Lush Quests Brings Training and Knowledge Together with Memset
In their common endeavor to engage its employees, enterprises have been slowly embracing the concept of gamifying employee training programs and handmade cosmetics firm Lush is no exception.
Lush’s training program, Lush Quests bears the markings of a gamified training system where employees are introduced to Lush’s brand and products through an interactive story filled with challenges and rewards. Upon completion of the narrative, users are then given a 10 minute quiz to reaffirm what they have learned from the material. Thus far, over 2,000 Lush employees have completed this online training program. These features do seem rather standard for enterprise training gamification in comparison to other training series in the sector. However, what sets apart Lush’s training system compared to other firms is their ability to quickly scale and distribute their program with the application of cloud computing platform, Memset.
Using infrastructure from British cloud provider Memset, Lush Quests is distributed through the provider’s private cloud platform. With the program’s user interface powered by common REST-based web services, it enables Lush to adjust its online training infrastructure accordingly to real time demands of the system. In other words, Lush Quests could accommodate varying user demands without having to compromise additional resources. As part of International Support for Lush cosmetics and the individual responsible for the IT set up of Lush Quests, Richy Baxter-Freeman explains: “We can monitor traffic and performance via Memset’s control panel and easily scale up or down as load patterns fluctuate, which means we only pay for what we need in terms of compute infrastructure. In addition, we benefit from the maintenance, support, and deployment automation provided by Memset to reduce our operational costs.”
Besides the flexibility in scaling its system demands, Memset’s cloud platform provided Lush Quests with a centralized SQL database. It acts as an analytics system, used to store application data and training results while images and video can be leveraged across user interfaces. In turn, it provides direct feedback to Lush’s training team and upper management in monitoring and evaluating their employee’s training progress. Developers could also utilize the input data and impart it into their five Miniservers, virtual servers with dedicated resources. Each miniserver hosts a specific language version of Lush Quest which includes German, French, Italian, Spanish and English. Baxter Freeman elaborates how, “Using Memset’s cloud service has enabled us to quickly roll out the program to other countries faster than we anticipated. We’ve been able to take snapshots of the Miniserver and recreate it quickly in the other languages required…”. With these two features working in sync, Lush Quests could be distributed across an international scope without having to deal with language barriers.
As firms are now operating in an international circuit where its employees consist of diverse cultural backgrounds and speaking different languages, Lush cosmetics utilization of cloud computing is keeping itself ahead of its competitors. It remains imperative that enterprises strive to make great gamification systems by continuously creating and reiterating new content for its users. Nevertheless, it goes to show how content value can be magnified when firms have the capability and flexibility to scale and expand gamified training services. A high-value gamified system would be rendered redundant if enterprises only engage a limited number of their target audience.
via TechWorld
