We’ve all been there — trying to establish a connection between skills training and business outcomes. Solving the age-old dilemma of proving training return on investment (ROI) is within reach with immersive simulations. Simulation-based learning changes how organizations can measure and develop employees’ skills.
Simulations not only help employees learn, but also provide executives with clear skills data. This data offers insights into skills gaps and can help leaders make better decisions. These simulations and data have the power to reduce costs, mitigate risk and increase revenue.
Here are three simulation use cases that can show ROI.
1. Use Simulations to Increase Revenue
A primary goal of any business is to generate revenue. Growth enables companies to retain top talent, innovate more quickly, and cater to customers and clients. Immersive simulations are an incredible tool for growing revenue where employees can practice and refine key sales and execution skills.
Sales and business development:
Sales teams are under pressure to close deals and deliver against growth targets. The best sellers are skilled in adapting to the market, understanding their customers’ needs and overcoming objections.
If your sales team is underperforming, how do you fix the problem? Training and expensive consultants may help, but it’s often difficult to pinpoint their connection to results. Real-time skills data is missing. This makes it hard to improve sales close rates, land more business and achieve milestones.
Simulation-based training gives sales professionals an opportunity to role-play — and measure their performance within that role-play. Since they’re in a no-risk environment, they can test new techniques and perfect their sales skills. These simulations don’t have to be cookie-cutter. You can build them with a specific sales framework. The salespeople can practice conducting realistic sales conversations, negotiating deals and managing difficult client interactions.
In a coaching mode, immersive simulations often involve artificial intelligence (AI)-powered avatars or human actors to provide feedback. You can branch off to different scenarios, replicating the complexity of a real sales call. Then, salespeople see reports of their performance and can improve quickly given the linked feedback.
Sales simulations also present executives with data. This data displays trouble spots and informs them of where to spend additional time coaching. Simulations allow managers to follow the performance of specific cohorts of sellers, watching how they improve certain skills. Skills data can also determine who should be promoted to a leadership role, because they may score higher in difficult simulations.
As you can imagine, increasing sales performance by even 5% across a large organization spikes revenue by millions. Scenario-based training and immersive simulations take less time than traditional sales training, so you’ll notice seat time savings too.
Mandatory training and onboarding:
Have you ever seen an employee’s eyes glaze over while going through onboarding or other mandatory training? By changing the approach of mandatory training and onboarding, you will notice increases in revenue over time.
It’s crucial to get employees up-to-speed on company policies. That’s why simulations can level-up onboarding. They can engage employees with unique learner journeys.
When a new hire comes on board, you can quickly benchmark their skill set. This helps you place them in the right environment, with the right manager and mentorship. You’ll save a lot of time training them, because simulations can do most of the hard work for you.
Simulations turn mandatory training into an interactive, hands-on scenario. New employees will be able to rehearse those key tasks, from handling difficult customers to navigating safety protocols to using critical software systems, improving team efficiency.
While most employees forget what they learn, immersive simulations ingrain key skills through memorable scenarios and actual practice. This saves companies millions of dollars in wasted time and mistakes down the road. Plus, it helps executives monitor the performance of new employees. It even makes mandatory training and onboarding fun!
Most importantly, these simulations that employees go through will have a large impact on revenue. Done right, mandatory training increases profit. Done wrong, mandatory training cuts into margins or only checks the box. Using immersive simulations for mandatory training and onboarding make it easy to increase revenue by shaping employee skills from day one.
2. Reduce Risk With Simulations
By quickly and effectively building specific compliance and DEI skills, immersive simulations help mitigate risk. Customer complaints, regulatory violations and lawsuits are all tangible risks any large company faces. These risks can be mitigated using simulation learning.
Immersive simulations offer an opportunity to train your team to avoid risk. This builds a stronger, more trustworthy workforce while reducing costly mistakes.
DEI training:
DEI is one of the hardest things to implement at a large organization. Traditional training fails to influence and change behavior. This is because employees go through the training without the chance to practice in a realistic scenario. It’s also not clear where skills gaps are and leaves employees potentially doubting their own interactions.
Instead, simulations provide a digital place where teams can practice and measure DEI skills and behaviors in action. They can be measured and trained on their unconscious biases, workplace conflict resolution, and more. It allows individuals to apply these concepts meaningfully.
Employees can practice navigating sensitive situations in a safe, controlled environment. Simulations can either coach them on the correct responses in a nuanced situation or continue to advance them through the training until they pass.
The data collected from these sessions is invaluable to executives. Unlike traditional training methods, in-person seminars or courses, leaders can see how their teams actually perform and infer what would happen in a real environment. Then, executives can take the necessary steps to address the problems before it costs the business money or leads to a major mistake.
Simulations make the strengths and gaps, as well as the return on DEI efforts, measurable — something that was difficult to do before. The skills data gathered from a DEI simulation helps to identify skill gaps in the organization. Using simulations, DEI becomes a controllable, developing skill set, not just a topic of awareness.
Compliance and risk management:
In most industries, compliance is not an option: It’s a necessity. Companies can burn through millions of dollars without proper compliance training in place. From banking to health care, adherence to regulatory standards should be a top priority.
How can you make employees engaged for compliance and risk training? Simulations make this possible. They let teams practice these compliance skills in a safe environment, with zero risk.
Whether this is financial compliance, data security or industry-specific laws, all can be brought to life through immersive simulations. Organizations can prepare simulation-based scenarios that require team members to act within regulations, identify risks and make compliant decisions. These realistic scenarios help employees understand the full effect of their responsibilities.
Data gathered from a compliance simulation program can illuminate exactly where the problems are. Executives are able to understand how well their teams know and practice certain rules. Leaders can spot the areas where additional training is needed, which wasn’t possible before immersive simulations empowered companies to measure skills data.
3. Transform Operational Leadership Through Simulations
A company’s operations are either propelling growth or holding it back. Immersive simulations offer a unique method of smoothing out operational bottlenecks. A great example of this is internally developing leaders.
Leadership development:
Great leadership can change the course of an entire business. The wrong leaders can make operations crumble. Immersive simulations now gather data and determine who would be fit for a leadership role. The results even show how current leaders may be lacking in particular skills. These simulations help leaders navigate realistic, high-pressure situations — before they occur.
Simulations and scenario-based learning help leaders practice critical skills, such as decision-making, team management and conflict resolution. They may be placed in a situation where they have to lead through company crises, mediate issues between two team members or make difficult budgetary decisions. Such exercises allow them to fine-tune their leadership capabilities, without the high stakes.
Board members and executives can study data from leadership simulations to predict who in their organization is the next high-potential team member. The rich skills data helps to create development programs for each leader-in-training.
Keep in mind, it’s less expensive to identify and develop leaders in house than it is to hire them externally. Immersive simulations offer a great opportunity to pick out these high-performers and turn them into A-players for the organization.
This process of developing leaders enhances operations ten-fold. Great leaders build better systems, hire better team members and create a better culture. Immersive simulations can help develop those leaders in a scalable, predictable way.
Simulation Learning Can Boost Business Results
Simulations can be used in any industry: health care, finance, retail, tech, manufacturing and more. This type of scenario-based learning helps organizations mitigate risk, increase revenue and cut costs. Business leaders will gain data-driven visibility into employee performance, helping them make smarter and faster decisions.
Simulations can become an organization’s competitive advantage by better understanding employee strengths and supporting individual and team development. By embedding simulation-based training into your approach, your workforce will be more ready for the future.
