Practice at scale: a live EasyCoach demo with real customer stories

Most organizations know their teams need to practice. The hard part is making that practice scalable, consistent, and actually useful.

In this session, William Salm from Equity Trust Company and DeJuan Taylor from Station Casinos share how they’re using EasyCoach to bring practice-based learning to their teams at scale. William walks through how he built over 70 roleplay scenarios to take volume off leadership’s plates and give new hires a consistent way to prepare for real client conversations. DeJuan shares how Station Casinos is using EasyCoach across multiple departments, from table games and food and beverage to leadership development, and how he’s gotten his teams to actually show up and engage with the roleplays.

After the customer stories, Khushboo Gulabrai, EasyCoach Product Marketing Lead at Easygenerator, takes you through a full live demo of the product, covering how to build a roleplay, how to share it with learners, and how to track performance and skill development over time.

Whether you’re exploring practice-based learning for the first time or looking to scale what you already have, this session shows you what it looks like in practice.

Speakers webinar transcript

Khushboo: Alrighty. I think we can go ahead and get started. People will keep joining. Welcome to our webinar. Today we’re going to be walking you through our newest tool called EasyCoach. As you know, a lot of organizations are moving towards skill building and looking at how we can go beyond content consumption to actually being able to practice. I have two wonderful speakers here, William from Equity Trust and DeJuan from Station Casinos joining us from Ohio and Vegas. We’d love to walk you through how EasyCoach has worked for them, how their organizations are moving towards more skill building, and walk you through what the tool looks like as well.

Before we get started, let me introduce myself. I’m Khushboo, from the Easygenerator team. I’m the product marketing lead on EasyCoach. We’ve been working super hard and long to get EasyCoach out to the public to really start to build practice at scale. Easygenerator’s core product and courses and trainings are really important, but how can we elevate that experience? By giving you an ability to actually practice and ensure that you’re confident before the actual conversation occurs. Let me have William and DeJuan introduce themselves as well. Over to you, William.

William: Hello. My name is William. I work out of Cleveland, Ohio. I’m the learning and development specialist here at Equity Trust. We sell retirement accounts and I work primarily with our sales team. I’m excited to be here.

Khushboo: DeJuan, over to you.

DeJuan: Greetings, all. My name is DeJuan Taylor. I’m the vice president of talent development at Station Casinos out in Las Vegas. The easiest way to think of Station Casinos is that most people, when they think of Las Vegas, think about the Strip. Well, the locals market, which we’re the market leader of, is actually the second largest gaming market in the entire United States. We specialize in everything from hotels and casinos to entertainment such as bowling and concert venues. Really excited to be here, and I look forward to a great conversation today.

Khushboo: Awesome. Thank you both. So before we get started, let me walk you through our agenda. We’re going to hear from both William and DeJuan on how they’ve actually implemented EasyCoach, how they’ve gotten their organizations to move towards skill development, what types of use cases they see success in, where skills and practice are important, and how they’re scaling this across their businesses. After that, we’ll move into an EasyCoach demo where I’ll walk you through what the platform looks like. Feel free to drop your questions in the chat at any point in time. We will have a Q&A session at the end as well. I’m going to pass the mic over to William to share how he’s been building out EasyCoach for Equity Trust.

William Salm — Equity Trust Company

William: Thank you. So before EasyCoach, I had a predicament that I think a lot of people in training experience, where I was being asked to have our new hires in sales and supporting roles ready for real client conversations, and quickly. We had two or three main challenges working against us. The first is time. I’m not able to sit on each role play, have each conversation, do each role play over and over again. There’s only one of me and there are a lot of new hires. The second is that I’m not an expert when it comes to having our sales conversations. I’m more of an expert when it comes to building the training, so it might not make sense for me to be critiquing these role plays or giving feedback.

What that meant was that the real bottleneck in our process was leadership. We needed them to be having these conversations with our sales reps and sales support staff. Real practice, real feedback. The only way to do that before EasyCoach was taking up time on their calendar, and that was expensive in terms of time and cost, and it didn’t scale past a certain point. I knew we needed a tool and we needed to get leadership’s buy-in because it was going to protect their time.

The other thing we experienced was that the handoff from training to live calls was kind of informal. It depended on which manager the new hires were assigned to and what was going on in the coaching sessions. Different new hires could have the same role and the same training but have a completely different experience, which would lead to different outcomes.

So I brought this problem to Easygenerator and EasyCoach. What they helped me do was take this volume of practice off of leadership’s plate and hand it to an AI roleplay partner that could run these scenarios over and over again without management’s calendar being involved. The reframe I sold them on was that leadership stopped being asked to run every single repetition of role play. Instead, what they got to do was review the outputs, look at the data, and that’s a fraction of the time and a much higher value use of their attention.

But one thing I didn’t expect was that it also gave me data. When I started grading the role plays and looking at the data over time, it showed up patterns where we had missed the mark in training. For example, we have a process where we help set up LLCs, and it has all these complicated forms. I noticed that people were really struggling when describing this process to the AI roleplay bot. That was able to inform me that training needed to be improved in those spots, and gave us that visibility.

When I first sat down to build it, it came faster than I expected. It was really easy to use the software. The structure is very simple. You get a title, an AI character, and you can build out some traits, context, interaction rules, and your evaluation criteria. The real lift is getting your sales organization to provide good source material before you put it in the tool. Scripts, objections, hearing what good sounds like before you even start to create the role play. Once you have that in hand, translating it into EasyCoach is really easy. After every scenario I would get faster and faster. I can probably stand one up now, when I have source material, in less than an hour. I’ve built out a pretty full library of over 70 different role plays over the last couple of months.

A couple of tips I’ve learned: I steal real language from my sales and support staff. I want to know what my top representatives are saying. I want dialogue and feedback that’s very real so the roleplay scenarios mirror their actual calls. I’ve also built a reusable skeleton or template that nails down exactly what I want, and I created my own process I can give to colleagues so that if they want to create role plays for their specific teams, I’m no longer the bottleneck. Third, I build the role plays with my learners and sequence on complexity. We start with our simplest, easiest conversations, then layer in objections, resistant callers, and edge cases. We build up confidence. We also create rubrics before we start. I want these teams to define for me what good looks like, otherwise I’m just guessing. And lastly, we use the tool to diagnose, not just to practice. We go in, look at the data, and ask: where are the gaps for this learner? Where are the gaps for this role? How can we get better?

In terms of results, manager coaching time has gone down significantly. We redesigned our training program with EasyCoach built in and cut manager training time from roughly 15 hours a week drilling with new hires to about five hours a week. Ramp up time is faster. New hires were going from onboarding to call-ready in roughly eight weeks before; now it’s about four to five weeks. Those two numbers are what I use to bring leadership around on investing in this. Once they could see that time coming back to them, it’s not really a hard conversation. And I also get better grading data back on gaps in our training so I can redesign as we go.

The way I got buy-in was to lead with how this was a win, not a limitation. I framed it as context, not a constraint. I made a strategic recommendation and said here’s a more effective way to use our time. I gave leadership visibility by giving them admin access into the reporting and performance data so they could see it themselves. At the end of the day, we let the data do the persuading. We let them see the gap analysis and the ramp-up time, and it was easy from there. We now use probably 40 to 50 different role plays across multiple new hire training processes. I’m really grateful for the software.

Khushboo: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing, William. Seventy role plays is a huge number. Before we jump to DeJuan, there was a question in the chat: did you consider any other AI roleplay solutions, and how do they compare?

William: I looked into a few but didn’t get very far down the road with them. One I had demoed was called MindTickle, I think. But EasyCoach is the one I’m most primarily familiar with, so apologies, I don’t have a lot of insight into the comparison.

Khushboo: MindTickle comes up quite a bit when we monitor competitors. DeJuan, what about you?

DeJuan: I’ve actually used Easygenerator for quite some time, even at a prior employer. So it was really meaningful to bring that to Station Casinos when I came back to the company. What I always thought was the wonderful thing about EasyCoach in comparison to everything else was the simplicity. The other tools would eventually get you to the job, but there were just so many steps to everything. I love the fact that, just like Easygenerator, EasyCoach was just so simple. It was easy to integrate into everything, whether I wanted to just send a link quickly or put it in my LMS. That’s why I stuck with EasyCoach.

DeJuan Taylor — Station Casinos

Khushboo: It’s always great to see avid Easygenerator users. We appreciate your loyalty and bringing it over from your previous employer. Now let me hand the mic to you, DeJuan, to share your insights on how EasyCoach has been working for you at Station Casinos.

DeJuan: Absolutely. Here at Station Casinos, because we deal with so many vast demographics and departments, we do a lot of in-person training. We’re a team of six covering 22 properties across the valley. It’s hard for our team to get out to do all those trainings. We knew we were doing a great job onboarding people in terms of giving them that first shot of training, but were we actually making it scalable, applicable, and measurable in a way that could show a real return on investment? People always ask about ROI in training, and EasyCoach helped us actually start to see it because of the data analytics.

Also, I don’t have a full design team for building content. I have experience creating content with Articulate and Adobe Premiere, building from scratch from the bottom up, which takes a lot of time — and the people on my team didn’t have that same experience or background. Easygenerator was very simple, plug and play, which was great for a team just starting to learn how to develop e-learning content. So once we had the opportunity to try EasyCoach, which was very simple, it really helped us move from doing in-person role plays where someone is shy, nervous, or doesn’t want to mess up in front of their peers, to now being able to create content that a person can do right in the comfort of their office or from their cell phone without having to drive 40 minutes across town. They get immediate feedback, whether in their own language or in English, because EasyCoach can be utilized in 26 languages. That was a huge asset for us given how diverse our population is.

We were able to build role plays on very specific things true to our business need, from how a front desk agent speaks to guests or how we interact with an intoxicated guest, all the way to role plays for our leadership, covering performance conversations or interviewing techniques. We’re a company that loves to promote from within, so we typically take hourly team members and put them on a path toward leadership and management. We want to make sure we’re giving them the tools, and the best way to do that is by getting reps — getting the opportunity to repeat the process time and time again without it being on-the-spot or on-the-job training.

What really made us go for EasyCoach was the simplicity and the partnership we already had through Easygenerator. Seeing that people could interact with this AI-powered roleplay environment, get immediate feedback, and have a structured evaluation — from a transcript they can read back to being able to hear the audio — was really compelling. We also loved that it gave the pros and cons of what a person experienced so they could improve. People see a score and if they get 50% when they need 70%, they want to strive to hit that threshold. Then when they hit 70 they want to reach 80. We’ve seen people have that natural desire to grow.

This also gives people the opportunity to self-teach and grow at their own stealth pace. An hourly team member who wants to become a leader can click into role plays on their own time and build their skills, so that when they apply for a role, even if they’ve never been a manager yet, they’ve had real-world scenario practice.

Three things that really stand out to us beyond typical guest service training: we use EasyCoach for something called Pathway to Citizenship, helping people get their U.S. citizenship, where we set up an AI role play to mimic that interview process and help people get comfortable. We’ve used it for helping people create emails and be more professional in writing, where we disabled the audio portion so the person could focus entirely on their typing and written skills. And we have individuals who want to work on leading an executive meeting without verbal pauses, where we disabled the written portion so they always have to speak to the AI agent. EasyCoach is very flexible as long as you know what your outcome and goal is.

One thing I’d strongly recommend: reach out to individuals you already have a relationship and trust with. Our initial hardship was that we just sent out a mass email saying hey everybody, click the link. We didn’t see a lot of people click. But when we reached out to individual leaders and team members and said I want you to try this tool, let me sit down with you for five minutes to show you — our numbers just skyrocketed. Within a month, we went from about 76 users to over 280 different learners. At this point we have over 106 role plays created. Just by being more specific and targeted, it naturally and organically became something really beneficial to us as a company.

Focus on the behaviors and the keys you’re trying to change. We’ve seen cost savings because we didn’t have to hire more staff to get out to another property. We’ve seen 7.5 hours of active learning time through the platform just in the last two months. Once we were able to personalize the experience, learners started doing the work for us. And once our leaders got in the habit, they started creating their own role plays. It’s no longer just my team of six — we now have over 20 different people creating role plays because they know what they need in their department. It has truly increased our bandwidth. I thank you for the platform and the fact that you constantly take our feedback and make modifications. It’s made our world so much better.

Bridge to demo

Khushboo: Thank you so much, DeJuan. A couple of things really stood out to me. With tools like EasyCoach, we’re giving people a place to practice on their own time. As much as role play sessions in training rooms are meant to feel light, oftentimes they feel like a test. You think you’re prepared, and then you come to the session and you’re nervous because you’re a human being. Whatever you thought you remembered, you don’t remember on the spot. With EasyCoach, you can practice in your pajamas in your comfort zone at midnight if you want to.

Before we move into the demo, I want to pause for a moment. Most of you received emails inviting you to the webinar, and there’s a little surprise. We’d like to give you 14 days of free access to EasyCoach. I’m putting out a poll right now to see who wants that access. If you do, we’ll grant it by tomorrow.

I also want to talk briefly about why we built EasyCoach. We know that coaching is happening across organizations, but the way it’s currently happening really doesn’t scale. It’s dependent on whether your manager has time, whether your organization has a coach available, whether it’s convenient. It’s also very inconsistent in quality. Is your manager in the same time zone as you? Do they like you? There are a lot of variables, and in general it’s just very infrequent. Maybe you join a company in sales and they give you one or two roleplay sessions to learn how to pitch, negotiate, learn the pricing, learn the product — and that’s just not enough for someone to feel confident before they get on the phone with a real customer.

That’s where we built EasyCoach from, and we built it on three pillars. The first is practice: giving you a safe space to practice company-specific scenarios and repeat it as many times as you’d like. The second is feedback: being able to receive real-time feedback on what went well and what you could do better, with a breakdown of each skill. The third is visibility: L&D teams, managers, and admins want to see if practice is actually helping their teams improve. You don’t want to give someone a tool and not know if anyone is improving. So we give you the ability to track improvement across your teams over time.

Looking at how EasyCoach has been performing across our customer base, we’ve seen it really shine in five areas: sales, where teams practice handling objections, negotiating, and doing discovery questions; leadership development, where managers practice having difficult one-on-ones or handling challenging team members; customer support, where agents practice closing tickets faster and handling escalations; onboarding, where role play tools get new hires up to speed on company policy, product knowledge, and go-to-market processes; and soft skills, where everyone can work on influencing, collaborating, and communicating across departments and seniority levels.

Live EasyCoach demo

Khushboo: Now without further ado, let me share my screen and walk you through the demo. I want to walk you through what the learner sees first, then what the feedback looks like, then how to create a role play, and then analytics.

This is my learner dashboard — Khushboo the learner, not Khushboo the creator. I can see all of the role plays that have been shared with me, along with my own progress. I have a very high not-pass rate and my average score is 43%. But I’d like to show you how you can try again and get better. I’m going to click into a role play that’s been shared with me. I can read through the instructions. This role play is about me being the head of marketing and I have to give feedback to my marketing manager during a regular one-on-one where they’ve missed a lot of deadlines. They’re typically really good with a strong track record, but the missed deadlines have impacted other people on the team. This manager tends to be defensive, so I need to learn how to manage that. On the right-hand side I can see the skills I’m going to be measured on: impact explanation, emotional regulation, and six other skills. As a learner I can take the role play in 26 different languages. You create it once and your learner can take it in any language they want.

Live roleplay demonstration — Khushboo plays a marketing team lead giving performance feedback to AI character Emily, a defensive marketing specialist who has been missing deadlines. The conversation involves Khushboo trying to understand the root cause and agree on a path forward without Emily becoming more defensive.

Khushboo: Okay, I’m going to call it there. I think you get the gist. I wanted to pause and ask William and DeJuan: what did you think about that conversation? Was Emily defensive?

William: Yeah, I think she was. She definitely had some reasons for the issues. I would have to look further into them, but there’s certainly some defensiveness there.

Khushboo: DeJuan, any thoughts?

DeJuan: Sorry, I got disconnected towards the end of the presentation.

Khushboo: No worries at all. So that was the learner experience. Now let me walk you through what the feedback looks like. I got 59%. I’ll be able to see what I did well and what I could do better. You can also enable or disable scoring depending on your use case. Some customers don’t like scores because they feel it simulates a test and takes away from the practice experience. Others love scoring because it’s easy to tie to pass or fail.

With scoring enabled, I can look at what I did well. The feedback actually quotes things from the conversation so I know exactly what worked. It also tells me what I could do better. For example, I was empathetic but my feedback was quite soft — and honestly, that’s how I am too, so this is really useful feedback for myself. The feedback gives you quotes from the conversation because if you don’t have a real person giving you feedback, you may not know what to do differently next time. So we want it to be very actionable.

You also have a breakdown of each skill. I can see how I performed on each one. I can click into constructive feedback delivery, see what I said, and see suggestions for the next round of practice. You also get a full role play transcript and you can listen to the audio. That’s also helpful if your manager wants to listen in to see whether someone is continuously struggling with something or whether they’re improving.

I’m going to move on to how to create a role play. It’s essentially as close to prompt-to-roleplay as we could make it. You put in a prompt, explain what the situation is about, explain who the characters are, and take it from there. You can choose from templates, but I’ve written my own based on the conversation we just had. The AI plays a marketing specialist, the learner plays a marketing team lead, the situation is a one-on-one to give performance feedback, and the AI attitude is confident, defensive, and subtly dismissive. I click continue and the AI does the heavy lifting for you. Based on your prompt, everything will be generated. You don’t have to think about anything from scratch.

Now we’re on our role play details page and everything is changeable. I can change the title, the AI character’s name, appearance, role, and tone of voice. I’ve made Emily skeptical. You can also choose how difficult you want the AI to be: supportive for situations like a counseling session, or resistant for situations like a tough procurement negotiation.

Very importantly, you can upload your own documents to make the role play specific to your organization. For example, at Easygenerator we give feedback using something called Edge Principles — that’s internal and not something you can find on the internet. I can upload that document and the role play will base the conversation on those principles. If you work at Volkswagen and want to train your showroom staff on when to pitch which car model, you can upload specs and price ranges for each model. The role play becomes specific to your organization in a way nobody else can replicate.

You also have interaction rules — your control box. We’re dealing with AI, not a human being, so it’s important to have control mechanisms in place for outlier situations. For example, if someone uses a swear word in context, humans can gauge the intent. AI won’t always know that. You want to set your AI up for success by defining how it should respond in those situations. We do all of this for you, so you don’t have to think about it unless you want to add something specific.

You also have settings: voice and chat, voice only, or chat only. You can decide who starts the role play and how long it should last. Our upper limit is 30 minutes.

The next page is Skills and Evaluation, arguably the most important part of the setup. You want to see if people are getting better and where they’re struggling. Coming in a couple of weeks, you can import your own skill library or taxonomy. What we do now is create skills for you based on your prompt. You can edit each skill, change its description, and define what good, fair, and poor look like — because all of us can have very different definitions of those terms. You can also create your own skill, enable or disable scoring, and set a minimum pass threshold.

I’m going to go ahead and publish this role play. I can do a final check and preview it. When I want to share, I can share via Teams, email, or URL. If you want to embed with your LMS, we have an LTI integration so basic analytics will transfer over and learners will experience the whole thing within the LMS. We do not have SCORM as of yet — if you want to use SCORM, we recommend embedding it into your Easygenerator course. We will potentially have SCORM at the end of Q3.

One of the unique things EasyCoach offers compared to some competitors is analytics in the platform. I’ll click into Analytics — available for admins. We have a very robust roadmap for our analytics feature this quarter. You can see how your organization is doing across the board: how many learners, how many role plays, learning time, and role play outcomes. You can also go into analytics by individual role play. I can see that Carlos has taken one role play 16 times. I can see his area for improvement — he’s been struggling with conversation summarization. I can click into his report, see what he did well at, see the feedback he received, and listen to the conversation. I can then decide whether to set up a new learning path for him, give him more attempts, or do a one-on-one session.

Coming up in our Q3 roadmap, we’re building a skills analytics dashboard that will show how skills are improving across the board, role-play agnostic. Not just conversation summarization for a specific role play, but how someone is doing with that skill across all their role plays. That brings me to the end of the EasyCoach demo.

Q&A

Khushboo: I’ll go to the top because some questions are for William and DeJuan. First one for William: are you using the library functionality to keep your role plays organized?

William: Yes, I am using the library function. It’s a newer feature. We have different suites of role plays — some for new hires, some product demos, some for different roles. So I use it to look at things and organize in that way.

Khushboo: DeJuan, are you using it as well?

DeJuan: We are. I noticed that update and quickly hopped on it. Similar to William, I have things for table games, slots, food and beverage, and leadership development. I even created one for a person who’s newly exposed to EasyCoach, to walk them through what they should get used to when interacting with the platform. It’s really great, especially when you’re trying to collaborate with many different people on your team. Everyone on my team puts role plays in the library so it’s easier for me to see what has been created across the organization.

Khushboo: A question from Dan: can EasyCoach be better integrated into Easygenerator so that EG listens for a successful completion of EasyCoach? Right now we aren’t working on having EasyCoach listen into what’s happening with the Easygenerator courses. What you can do is embed your role play into your Easygenerator course so you have a more seamless experience — people learn the content, then they go in and practice what they’ve learned. I’d be curious to learn more about what you mean by this to see if it’s something worth exploring further.

Another question: can this be hosted on SharePoint as an embed or link? You can embed it as a URL. You can put it in a Slack channel, on SharePoint, anywhere you’d like. That said, as DeJuan mentioned, you want your learners to actually take the role plays. If L&D is sharing it via mass email, people tend to ignore it. But if it’s coming from a manager or it’s inside a course where it’s mandatory, you’ll see much higher learner engagement.

Question about personas: are they part of the library for reuse, or do you create unique personas for each role play? Right now it’s unique personas per role play. The workaround is that with the library you can create a template and then duplicate that role play to reuse the persona.

Question: can an admin see and access role plays produced by users that aren’t shared in the library? Admins can see analytics across all role plays, but they cannot see the individual role plays, go in and edit them, or reassign them. Only the creator can do that. What’s coming in Q3 is collaboration — creators will be able to add collaborators who can edit the role play as well.

Question on analytics: how easy is it to create reports? You can export everything out to a CSV. We’re also looking at making our analytics more robust so it can be a one-stop shop without needing to export.

I’m mindful of time. We have one more poll: would you like us to reach out for a personalized demo, meeting, or follow-up session to answer any questions you might have? And before wrapping up, I just want to thank William and DeJuan for their time. I really appreciate it. I know we’re all in different time zones. Any last words from your end?

William: No last words besides thanks for making the tool. It makes my life easier. And thank you for having me.

DeJuan: I think William said it best. I agree. Thank you for making the tool. Thanks for having us here today. We truly appreciate it.