OneVision provides award-winning service solutions to pro smart-home installers, enabling them to elevate their client experience, restore work-life balance, generate recurring revenue, and eliminate the constant distractions of service. OneVision has over 200 pros on its platform and services over 50,000 homes in North America.
OneVision has a 48-strong technical support team that onboards in groups of up to ten new hires in any given month. Just two people are responsible for tech support training and QA, while their smaller sales team has one administrator who also handles training.
OneVision’s tech support carried out all its training role plays live over Zoom, led by one of the managers. The sales team reviewed their own calls and practiced role plays together when they felt it was necessary. While the company saw role plays as the best way to transmit the technical knowledge and skills the support team needed for their jobs, they found that human-led role plays were not effective. Colleagues tended to go easier on trainees than real customers, which didn’t deliver a genuine practice experience.
“When you train somebody and you do role play, you have a tendency to take your foot off the pedal, maybe ease up a little if you see they are struggling. That’s not what a client does. So how do you get a genuine experience, where the client who is upset at the beginning of the call may still be upset at the end?” – Chris Winn, Instructional Designer, OneVision Resources.
The tech support team in particular was limited by managers’ training capacity. Customer support reps typically shadowed or were reverse-shadowed by a more senior employee. In that format, they would experience just two to three actual troubleshooting calls during an 8-hour workday. OneVision needed to increase the number of practice scenarios a trainee could complete in a day, without waiting for live calls to come in.
OneVision’s training also took experienced support agents away from their other tasks, creating a heavy burden on the rest of the tech support team. The operations team frequently had to scramble to clear the resulting ticket backlog.
Furthermore, high training demands on a small training department meant that there was very little attention paid to upskilling or ongoing development for existing staff. Onboarding took most of the dedicated trainer’s bandwidth.
Finally, OneVision’s training team struggled to gauge what exactly the trainees were absorbing. They needed a way to validate the impact of their training material and verify that trainees were correctly identifying points of failure in the technical systems they were hired to support.
Chris Winn and Paul Donato, who lead training and quality assurance for the technical support team, looked into a number of conversational AI role play training platforms, and found that Second Nature delivered an experience that was closest to real-life.
“One of the biggest things that we loved about Second Nature was that when the AI spoke to you, it felt like an actual person. That was a huge drive for us. These clients are very high end clients, they have very high end demands. We wanted this to feel as genuine as possible.” – Chris Winn
Second Nature integrates seamlessly with OneVision’s existing LMS and content delivery systems, Articulate360 and Reach360. Embedded role plays and SSO streamlined training workflows, enable trainees to practice skills immediately after learning them, reinforcing retention. OneVision trainees adopted Second Nature enthusiastically, enjoying the challenge of improving their score and experimenting with different conversational approaches.
Chris and Paul, together with Kearsten Morgan who manages training for the sales team, found it very easy to use the AI course creator assistant. It takes them an average of 15 minutes to build, test, and publish a training role play, leading to the scores of role plays they have amassed so far in their training library.
OneVision initially implemented Second Nature to help sales teams practice difficult conversations and tech support teams to refine their customer conversations. But they quickly discovered a unique use case: automating technical troubleshooting training.
The team feeds system documentation, SOPs, and signal flow data to Second Nature from its backend LLM, to create live replicas of troubleshooting scenarios. Trainees practice diagnosing customer tech problems based on real product and customer data, and learn how to differentiate between issues that are “in scope” for phone support and those requiring an on-site technician.
“The AI is able to help us troubleshoot and try to navigate the actual root cause of the customer’s problem. So a new tech trainee will come in and need to diagnose what they’re looking at and what error is happening. Second Nature is able to pull that information up and throw it to them and do a live replica of a technical troubleshooting scenario.” – Chris Winn
Chris and Paul are in the process of creating 80 different technical troubleshooting scenarios in Second Nature, covering 15 different systems and multiple variables like devices, personas, expectations, and membership levels.
Second Nature successfully delivers a genuine customer support experience, with trainees feeling like they are interacting with real people. Second Nature’s AI role play personas are consistent and objective, ensuring that every trainee faces the same level of difficulty from start to finish, without the bias or lack of focus that can come with human-led role plays.
With Second Nature, OneVision saw a dramatic increase in training efficiency. The training team moved 50% of their onboarding to automated role plays on Second Nature. Trainees are now able to complete 12 troubleshooting scenarios in half a day, representing a 4x rise in practice time. What’s more, having fewer experienced agents tied up in shadowing and training tasks eliminates the drain on operational bandwidth and clears up the resultant ticket backlog.
Replacing live training with AI role plays improves training management and frees trainers to focus on training delivery, documentation, and imparting company values. Now Paul and Chris have more time to dedicate to higher-value tasks like instructional design.
For Chris, the visibility into training impact and unbiased analysis Second Nature provides is extremely important. Second Nature validates that trainees are absorbing the material, measuring their technical accuracy, soft skills, and personalization in customer conversations.
“Second Nature gives me feedback on did I give them the right content? Did I train them on the right aspects of a system? Did I train them on signal flow appropriately? Second Nature can validate that they’re going through the proper steps and getting to the proper results based on the training I delivered initially.” – Chris Winn.
Thanks to Second Nature, OneVision will be able to keep its small training team, while scaling its team efficiently from ~50 today to 200+ in the next three years..
The OneVision training leaders intend to use Second Nature to train employees to improve client experience, increasing their focus on ongoing training and upskilling, which had previously been sidelined by the company’s onboarding needs.