Serious Games For Customer Portfolio Management

Succubus Interactive is one of the gold medal winners of the International Serious Play Awards Competition with the Serious Game Cornak in the Business category.

Cornak allows players to learn how to manage their sales activity and particularly their client database. Set in a remote future, Cornak frees players from the nowadays market constraints to help them focus on the core challenge: selling products while skillfully and efficiently managing a customer portfolio.

Cornak was developed in partnership with Waypoint Conseil, a consulting company specialized in sales performance optimization. The Serious Game is intended not only for an inexperienced sales force, but it is also helpful for experienced professionals needing to improve their competences.

Through Cornak role-play, players become aware of the importance of planning their activity and understanding the consequences of their actions, which is often hard to do in the real world due to day-day pressures.

"Faced with these difficulties, the tendency is often to consider the situation, the relevance of the objectives and the market offer, but rarely the effectiveness of the commercial approach”, says Jerome Berger, Associate Director at Waypoint Council.

To achieve this goal, Cornak transports the player to the future and another galaxy to work at the Cube Company. Game context deliberately breaks from players’ daily reality to promote a different perspective and risk-taking.

In the game, the company C.U.B.E. tries to widen its blooming activity with the recruitment of new sales representatives. The star products are the red cube and its variation the blue cube. The player is a recently hired inexperienced salesperson who is helped by an experienced one.

Role playing the new hire, players are given a customer portfolio that they will have to change, according to the objectives set by their manager over a one-year period.  Each month players shall plan their actions and hold a debriefing meeting with the manager to develop an action plan for the following month.

Players’ objectives comprise five key elements of customer portfolio management: number of sales, product mix, customer structure, number of new customers and the quality of commercial relationship.

To spice up the game, unforeseen events can disrupt commercial activity every month (inventory shortages, new competitors, seminars, etc.) requiring players to constantly review their organizational strategy.

Since its launch earlier this year, Cornak has been adopted by the French subsidiary of the German group Heraeus, the recruitment specialist Expectra, and by large schools such as ESSEC Cergy-Pontoise or IAE in Paris.