Case Study: Alcatel-Lucent University Surveys the Power of Mobile Technology

By Bill Perry

Alcatel-Lucent University explores the use of mobile technology to keep its annual sales conference fresh and innovative.

Alcatel-Lucent is one of the world’s largest providers of voice, data, and video communications. So it comes as no surprise that the company has a keen interest in exploring any technology that strives to make communicating easier. In December 2008, a team of 10 professionals from Alcatel-Lucent University’s North American campuses began looking at how mobile technology might enhance the sales training underway for Alcatel-Lucent’s 2009 annual sales conference. The sales conference would bring together 1,100 sales executives intent on learning about Alcatel-Lucent’s latest products and services.

Among those making plans for the sales conference were Alcatel-Lucent University’s Barbara Busquet Jorge, a senior training manager, and Dave Batchelder, a sales training manager.

“The Alcatel-Lucent Marketing group asked us to manage the evaluations and break-out sessions for the January sales conference,” said Busquet Jorge. “We saw it as an opportunity to survey our sales people and gauge their level of interest in mobile sales training, as well as what they wanted from our upcoming Technical Sales Forum, which is a technical training session held each year for approximately 300 sales executives and sales engineers.”

To keep the annual sales conference fresh and innovative, Busquet Jorge and her colleagues decided to explore some new technologies. Because of the popularity of mobile devices, the planning team wanted to employ mobile technology in some way at the sales conference.

“Our goal is to always find innovative ways to introduce technology into learning,” added Busquet Jorge. “As we evaluated ideas, we learned about Hot Lava Mobile, a software platform that had been used in Asia to carry out surveys via web-enabled devices.”

The ALU team saw the Hot Lava Mobile software as a unique way to develop and send queries (and keep tabs on responses) via virtually any mobile device, anywhere in the world. For Busquet Jorge, the software looked like an excellent method for developing, delivering and tracking marketing data, such as surveys, quizzes, and usage reports.  

With Hot Lava Mobile in place, ALU developed a plan for a mobile survey of its own, which was called “Feet on the Street.” The concept involved sending ALU’s team to the 2009 sales conference to conduct live, face-to-face surveys with the approximately 1,100 sales people and sales support staff at a conference center in Nashville, Tennessee. “The idea was to have our training team use a web-enabled mobile device, to survey attendees at the conference,” said Batchelder.

From a technical standpoint, Batchelder says the ALU team first used Hot Lava Mobile to build the survey application. As part of that effort, the team came up with approximately 25 questions for the sale force. The questions were grouped, so no survey respondent would be asked more than five questions. And the queries were earmarked, so sales people would receive one set of questions and sales engineers would get another set. The questions were hosted on a Hot Lava Mobile server. Batchelder and a team of about eight people used HP iPAQ 210 Enterprise Handheld computers to conduct the surveys.  

“We took the survey from just a network survey to a mobile survey,” said Batchelder. “The conference was at a very large convention center where—depending on your mobile carrier—connectivity was an issue. So we downloaded the surveys to the mobile device, interviewed attendees, stored their answers, and then connected through the convention center’s Wi-Fi to send the answers to the Hot Lava Mobile server.”

As the ALU surveyors collected and sent their answers to the Hot Lava Mobile server, the software gave Busquet Jorge real-time reporting that enabled her team to adjust their questions on the fly. If, for example, she saw certain trends developing based on the question set being used, she could shuffle in real-time the order of questions her surveyors were asking, so they focused on a particular topic or agenda.

The survey team was able to catch sales people as they zipped between sessions or chatted around breaks. Busquet Jorge’s team managed to survey 150 people during the conference, which, she says, gave the surveyors “enough data to lay out a training deployment strategy for the coming year.”

Email was the way Alcatel-Lucent had conducted these kinds of surveys in the past, never face-to-face in real-time with the sales people. When asked why Busquet Jorge and her team didn’t deliver their surveys directly to the sales people’s mobile phones via Hot Lava Mobile, she said it was important to control the application.

“We put together the concept of mobile surveys in the span of a couple of weeks prior to the sales conference,” said Busquet Jorge. “We wanted to get some experience with the technology before putting it in everyone’s hands. Hot Lava Mobile could have easily delivered the surveys directly to mobile users, but our desire was to understand the power of the technology in our own hands, first.”

During the 2009 sales conference, the surveys that ALU’s team carried out included questions about the upcoming Technical Sales Forum. For the first survey, Busquet Jorge’s team asked whether sales people thought they would benefit from the upcoming forum, and what sort of things they were interested in seeing at the forum.

Another survey conducted at the sales conference had interviewers asking attendees what type of sales tools they needed. The third survey focused on mobile learning, specifically asking about sales people’s appetite for mobile learning, as well as how long a mobile training course should last. Forty-three percent of respondents said a mobile training course should last between six and 10 minutes. When asked whether they would prefer to watch a training video on the web or via their mobile device, the majority of attendees surveyed said they would like both.

Using what the team learned from the surveys at the sales conference, Batchelder kicked-off the three-day Technical Sales Forum in April 2009 by collecting mobile device details for each attendee who registered for the forum. With that information, the ALU team began sending text messages, with links to specific forum information, to attendees via Hot Lava Mobile. “It was a way to gradually introduce them to mobile learning and take advantage of the power of Hot Lava Mobile,” said Batchelder.

One challenge in delivering content—whether it’s a training course or a web page—to a mobile device is the wide array of devices that can receive the information. For content developers, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate what device someone will use to access your content. But Batchelder notes that Hot Lava Mobile includes an authoring component for building content once for deployment across all major brands of mobile phones, over 500 varieties.

Among the text messages sent to forum attendees were reminders such as: “Join your colleagues at our networking event at 6 p.m.” That particular text message was used for the Technical Sales Forum’s Get Connected Event, which is like a mini-trade show featuring approximately 20 subject matter experts at individual cocktail tables. The Get Connected Event offered attendees a chance to meet the forum’s workshop experts who are Alcatel Lucent employees, or consultants. The Alcatel-Lucent team says the text messaging helped increase attendance at the Get Connected Event by 20 to 25 percent over the prior year.

At the end of the Technical Sales Forum, Batchelder solicited feedback by sending a conference evaluation to attendees via their mobile device. This was the first time ALU delivered its evaluation via mobile device; in the past, the evaluations had always been handed to attendees at the end of the forum, and a follow-up email was blasted around as a reminder to anyone who didn’t return an evaluation.

“On the last day of the Technical Sales Forum, which was a Friday afternoon, we sent out our evaluation with 10 questions to each mobile device we had a record for,” added Batchelder. “We knew people would be waiting for their plane and working with their mobile device. So it wasn’t a stretch to think they would take a few minutes to fill out the evaluation once it hit their device.”

Included with the ALU team’s questions was a comment line. The moment anyone chose to add a comment, Hot Lava Mobile automatically forwarded the remarks to Busquet Jorge’s team and the software tracked the remarks. She noted that response rates for evaluations rose year over year by 10 percent simply by adding the mobile evaluations.

According to Alcatel-Lucent, the Hot Lava Mobile platform helped in two ways. First, it made possible the delivery of content to virtually any mobile device. And second, it tracked everything, which is important because tracking meant the ALU team could know which sales people looked at what content, how many pages were viewed and what questions were answered. “Real-time tracking of mobile surveys is what tells you if the investment is effective,” said Busquet Jorge.

So what advice can ALU offer those interested in mobile surveys?

“My advice is jump in. Regardless of the product you use, the technology is available and there are a vast number of things you can do with it,” noted Batchelder. “Not everything you choose to do with mobile content will be effective; it’s a tool that will work for your audience in some places better than others. But the cost to do this is not off the chart, and that makes it appealing.”

Bill Perry is managing partner of MARCH 24 Media, LLC, a marketing and communications firm. Perry has nearly a decade’s worth of experience in the training industry.