Challenge
Our client is one of the leading training organizations in safety and business operations. Training clients in their understanding and use of complex equipment is one of its key offerings. But, due to the cost and budget pressure in the training department as the industry cut its investment, it became critical that our client’s training services maintained its market share.
Client faced a three fold challenge to:
- Enhance the knowledge gained in the training classroom, creating a memorable and stimulating experience.
- Use technology to replicate real-life situations in order to test and improve learning outcomes beyond any competitors.
- Make it possible to train beyond the high-tech classroom facility in HQ and so, create a localized and international offering.
- The simulator has also been used to fuel marketing activity. It was taken to different events and conferences while the data it collected was used to create content and media opportunities.
Tactics
To address these, the team created a virtual reality safety simulator. Three catastrophic industry events were created in VR and gamified. In each scenario, lives are at risk if people don’t take the right action. ‘Players’ put on a headset, see the incidents and then have the chance to fix them and learn more.
The headset, a laptop and an iPad are the only items needed making the learning experience far more portable than the real safety equipment used in the classroom.
The simulator has also been used to fuel marketing activity. It was taken to different events and conferences and the data it collected was used to create content and media opportunities.
Outcomes
Since the launch, our client has seen an uplift in training bookings and has already achieved 3x ROI. The company is now taking its training offering even further, creating AR experiences so that whole teams can work together to solve scenarios.
Learnings
- Identify the real problem: Not the marketing problem, but the business issue that needs addressing. In this case, marketing didn’t create a B2B campaign to increase bookings. It drove a technology initiative that got to the very crux of the problem.
- Be strategic with spend: The project more than paid for itself, showing the value of executing an innovative idea.
- It doesn’t take as long as you think: From idea to implementation, the project took two months to develop.