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23 - 24 April 2025 | ExCeL London

23 - 24 April 2025 | ExCeL London

Real-world examples proving the ROI of video-based training

Tuesday 21 November 2023

Real-world examples proving the ROI of video-based training

Micah Eppler
Real-world examples proving the ROI of video-based training

Modern organisations want flexible, scalable ways of delivering online learning to a distributed, global workforce. For many, video-based practice and coaching presents an elegant solution to these pain points.

A video-based practice platform enables sales associates, customer service reps and other workers the opportunity to truly practice conversations about wide-ranging products or services, to receive personalised coaching and feedback and to perfect their skills, increasing both confidence and competence.

In this article, we share a few real-world use cases from companies across various industries achieving skills acquisition and behavior change with video-based training.

 

First, what is video-based training

Video-based training prompts learners to submit videos and incorporate feedback from mentors or artificial intelligence (AI) on their next attempt. Learners can re-record assignments when convenient—anytime and anywhere globally. Practice makes perfect! Using a tool like Rehearsal for can help your workers dramatically improve sales demos, product messaging, and soft skills by repeatedly responding to simulated scenarios.

Seventy four percent of respondents surveyed by Training Magazine Network said virtual coaching and mentoring is just as effective, or even more effective, than traditional coaching.

 

What training needs can you address?

Video-based training is used to accomplish a wide range of learning objectives, including soft skills development, onboarding, compliance coaching, customer service training and more.

Soft skills development

Any job role in any industry requires strong soft skills, including communication and problem-solving. Video-based training is an excellent way for employees to practice these skills and improve communication with clients, coworkers or vendors.

Onboarding

The onboarding experience can make or break an employee’s experience with your company and significantly impact employee retention rates. Allowing your new employees to ‘get their feet wet’ through practice sessions in a safe environment can ensure more accurate and confident performance when it’s time to apply those skills.

Compliance coaching

In heavily regulated industries like healthcare, finance and manufacturing, your employees MUST understand all the laws and regulations applicable to their job function. You can reduce the risk of compliance violations and improve workplace safety through video-based practice.

Customer service training

Providing excellent customer service and increasing customer satisfaction is essential for many companies. Enable learners to practice their communication and problem-solving skills in realistic scenarios until they reach 100% accuracy.

 

How do companies use video-based training?

Let’s take a look at a few case studies across telecommunications, healthcare and business services.

 

Verizon: Training telecommunication reps on new products and services

As a global telecommunications company focused on innovation, Verizon continuously creates new products and services, resulting in the constant need for and development of new training content.

With more than 1600+ retail outlets in the United States, Verizon needed to find a scalable way to deliver new product information, train employees and ensure that each and every employee understands how to explain new product information to its customers. With such a wide geographic spread of locations, Verizon also needed an effective way to reach a diverse and multiple language speaking customer base with varying credit levels.

Verizon decided to test video-based practice and coaching with a subset of its retail store representatives. In these select locations, employees would practice and record mock responses to customer-centric virtual role-play scenarios, upload their videos and then request manager feedback.

In this test run, completing the video-based training portion was optional, giving Verizon the unique opportunity to measure the practice group's performance against the control.

Verizon’s Learning Effectiveness team tracked and compared key performance indicators (KPIs), whereas Gross Adds—a metric that tracks the acquisition of new customers—served as the primary metric.

The employees who completed two or more video role plays with the video-based practice tool showed a 71% increase in gross adds over groups that received only the standard training, resulting in an additional $1.39M in revenue over three months.

After a comprehensive analysis, Verizon concluded that introducing the practice-based training model resulted in a return on investment of 749%.

 

3M: Developing sellers in a complex clinical environment

The 3M Health Care Business Group delivers practical, proven solutions that enable their customers to protect and improve the health of people around the world. With highly technical products and a clinical sales approach, 3M’s 1000+ sales reps needed to practice and perfect messaging to ensure success when speaking with medical professionals.

To meet the challenges of an ever-changing technical sales environment, 3M implemented video practice for onboarding new hires and reinforcing experienced sales reps’ skills. The asynchronous nature of video-based practice allowed content deployment as needed, regardless of team location.

Since then, 3M has seen more accurate and consistent messaging and has greater confidence in the effective delivery of that message.

Reporting and analytics from video-based practice can also provide leadership visibility into sales rep engagement and skills development. At 3M, field sales managers are empowered to request specific practice scenarios based on their observations or individual reps’ needs.

 

Paychex: Increasing retention and revenue for a Human Capital Management provider

Paychex is a leading provider of integrated human capital management solutions for human resources, payroll, benefits and insurance services. After turnover increased for newly hired Small Business Market (SBM) sales reps and revenue goals weren’t met, Paychex looked to launch a new sales onboarding strategy.

The company rolled out a new blended learning strategy, which included video role-play assignments and certifications. Using a video-based practice platform lets each employee demonstrate specific sales skills with their coach, apply their learning immediately on the job and continuously add new skills to their portfolio. The new program yielded:

  • 8% increase in retention
  • 10% increase in business revenue
  • 41% increase in speed to competency
  • 68% reduction in travel expenses

 

Modern Woodmen of America: Streamlining financial services onboarding and increasing employee retention

Modern Woodmen of America is a member-owned fraternal financial services organisation, the nation’s third-largest fraternal benefit society in terms of assets. Its representatives provide financial products to help members protect their families and their futures.

Modern Woodmen’s financial representatives are distributed nationwide; however, they must all speak a consistent language and accurately represent the organisation’s unique brand and fraternal nature while driving sales.

In addition to the product sales training, the organisation needed a way to address a high attrition rate. Finally, L&D Managers wanted better control of the training matrix to generate meaningful data and infer learners’ and mentors’ engagement.

Leadership rolled out video-based practice scenarios to help the field managers and financial representatives.

Modern Woodmen has found that the learning provides excellent clarity on the language, the pitch and troubleshooting avenues for a comprehensive self-learning session. Since implementing video-based training, it has witnessed significant improvements with all stakeholders:

  • Learners deliver better presentations that align with the brand
  • Mentors ramp up the time-to-productivity and time-to-proficiency of their team members
  • The L&D team drives better learning through the ease of the tool and insights generated

Through advanced analytics, L&D Managers at Modern Woodmen can get a comprehensive overview of how many learners have commenced their learning path, and recorded responses and mentors’ involvement with mentees’ training program.

It’s clear that no matter the industry, video-based practice provides a scalable and effective way to improve communication skills, drive sales and retain employees.

 

Schedule a personalised demo of Rehearsal by ELB Learning.

 

Micah Eppler Micah Eppler

Account Executive at ELB Learning

 

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