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Bright Executive Interview

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Sheri Greenhaus, Managing Partner of CrmXchange, met with Luc Dallaire, Head of Growth for Bright, an innovative company that offers a holistic and integrated platform for large-scale practice, revolutionizing the learning and development space. By enabling individuals to practice their skills in a simulated environment, Bright brings about dramatic improvements across the talent funnel, like training cost reduction, performance improvements in all kinds of core business metrics, and improvements to employee engagement and retention. Their unique approach emphasizes the effectiveness of practice, and they are dedicated to helping businesses achieve this on a significant scale. With Bright, organizations can unlock the full potential of their workforce through immersive and tailored learning experiences.

Sheri: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Luc: I started my career as a call center agent at Allstate many years ago, then moved into roles of increasing responsibility within Operations, Instructional Design, and Workforce Management. Eventually, I joined Labcorp, where I led the launch of a workforce optimization solution globally across their contact centers. I moved into larger leadership roles leading enterprise projects, and then built and led a net-new team to centralize key enablement functions like project management, customer experience, business intelligence and analytics, and operations excellence. Last year, when I had the chance to join Rob, the CEO and Founder of Bright, it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. After learning about what he was doing, I knew I had to be a part of it.

Sheri: Tell us about Bright.

Luc: Bright is an immersive learning and workforce development company that uses simulation-based practice to make undeniable positive impact to organizations. We’ve focused initially on the contact center industry since the ROI is very easy to calculate, but we also support training for a wide variety of roles like lawncare specialists, nurses, field technicians, sales teams, and more. Our mission is to put practice, and hyper-personalized coaching, at the center of our customers’ learning strategies. By significantly reducing training time while also improving associate performance at the same time, we create incredible value for our customers. We do this by using our platform to deliver a holistic immersive learning program, including digital lessons and assessments, a wide array of simulation types, human or AI-powered coaching for highly-scalable practice, and by capturing an unprecedented skills data set about each learner. We are the only provider in the market today to offer this type of integrated solution, and we put all of our proprietary authoring tools in the hands of our customers for them to create anything they want themselves without being dependent on us.

Sheri: What do you mean by practice at the center of your customers’ learning strategies?

Luc: When we say practice at the center, we mean that since practice is how humans actually develop skills, that’s what we should spend the most time doing during training. Rather than relying solely on traditional training methods like instructor-led classes or eLearning modules, we emphasize the critical importance of practice for skill development. Our platform allows learners to engage in highly-realistic simulations where they can apply their knowledge and practice various scenarios. It's not just about providing information or assessments; it's about giving learners the opportunity to actively practice their skills in a safe and controlled environment. We capture proficiency data throughout the process, so organizations can assess readiness based on demonstrated skills and proficiency, not just quiz scores.

Sheri: How does Bright customize the learning journey for new agents?

Luc: We offer a highly-modular approach that allows for curated and customized learning paths. We break down interactions into "moments," which are individual learning experiences. These moments can be strung together to create simulations, and then learning paths. For new agents, we can start with the basics, such as empathy skills, and gradually progress to more advanced skills and knowledge while still revisiting and reinforcing previous concepts. This approach leverages all of the strong learning science research around the importance of spaced repetition, which is crucial for effective learning. Learners can practice and apply their skills in various scenarios, whether it involves interacting with customers, making decisions, or using specific software systems. Throughout the learning journey, skill proficiency data is captured, providing a comprehensive view of an agent's readiness and skill progression.

Sheri: What does a company get when they start with Bright?

Luc: Our approach to customer onboarding has been a high-touch, white-glove implementation process. We work closely with our customers to understand their existing training programs and identify areas where practice can make a significant impact. Our platform is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, accessible through any modern browser, and requires no IT integration into any customer systems. During the initial implementation, we build the first few hours of simulations for our customers, ensuring they have a strong starting point, and we teach them how to build simulations for themselves during that process as well. We also have an extensive self-guided certification program called Bright Academy within our platform, where customers can access tutorials, guidance, and practice on using Bright. In this way, we use our own platform to teach people how to use our platform. Our team and account managers are there to review progress, provide feedback, and support the organization throughout their relationship with us.

Sheri: Who typically serves as the administrator for Bright?

Luc: Usually, someone from the learning and development team takes on the role of an administrator. This could be an instructional designer, a manager, or someone responsible for the learning process within the organization. However, we’ve also seen administrators be a trainer, a business analyst, or anyone involved in building simulations and managing the learning journey. One of our unique value propositions is that our platform doesn't require any IT integration, so it can be built and managed by the learning and development team without relying on IT support. This flexibility allows organizations to create and customize simulations themselves, even without technical expertise.

Sheri: I noticed that spaced repetition is a key principle mentioned on your website. Can you elaborate on that?

Luc: The research on this topic is undeniable. With spaced repetition, learners have the opportunity to reinforce their knowledge and skills through repeated practice over time. This concept is widespread across so many facets of our society. Think about it - athletes, musicians, airline pilots, etc. all practice for countless hours to hone their skills, yet the corporate learning function hasn’t followed suit. Our platform and approach to blended or hybrid learning is specifically engineered for spaced repetition. And while many aspects of our platform can be fully asynchronous, we strongly believe in the power of human coaching and engagement as well. Our platform provides a coaching inbox where human trainers or coaches can review and rate learner submissions. They can provide personalized video feedback, which enhances employee engagement and improves morale. Depending on an organization's needs, they can throttle how much coaching should be powered by AI versus delivered by human trainers. By combining the strengths of both approaches, we create a more efficient and effective learning experience.

Sheri: How did Bright get its start?

Luc: Our founder and CEO, Rob Wright, previously served as the head of global learning strategy for Marriott. His team managed a massive learning program, training over a million people in his last year there, across more than 100 countries and in multiple languages. Having bought learning services and technology from so many vendors, he wasn’t able to find anything to make a measurable impact or provide his team with scalable practice, so he decided to start Bright and build everything he wished he’d had when training people at that scale. The company was founded with the aim of revolutionizing learning and development by leveraging simulation-based practice at scale.

Sheri: What do you see as the biggest challenge for Bright?

Luc: Our biggest challenge right now is educating the broader market that simulation-based practice is actually a real thing, and that we’ve created a technology platform to deliver it effectively at scale for the first time. Corporate learning and development teams have subscribed to traditional, status quo training methods for decades. Many organizations still assume that classroom-style learning and video-based training through a basic Learning Management System is the best they can offer, and are not aware of the existence of simulation-based practice. Our challenge isn’t that people don’t believe practice drives more effective learning – that part everyone seems to understand without question. Our challenge right now lies in bringing this new technology to light. It’s in showing organizations that there is a platform out there now that can deliver effective, scalable practice across multiple modalities, and that can capture proficiency data that’s never been captured before to actually prove the impact of their learning program. This has previously been unattainable, and this combination of capabilities is helping our customers turn the learning and development function into one of the most valuable functions within the organization.