How Vyond Solved the L&D Content Bottleneck at American Express

Challenge

The global learning team at American Express is tasked with creating content and communications for an audience of over 5,000 internal and external partners.

The team’s production volume was high, their graphic designers’ bandwidth was limited, and original content tended to be text-heavy and dry. The team needed a versatile tool that gave them multiple options for delivering messaging in an engaging way—and allowed their instructional designers to create some of the training videos without help from the graphic design team.

Instructional designer Chuck Field and his colleagues had been using another animated video creation platform but found the features limiting and the interface difficult to understand. So they decided to try Vyond.

Approach

As an initial test, Chuck took a training video he had originally produced in the other tool and recreated it in Vyond. Instantly, he and his team were hooked.

“The thing I was most impressed with was the ease of learning how to use it,” said Chuck. “But what blew me away was the ability to continue a scene, which saved a lot of time over having to keep micro-adjusting characters and changing where they stood.”

Since getting Vyond, the team has shifted to creating videos with engaging scenarios and characters as a replacement or addition to existing text-based training. “We have some activities where we just have a text scenario and learners select the best response, but it's never as powerful as seeing a character and hearing their voice,” said Chuck.

They’ve also boosted engagement by adding animated GIFs to “generally boring” emails driving employees to visit their learning management system.