THE CHALLENGE:
At FBD Insurance, there was a specific problem identified regarding a gap between the training room experience and the reality of the sales floor environment.
The assimilation’s required were previously handled with scheduled shadow sessions where the new trainee would shadow an experienced customer call centre agent on the sales floor. However this has an overhead of both time and personnel resources which was becoming less feasible during a leaner stage at the organisation.
THE SOLUTION:
Adaptas training and FBD Insurance created Virtual Reality simulations of sales call conversations for motor and home insurance.
The umbrella name of the tool, with the separate motor and home insurance calls is ‘Immersive Sales Star’. It is being used to scale best-in-class behaviours and competencies and replace the need for the shadow sessions.
The experience for the new trainee is that they put on the headset and see out through the eyes of the experienced call centre agent in the actual working environment with all the real distractions, both audio and visual, of that environment. They look down and see a body (albeit not their own) but this anchors and immerses them more deeply in the training.
The solution, a 360 degree video file (mp4), was rolled out with Oculus Go headsets. The Oculus Gallery app was the chosen tool to deliver and play the video through. The trainers were brought through troubleshooting for the devices to ensure they were comfortable with the tech behind the training tool.
By design, the audio track is replaceable (as we don’t have see people’s mouths in the video), meaning a cost effective update is possible should the insurance sales and compliance script become outdated. A new voice-over can be recorded and synced to the existing video and spatial (background audio) mix.
THE RESULTS:
Research analysis is running alongside the rollout of the ‘Immersive Sales Star’ at FBD. The staff who have used ‘Immersive Sales Star’, are showing the confidence required to build rapport, deal with customer objections and ask for the sale.
Comments from the users include:
“When I made my first real call, I felt like I had done it before”
“It brought all the jigsaw pieces of the training together for me”
”It makes you feel like you have done a call and achieved the sale”
“It made me feel like I stepped into an expert seller’s shoes”
“It trains you in the exact environment that you’re working in rather than a meeting or training room”
“Rather that skating around the question, I now go straight in and ask directly for the sale”
THE FEEDBACK
John Mulreid, Learning and Development Manager, FBD Insurance:
“Great solutions in business are never created by a single individual; they are done by a talented and committed group. This is why we chose to partner with Adaptas Training. Adaptas have been early adopters of using Virtual Reality technology, a medium which enables more immersive staff training. The Adaptas team helped us create an innovative, practical and results orientated training solution to overcome a real business challenge. The tool has improved product knowledge which in turn is improving Sales Performance and has eliminated the cost associated with employing a full time Sales Coach”
‘Immersive Sales Star’ won the ‘Excellence in Digital Learning’ award from the The Learning and Development Institute (L&DI) (formerly IITD) 2019.