A few months ago an online teaching business used one of the contact emails here at CAPro to alert me of an opportunity to teach on its platform.
That business went by the title of Learn Desk.
According to the email, “Hello, I came across your learning content and found it to be useful for a lot of people.”
While I agree, there is a lot of material on the CAPro site that is useful to a lot of people, there were no specifics as to what this person—Sr. Vice President Vivek Puri—noticed that was so remarkable.
In fact, during a follow-up phone call from Puri’s female marketers, I asked that specific question: What was it that you observed that compelled you to send me the email to ask for me to teach on the Learn Desk platform?
It was crickets. No response. The female had never even visited the site, but he “came across [my] learning content.”
Strike one.
So, I asked about all these people that Puri thought would find the CAPro content useful, which he never examined. Did he talk with them? How many were there? What did they say? What questions were asked by way of response?
With the air conditioner running, I could hear a pin drop in the background. Dead silence. If Puri had talked with anyone, he didn’t let the admin assistant know about it.
Strike two.
Anyway, at her invitation, I agreed to attend a 45-minute Zoom meeting, where one of the co-founders of Learn Desk, Dr. Manish Arora, could make his sales pitch and supposedly answer questions of those who attended.
What I found strange about it all was the lack of any real information that I had not already discovered by reading through the material that Puri had sent me; it was a rehash or remedial information at best.
When Dr. Arora asked if anyone had questions, I chimed in with a few written queries I had about the operation pertaining to trials and discounts.
Why not give the potential instructor a trial period to try out the product, and if it works for him-her, then he-she can fork over the $160.00 annual or $430.00 lifetime fees to keep using Learn Desk?
Explanation? Because Dr. Arora would have to market it, and he was not going to have anyone checking out the nuts and bolts of his operation and, God forbid, make a dollar or two, without him getting his slice of the pie first.
To entice everyone at the demo that they should really sign-up for his service, he was offering a 10% discount. Wow! You mean, I could pay $144.00 dollars, instead of $160.00, without the possibility of a refund or guarantee, to try something that I really didn’t know was going to work? Well, sign me up—not.
Explanation? Only demonstration viewers were eligible for the discount on the day of the demo, no exceptions.
That is, unless no one signs up, and a follow-up email from Sr. VP Puri a day later states, “We are offering a 10% discount on the Premium Membership if you are to upgrade your account within a couple of days of attending the demo. Please upgrade your account using this link and let me know so that I can issue a refund of 10% back to your payment method for the year. The discount is also valid for the Lifetime Membership.”
Ooops!
Strike three.
To me, what Dr. Arora was doing was the same thing you get from high pressure salesmen or those roaming used car lots trying to get you buy their pieces of junk.
Well, I was not impressed the demo, nor was I impressed with Dr. Arora. So, I just blew the whole thing off, at least until the next day.
Today, August 13, 2022, I received another email from Puri asking what I thought about Dr. Arora’s demo? I think he was hoping I was impressed.
He asked me four questions:
(1) What did you gain from the LearnDesk demo? Answer: nothing.
(2) What else would you like to be covered in the future LearnDesk demos? Answer: Who runs the show at LD? Who are the trainers, customer service reps, technicians? Is there an HR office? Heck, given the dearth of information thus far, just about anything would have been welcome. I ended up with nothing, as Puri ignored my questions.
(3) What other features would you like to have in the LearnDesk software? Answer: Instead of more features, how about just let me try it out for a while, and I’ll let you know if I need something else? Wrong answer.
(4) Any other feedback or comments that you would like to share about the program or the instructor. Answer: In short, thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll pass for now. If I change my mind sometime in the future, I’ll let you know. Again, wrong answer.
Puri was Johnny-on-the-spot with a response, though. He wrote, “Dr. Paul, what do you teach and how many students do you have? Any reason you did not have your video or audio on during the demo?” as if those questions had any relevance to what I wrote and asked him.
Nevertheless, I responded with zero and then hit him with another bevy of questions to go along with the previous questions he failed to answer, and I called his attention to.
That’s when it was determined by him that Learn Desk was just not my cup of tea, to which I called to his attention, again, about the first email where he wrote, “I came across your learning content and found it to be useful for a lot of people.”
So, what happened? Did he finally get around to talking to all those people in the last 24 hours, or were all the questions I was asking—that he and Dr. Arora did not want to answer—undoing their operation?
Time will only tell.
What I did discover later is that Learn Desk is on the California Better Business Bureau’s radar, and it has given the “business” a big, fat D+ rating for failure to respond to customer complaints.
I have since added my comments to the California BBB concerning Learn Desk.
Given what I know now, both from the testimonies of others who have dealt with LD and my personal experience, I can fully understand the rating.
Therefore, buyer beware, especially when it comes to this seemingly good learning platform for teaching that soon crumbles to unseemliness by asking just a few questions.
