoted to ensuring customers renew? I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the answer.

 

So today I had an interesting customer service experience. Not only was it a waste of more than an hour, but I still didn't get my issue resolved.

Where to begin? A few months back, we purchased a copy of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac from Staples. The computer we originally installed it on was for an intern and once the intern left, we uninstalled Office from the computer. The box that Office came in tells us that we could install the software on 3 separate computers. Well, today, we tried to install it on computer #2. Of course, the product key didn't work when installing on our new computer. What do we do? Go to Microsoft customer support, expecting some kind of help. Once there, I first look through the FAQ's. Nothing there really helps. They provide a number to call for help with your product key. So, I call the number. Concurrently, Rini, our CEO, starts an online chat with a customer service rep. After a 10-15 minute back and forth through chat, Rini was unsuccessful at getting any help. Keep in mind, I'm still on hold on the phone. 35 minutes goes by...and I still haven't talked to a human being. Finally, the person on the live chat gave us a different number to call. We call the number and finally talk to a human! Only to be transferred to a different department. After the transfer, the operator tells me I need to contact the store I purchased it from to get any kind of help since we purchased it retail and the license is through the store.

Given our latest Occupy Customer Experience blog piece last week, I felt it was appropriate to post to the following conversation we had with Marianne Curran, EVP of Go Daddy, way back in December of 2010. The piece does a great job of displaying exactly how Go Daddy uses social media to provide quality customer care and how it fits in with the company's overall customer experience strategy.

Read our interview with Go Daddy

Read about @GoDaddy and how they occupy customer experience

Enjoy!

GoDaddy.com employs more than 3,300 employees with 8 locations, including Arizona, Iowa and India, and provides "follow-the-sun" 24x7x365 sales and support commitments.

In this series, we test the operational maturity of companies and organizations in how they leverage social media channels for sales and service processes.

For Go Daddy, we asked one simple question: How well does Go Daddy retain and upsell its customers when these customers reach out to them and bring their concerns via Twitter?

 

 

 

Delta Airlines employs more than 80,000 employees worldwide and has a fleet of more than 700 aircrafts and has 160 million customers.

It has a reputable social-media operation. Or so we have read...

In an article written by Dennis Schaal, Inside Social Media at Delta Air Lines - A Behind The Scenes Look on June 10, 2011, he mentions that they have a control room just for social media at their headquarters, and that they knowingly don't respond to all tweets, stating: "The social media staff doesn't respond to every tweet about the airline, and does its share of apologizing to customers."

At PAKRA, we decided to dive a little deeper and experiment with the Twittersphere for Delta Airlines and see exactly what is going on. We wanted to get few questions answered:

(1.) Since Delta knowingly doesn’t respond to every tweet about the brand, would they be more likely to respond to tweets that areincluded in the “Dreaded” hash-tag #Fail search? As you know, if this hash-tag is included in a tweet about your brand, the customer is probably quite upset with your brand and you are at risk to lose them as a customer. Surely, Delta will respond to all of “these” tweets. Right?

(2.) Why does Delta not respond to all tweets? As we see from the article by Dennis Schaal, Delta has about a dozen "Social Assist Agents" on a 24x7 follow-the-sun support schedule. What stops them from handling more tweets, especially potentially harmful ones like those that include "#Fail" in their tweet?

We analyzed all tweets in a randomly selected time period that included the name "Delta" with the hash-tag #Fail in the tweet text.

You must have read this recent article, “Three Months in Customer Service Limbo”, by David Segal in the New York Times. The article discusses the fate of a customer at the hands of customer service, customer's trials and small successes, and well! spoiler alert -- "Still! Unresolved issues". Oh! What drama. I suggest you read it too.

It is time for us to Occupy Customer Experience.

You, the (B2B or B2C) Customer

As you searched, vetted, purchased, used and reviewed products/services that will help you, you too experienced some degree of failure or had instances where your expectations were not met (if not to this extreme degree in the Times article). Some of you also use social-media channels such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Yelp to communicate your frustrations and delights. Some of you will also agree with me that Revenue and Operational Margins are the two KPIs that your company/organization/institution closely manages.

You, the Manager

Given that you and your team deliver products/services, you are always looking for ways to increase your revenue while reducing operating costs. Among all channels of customer interaction (voice, chat, web, face-to-face and social media), social media is still the cheapest way to find and manage customers who reach out to you via social media.  Also, let’s not forget the amplification effect on your brand. Who can forget the Alec Baldwin tweet on American Airlines, or the Komen Foundation fiasco with Planned Parenthood?

"Customer Experience" is why companies/organizations/institutions exist. Customer experience drives both revenue and operational costs. Your customers are just like you; they want to do business with you using these channels. What is stopping you from delivering exceptional customer experience?

Coming Soon at a PAKRA channel near to you – "Thought-provoking Discussions". Please join the discussion.

 

Thanks to our customers, users, game-players, partners, advisers, employees, we met and surpassed all our goals and milestones that we set for ourselves in 2011.

Being a Remarkable Learning Company®, we ourselves learned a lot in 2011. Some of the key learnings were:
1. The value of "failure" from Jeff Stibel's blog post "Why I hire people who fail?"
2. The value you get from continuously experimenting, measuring and adjusting
3. The value of using social media channels effectively for sales and customer service
4. Helping businesses and organizations understand the buyer, especially millennial end-user and mindset
5. According to Horses for Sources and recent purchases of SuccessFactors and Rypple, Business platforms like PAKRA are the future of outsourcing
6. One can bootstrap and with a little ingenuity create immersive learning experiences and data that provide insight. These videos from TED.com inspired us in 2011.

• Arvind Gupta: Turning Trash to Toys for Learning
• Luis von Ahn: Massive Online Collaboration
• Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape the world