Using Video to Polish Professional Communication Skills

Vosaic offers Capite Corpus and their clients a competitive edge.

Laurent Lagarde is the founder of Capite Corpus, a professional development firm in Lyon, France. Lagarde utilizes his experience developing the skills he used for success in his career to support clients in honing their own soft skills for professional enhancement.

As coaches, Lagarde and his team face the daily challenge of accurately reviewing their clients’ performance. While Capite Corpus seeks holistic development of clients’ interpersonal skills, it is difficult for a sole associate to capture all aspects of an individual’s performance at once. When a coach attempts this, important details can be missed.

Using video recording and an intuitive platform for providing feedback, Vosaic gives Capite Corpus and its clients a competitive edge in their business. Vosaic allows coaches to capture every detail of clients’ mock interviews, presentations and sales exercises. Combining these with the ability to provide timely feedback directly on the platform, Vosaic equips Lagarde and his clients with tools for Performance Discovery in their interpersonal skills.

Tell us a little bit about your company?

Capite Corpus is a training company specializing in interpersonal communication. Our goal is to help people find the right words in professional situations where their natural abilities reach their limit. By working on communication techniques, we allow them to broaden their catalog of behaviors in order to adopt the one that will be most suited to the situation. Our trainings are very practical, with lots of simulations, to test what benefits a change in behavior can bring.

What about using video analysis appealed to you for your industry?

When it comes to training on verbal communication, having video feedback is beneficial for both the trainer and the trainee. For the trainer, it allows him to be more precise and more objective in his feedback. For the trainee, video analysis promotes awareness of the difficulties in implementing a technique and also helps to anchor good practices, thanks to the "evidence" seen (and heard) on the screen.

How do you use Vosaic?

We use Vosaic in more and more of our trainings, but mainly around 3 themes:

• Management
• Sales
• Public Speaking

On the topics of management and sales, we use Vosaic on two levels: first to check if the person follows the steps we recommend in our methodology; then, inside each step of the method, to study how they say things, if they use the right phrases. For oral communication traits, we use Vosaic to work on the speaker’s form, both on the nonverbal communication (gestures, postures, mimicry, expression) and also on the voice (intonation, volume). At the beginning of the training, Vosaic allows us to review a client’s existing skills and establish a starting point for the program. As a trainee progresses, the tool allows us to evaluate their implementation of our practices.

Would you recommend Vosaic to other companies similar to yours? Why or why not?

I recommend Vosaic without hesitation, but surely not to our competitors because on some projects, Vosaic brings us a differential advantage that you want to keep as long as possible. 

What types of things were you looking for in your videos? Can you describe one, or several, of the video mark-up forms you created in Vosaic?

We have set up specific forms for each of the methodologies on which our trainees practice. Generally, we proceed as follows:

• We use blue markers to identify the steps of our method.

• We then use the rose to identify the elements of language within each step.

• We use red (bad), orange (improving), and green (good) as indicators of the quality of the speaker's step utilization and language choices.

Using forms like these, we provide trainees precise feedback on their simulation. In the end, our forms are very complete (often with about twenty markers). For the coach, learning to markup the video in real time take a bit of practice, but we find that this reflex is developed relatively quickly.

What kind of insights have you received from Vosaic that you otherwise wouldn't have?

In the past, we used video to review performance, but couldn’t use it very regularly due to the time it takes to review video without markers. Sometimes, it was necessary to watch the entire video to point out what the trainee was doing well or improving. The use of markers has been a small revolution for us! No need to replay all the video: we go directly to the point (or points) we want to review. Vosaic is a huge time saver for us...that time can be used for more practice!

What kind of comments did you get from people who received feedback from you through Vosaic?

Our trainees are, at first, generally very impressed by the tool! Then, even before meeting their trainer, the visualization of the markers posted by the trainer establishes a relationship. Finally, they appreciate the objectivity and accuracy of our feedback, made possible by the markers.

Do you have an interesting anecdote or story about how Vosaic helped you observe something you otherwise would have missed?

In our management or sales seminars, we often have experienced people who say that they know what to do and how to respond to sensitive situations that we offer them. In these cases, Vosaic allows us to avoid giving them verbal feedback: when the trainee sees the feedback in the markers on the timeline, they often become more humble and more receptive to our advice!