IAE Lille runs a Master 1 in Marketing Strategy & Customer Relations with a clear ambition: to connect academic knowledge to operational reality. The school wanted to:
The pattern is a familiar one: lectures give students solid frames of reference, but they get very little actual practice across a semester — not enough to embed the right customer-facing reflexes. In a mixed cohort, with varying levels of experience and very different placement contexts, the gap between theory and the field is wider still.
So the school needed to increase practice without overloading teaching staff, give every student consistent, measurable feedback, and innovate pedagogically to hold attention in groups of 25 to 30. There was one further requirement: the skills practised in class had to transfer directly into students' placement work.
Role-play moved into the middle of the classroom. Students take turns facing AI avatars that play believable customers: emotions, objections and speech patterns are all matched to the scenario. Each five- to ten-minute sequence ends with an immediate debrief — strengths, priority areas to work on, and suggested rephrasings, generated automatically by multimodal analysis of content, tone and delivery.
The set-up was designed to fit naturally into the existing programme. It does not replace lectures; it complements them with repeated practice. Students run several sessions over the semester, which makes progress measurable over time.
More importantly, students were put in a meta position: they built their own personas from the situations they encounter at their placement companies. Writing those scenarios forced them to work out what AI can genuinely contribute to their day-to-day work — quality of welcome, clarity of explanation, handling a tense customer, following up after an interaction — and anchored the skills as close to the field as possible.
The first sessions scored 100% satisfaction. Students describe a wow effect and an immediate sense of usefulness: they know where they stand, what to work on, and how to improve from one session to the next.
For teaching staff, feedback becomes consistent and objective: every student receives the same depth of analysis, whatever the size of the group. Classroom dynamics improve too — students compare scores, swap strategies and help each other through the trickiest situations. The quality of the training also becomes more visible to employers: students talk about it with their workplace tutors, who see the progress on the ground.
According to the Master's programme director, Face Up has closed the gap between theoretical teaching and what partner companies expect in terms of interpersonal skills. Students arrive on placement with reflexes already rehearsed, which speeds up their operational learning curve.
IAE Lille and Face Up are working on extending the programme in several directions:
The longer-term goal: to make conversational learning a pedagogical standard in interpersonal-skills training, alongside classroom teaching and real-world feedback from the field.
Want to put your students into real situations as part of your programmes?
Get in touch: contact@face-up.fr
