‘QuoDeck’ enables enterprise learning

An enterprise learning platform operates with games!

Kamalika Bhattacharya was fast moving up the corporate ladder when the entrepreneurship bug bit her. Following her heart, she left her job to team up with her husband and launch her dream venture QuoDeck Technologies, a platform that uses interactivity and games to engage enterprise learners.

In an elaborate tete e tete with Baishali Mukherjee, Bhattacharya shares her seven years of entrepreneurial experience, the excitement, the struggle and the fulfilment! Read on!

I started my career with ADP India, which was then just entering India. I spent the first four years working with the US markets and quit to do my MBA from ISB, Hyderabad and then entered the Indian financial markets with ICRA, in credit ratings. Post that, I moved into investment banking, raising money from Private Equity and Venture Capital investors for other entrepreneurs and moved into senior positions with companies such as IDFC Capital and Intellecap. This is really where my love for entrepreneurship was born – rubbing shoulders with a lot of them, seeing their trials and triumphs. And that’s what prompted my own entrepreneurial journey. My husband, Arijit and I started QuoDeck together in the year 2010 in Mumbai.

Addressing the generation need

I started QuoDeck in 2010. Through the 13 years I had worked in the industry, I experienced a wide range of classroom and online training. However, I’d always felt that there was a huge gap that needed to be bridged between how companies were training and how training needed to be done. Training in enterprises had become forced, which impacted its effectiveness. With more employees being from the Twitter and gaming generation, older tactics of training needed to change drastically both in terms of methodology and technology. And gaming, gamification and mobile were our answer to that. Starting with our own capital and bootstrapping it significantly, we have raised multiple angel rounds to fund our continued expansion, as we grew.

We started by creating game-based learning for some educational institutions and corporate to address this gap. Soon, we realized that creating each game-based learning platform from scratch was too complex and was taking too much time. That is when QuoDeck was born, a product that could make the entire process faster. And starting from a few rudimentary game engines coded by us, QuoDeck is now built by a team of passionate game developers who have evolved QuoDeck into the omnipotent system it is today.

When we started QuoDeck, the concept was altogether alien to the Indian market and nascent, even in the global market. The concept of games being used for more than just entertainment took some serious convincing. But as we persevered and built up our brand, we ended up working with larger companies, and it progressively got easier. We were talking game-based and mobile learning long before they became industry buzzwords and fortunately, that early start allowed us to create our position as the definitive product in this space today.

Wow Moments

This was during the early years of QuoDeck, when it was called Ptotem Learning. We were commissioned by one of the largest media companies to design a game-based learning course on Media Industry. We were so excited! Since they were doing such an activity for the first time, we suggested launching it with a game-based teaser campaign to create excitement around it.

A confident Kamalika

Here’s what we suggested – a slot machine-based game with questions on Media. It would go on for three days. The top five winners could win gift vouchers. It was an experiment for us as well. When we launched the campaign, the results were astounding!

The players were supposed to score 2000 points. But when we checked the leader board on the first day, the top score was 20,000. At the end of the campaign, when we checked the leader board, the top scorer had scored 53,000 points. The campaign was a tremendous success and the learning programme was launched with a bang.

QuoDeck Technologies uses interactivity and games to engage enterprise learners

QuoDeck is a SaaS product catering to the enterprise learning market. The basic concept of the product is using interactivity and games to engage enterprise learners and use that to capture data, which in turn gets used to improve the learner experience and effectiveness. The product allows enterprises to quickly create and deploy learning platforms, which are mobile learning oriented with a big data backend to capture click stream real-time data. Once deployed, the captured data streams 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, regionalization, data and security. As a learning platform, we are fairly unique since we combine platforms, games and authoring, usually available in different products.

The growth chart

Today, QuoDeck is one of the established and sought after brands when it comes to new-age enterprise learning. We were one of the top 10 winners of ET Power of Ideas 2016. Our online version is being used by 500+ learning creators across 40 countries that are creating learning content in more than seven languages. Our enterprise version is currently deployed at more than 25 global companies and has more than 120,000 learners. We are currently witnessing a 20 per cent month-on-month growth in revenues. Headquartered in Mumbai we have resources in Delhi and Bangalore. Our team is currently 28 strong and we are growing rapidly.

The uniqueness

“Our employees don’t stick to our learning programme” – This is one of the commonly faced issues when it comes to workplace learning. Employees don’t easily adopt any new learning programme or learning system. We have seen people beg their employees to complete a course, even bully them.

They need something their employees would be excited about, rather than shy away from. In other words, learning which they would like to go through, rather than forced to. This is where game-based learning helps!

Women in business is the new reality India is waking up to

As an entrepreneur, woman or not, the journey is definitely arduous. Some succeed at the first time, some later, but the key is to never stop trying. Of course, as a woman, people have their own set of expectations. It is difficult to swim against the tide, but that’s what makes it enticing.

But the good thing is, things have changed now. The perception of ‘nine to five’ job and taking care of the family chores is changing and people love the fact that women are running businesses and making an impact in the business world.

Have you ever used digital gaming for learning and interaction? Please share your views.