How this platform seeks to make corporate training fun and interesting
The SaaS product husband-wife duo Kamalika Bhattacharya and Arijit Lahiri have built captures data from user engagement, which allows them to make training sessions more interesting and engaging.
Corporate training is considered to be an essential business enabler. But are companies doing enough to keep their employees engaged during such training programmes? The seriousness with which companies usually go about such training in order to get maximum bang for their buck may make such programmes boring and tedious for the employees thus rendering them ineffective. With more than a decade of experience in the corporate space, husband-wife duo Kamalika Bhattacharya and Arijit Lahiri were aware of such anomalies in corporate training and set out to make such programmes interesting.
Kamalika and Arijit being gaming enthusiasts decided to gamify the entire training process. They began by creating game-based learning for corporates. However, soon they realised that creating each game-based learning module or platform from scratch was too complex and would take a lot of time.
While they were wondering what they could do next, they found that coding a few rudimentary game engines appeared to be quite feasible. That’s when they went on to build a team of game developers who had the same determination as them. This led to the genesis of QuoDeck in February 2010.
QuoDeck is a Software as a Service (SaaS) product that measures user engagement by tracking the user’s performance. This user-generated data gets fed into the product and is used to improve the learner’s experience and effectiveness.
It thus allows enterprises to create and deploy mobile learning platform with a Big Data backend to capture clickstream and real-time data. Once deployed, the captured data are processed to provide effectiveness insights such as learner profiling, content quality assessments, training need identification, etc.
“The product has been designed specifically keeping in mind the modern enterprise and its need for engagement, speed, mobility, regionalisation, data, and security,” says 40-year-old Arijit, who is an MBA graduate from IIM Calcutta. His wife Kamalika is an MBA graduate from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. They worked at companies like IDFS-SSKI Limited, Edelweiss Capital, and AMRO bank.
Solving real business challenges
The product of QuoDeck consists of a content authoring tool integrated with game engines which allow content creators to author game-based learning almost at the speed of thought.
For example, BFSI customers have used QuoDeck to create documentation simulations to enable learners to practice and reduce errors in account opening and loan documentation processes. QuoDeck also has games like Casino Games and Shooting Galleries which are used for product training. They also claim to have advanced games like AI Bot driven conversation simulations which are used to train sales and customer service executives.
QuoDeck is available in two versions – a DIY online version and the enterprise version that caters to large enterprises. They claim that the online version is used across 40 countries by more than 500 learning creators who are creating learning content in more than seven languages. The enterprise version is deployed at more than 25 global companies like Unilever, Star India, eBay, SBI Life, Aditya Birla Group, and Axis Bank, which has more than 61,000 learners. The number they said is expected to grow to 1,50,000 over the next three months on the back of the current deployments in progress.
Revenue generation
QuoDeck Quick allows users to create learning games through a DIY process and share across their learners. These are used to train a team of 100 people which costs $99 per month. QuoDeck Creator is a more involved system which can be used to author full-fledged game-based learning platforms.
“We believe this to be the quickest method for creating a large-scale game-based learning system in the world today. With typical target team sizes of 100–1,000 learners, this is the entry point for organisation-wide deployments and costs around $99–$999 per month,” says Arijit.
QuoDeck Enterprise is a game-based learning management system that handles the enterprise learning needs. With features ranging from course management to automated training need identification, it is targeted to organisation deployments of more than 1,000 users and is priced with a consultative approach.
QuoDeck was started with an angel round of $100,000 from HNI investors. With a team of 26, the platform is currently witnessing month-on-month growth of 20 percent in revenues. Headquartered in Mumbai, they have people in Bengaluru and Delhi.
In the next two to three years, QuoDeck is planning to build a global user base with enterprise sales offices in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. The startup aims to cross $1 million revenues in the next fiscal year.
According to ReportsnReports, global gamification market is set to grow to $11.10 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 46.3 percent with rising adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) among enterprises and Asia-Pacific (APAC) expected to become one of the major adopters of gamification techniques by 2020.
Apart from QuoDeck, there is Mumbai-based Indusgeeks. The platform claimed to have worked with various corporate and government organisations in the past eight years in transforming the legacy learning content into fun and gamified solutions to engage more with learners.
Undoubtedly, there may be other companies in this space. If you know any, please do share the names with us.
Website: QuoDeck
