Phones 4u

3D virtual learning academy

The challenge

Phones 4u approached us looking for a fun and engaging 3D online environment through which Sales staff would want to access a vast range of training and reference material.

Sales staff complete their basic training over several weeks at the company’s Fort Dunlop Academy before joining their store. They then receive hour-long weekly training updates via the company’s intranet, covering topics such as new products, technology explanations, sales techniques and company news.

However, by its very nature this material consists of fact-based reference sheets and is not very inspiring. What was needed was an engaging new way of delivering and maintaining information for this widely distributed young sales force. The imagery needed to be extremely high quality to earn the respect of experienced ‘gamers’ and its style in keeping with the funky, slightly irreverent, Phones 4u culture.

In addition to all this, the new system had to enable admin staff at the Training Centre to add and distribute a wide variety of new material within minutes and without any programming required.

The Academy: Online - Product Expo (click image to enlarge)The Academy: Online - The Gym (click image to enlarge)The Academy: Online - Interrogation Suite (click image to enlarge)The Academy: Online - The Lab (click image to enlarge)The Academy: Online - Museum (click image to enlarge)
…an engaging new way of delivering and maintaining information for this young sales force.

Our solution

The Phones 4u Academy Online is a 3D virtual world based on an environment familiar to the user – the actual Training Academy building at Fort Dunlop – but this Fort Dunlop has been extended with some quite spectacular ‘modifications’!

Enjoyable, intriguing, and interactive, it is an environment which is extremely easy to navigate, offering unusual and varied challenges to the employee, and generating excitement and a desire to explore over repeated visits.

Join us for a walk through the 3D Academy…

Academy Reception area

The Reception area is the ‘Home’ location for the Academy, displaying these client-editable items:

  • A character who welcomes us with a message
  • News ‘flashes’ which scroll along the rear wall
  • A calendar of Academy events and a facility booking page

3D Reception Objects

The user may ‘pan’ the view to the left to display a further selection of clickable objects – each one representing a themed room in the Academy. Selecting an object launches a dynamic (pre-rendered) ‘fly through’ video which takes us from the Reception to the chosen room. These videos last 3-4 seconds and ‘fly’ us through an open plan meeting area and into the target room.

The rooms available are:

Product Expo
Product Expo:
Product specifications, demos, images, adverts, eLearning modules etc.
The Lab
The Lab:
Technical demos, technology explanations, sales briefings etc.
The Gym
The Gym:
Weekly briefing packages, sales tips etc.
Chill-out zone
Chill-out zone:
Games, interactive novelties
Museum
Museum:
Legacy product information
Interrogation suite
Interrogation suite:
Profiles of Academy staff, audio/video interviews

The role of the rooms is to provide a themed environment in which material may be accessed, in effect a portal onto a vast range of instructional and reference content. This material includes files such as pdf, jpg images, Flash movies, mp3 audio files or even executable programs.

An important role for the Academy is to provide sales staff with rapid access to reference materials, but without the need for them to navigate the 3D world or to use the menu and sub-menu hierarchy in each room. It was important to provide an interactive Map of the Academy, giving instant access to any room but without a 3D fly-through. Engaging interactivity is great but enforcing it on a harassed administrator at head office who’s attempting to quickly update a product spec is something else entirely.

Optimising performance

A core program of around 20 Mbytes resides on each store’s server disk and includes the shell control program and the 3D Academy video journeys. Holding these files locally ensures the best possible user experience with no network delays. Any updates to this software are downloaded overnight by Phones 4u. ‘Live’ data (such as product information) is accessed in real time from the head office server and downloaded whenever the user visits a new room in the Academy.

CMS Control dashboard

The back-end dashboard provides a ‘window’ onto the entire Academy and a set of tools with which Training Department staff may add, edit and delete all of the content in the CMS database, using files already created in other applications (including audio/video editors, Flash, PDF publishers, etc).

The files are organised in a hierarchy, eg:

  • Category (Handsets)
  • Manufacturer (eg: BlackBerry)
  • Product (eg: Pearl, Bold, Curve, PlayBook)
  • Files available (eg: data sheets, advert videos, Flash demonstrations, photos, etc)

The effects of any change made to the CMS are seen as soon as a user at a store enters an Academy room which means that they are never working with obsolete information.

Who is it for?

The audience were 5,000 Phones 4U retail sales staff. Typically young, enthusiastic game-players, these employees thrive on interaction and crave challenges and fun. This audience would quickly get bored with dull content and had high expectations for any computer-based training they had to complete.

System requirements

The training and reference material to be delivered included thousands of media files incorporating audio, video, animation, images and documents. However, the 450 stores communicate with Head Office via an intranet whose most important role is supporting sales transactions, not training. The new training system had to run on the standard store till PCs, also used for sales transactions. The company couldn’t risk compromising this vital real time connection.These Windows systems had audio and video-playing capability but a restricted screen resolution of only 800 x 600 pixels. Administrators had to be able to centrally create, modify and delete all content without programming.The nature of the mobile phone and tablet computing industry is one of frequent change. New products and contract deals are launched daily, as older models and packages are dropped from the catalogue. Sales staff must become knowledgeable very quickly with every new product or service as it is launched.The new system had to enable admin staff at the Training Centre to add and distribute new material within minutes and without any programming. In other words, a bespoke, back-end Content Management System (CMS) was needed.