Vyond

Owned by Rentokil Initial plc, Terminix is a leading provider of residential and commercial pest control. Combined, Rentokil and Terminix employ over 19,000 qualified pest control specialists in over 80 countries across 1,800 local branches. The company’s mission is to protect people and enhance lives by providing pest control services that ensure public health and protect the environment through energy efficient and sustainable solutions.

A diverse group of Terminix professionals visit more than 50,000 homes and businesses every day to deliver these pest management services, including protection against termites, mosquitoes, rodents and other pests. As such, the company has a significant need for ongoing employee training.

In the U.S., senior instructional designer Jon Hegidio is responsible for delivering a large volume of training content, ranging from general information like HR and business operations material, to specific, technical instructions that cover detailed subjects like mixing and applying pest control solutions with sophisticated, purpose-built equipment.

Early on, Hegidio discovered the value of on-demand video – not only for its reach and easy accessibility – but because it can be watched and re-watched by employee learners when it is convenient for their work and personal schedules, as well as when they need a quick on-the-job review session. He finds video perfect for the “microlearning” environment in today’s workplace, where younger workers are more prone to consume video due to their regular use of social video platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Discovering and Rediscovering Video Animation

In his role at Terminix, Hegidio has a wide variety of video production techniques at his disposal, including live shoots with human actors, computer graphics-based presentations, and animated video.

He discovered the utility and value of animated video in a role previous to his time at Terminix. He first started developing animated employee videos using technology from video creation software company Vyond, as far back as 2019. Hegidio found himself in need of a solution that he could use to represent a very diverse group of people for a workplace harassment video.

During pre-production, Hegidio discovered that Vyond had a library of characters that were perfectly suited for this HR-focused project, which integrated his client’s focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Using the animation tools in Vyond, he built a video with realistic characters that represented the full spectrum of people found in today’s workplace, helping to “pretty much develop situational scenarios that you might come across in the workplace.”

Having access to a pre-built library of diverse characters, as well as different location settings and backgrounds, enabled Jon to show the necessary and appropriate diversity representation, and to build and distribute his video more quickly.

In this same role, Hegidio and his team were also tasked with executing one-to-many HR and employee education trainings, and used video conferencing tools. However, given the small size of his team and resource constraints, it was an approach that did not scale – so they again looked to animated video, which enabled them to do large-scale education events, as well as to make them available on demand.

Making Production Easier

According to Hegidio, the role of an instructional designer is to simplify and make things easy to understand for learners. Using animated video helps him do just that. With AI-powered video tools at his disposal, which include an entire catalog of characters, workplace environments and even a selection of illustrations that cover the different tools that a person might use on the job, the Vyond animation platform gives Hegidio and his team the ability to quickly portray the workplace environments that they need.

This flexibility allows the team to produce a wide variety of videos, including for field training, IT, and business processes. Instruction can be given to employees in advance and then be made available on-demand for review in the field, should employees need to refresh their knowledge of a given process or procedure.

Terminix enables its field technicians with mobile access to training materials, including videos. “We equip all of our field operations technicians with certain tools and provide day-to-day access to our own software,” he says. They use video to train people on the app, and he adds that mobile access makes sense because, “Our company wants to get these guys out the field as fast as possible, and there's a lot of work.”

Terminix’s proprietary mobile app is called “Fundamentals,” and it is used by technicians who might be out in the field and need a refresher on a given training topic.

For example, if someone cannot remember how to use their backpack sprayer, or another tool, that person can pull up video-based instructions into their app for review. These on-demand learning modules might be for something as simple as how to measure a piece of land, or as complex as how to mix a pest control product to treat for mosquitoes, and how to properly apply that product using a sprayer. Information within the app is critical, because when mixing pest control chemicals, the technicians must always reference the label and other information like materials safety sheets.

Of course, careful attention to procedures and safe handling is critical when dealing with chemicals. In addition to providing safety information, Terminix’s animated videos account for factors such as state and federal regulations when it comes to using chemicals, and provide actionable tips for their technicians, providing them with guidance around common mistakes and pitfalls to look out for, which might include over-applying product. All of these efforts offer convenience to Terminix workers while helping them stay current on regulations and best practices, and help to ensure that chemicals are used in the safest possible way – to protect people, the environment, and pets.

Ultimately, Terminix’s approach to training video helps them deliver better service, more efficiently. In addition to becoming a core training tool, video has also helped Terminix reduce paper-based processes, eliminating a number of complicated printed spreadsheets that were used as reference materials by instead placing them within the app.

Time and Cost Savings

Animated video has also helped Terminix reduce production costs and save time. With animation software at their disposal, Hegidio’s team can quickly translate their ideas into storyboards and scripts, and then proceed to creating their finished product.

Animation not only helps Terminix move faster and iterate more quickly, it offers the company substantial cost savings when compared to traditional video or film production techniques. A traditional shoot requires actors, locations and a crew, and changes and additions to the script or the video always mean extra cost. And for a company like Terminix – which takes its environmental responsibilities very seriously – they even consider factors like the carbon footprint of their projects. As such, animated video is becoming a preferred option.

“Even if you're doing video production in-house, the old way is going to be way more time consuming and just labor intensive,” commented Hegidio.

As an example of the cost savings Terminix is achieving, the company recently shot a video to demonstrate how to apply certain chemicals using a sprayer, costing “thousands and thousands of dollars.” There was a need to revise the script and the resulting minor changes meant that voiceover talent needed to be hired a second time, with additional impact on the project’s budget. According to Hegidio, these changes, along with re-shoots, are not uncommon, and must be accounted for when supervising a project, particularly in today’s era of tight budgets.

With animation, and the ability to create projects from scratch quickly – as well as to manage revisions in near real-time – Terminix can turn around projects faster and less expensively than ever before. Being an expert in applications like Premiere, After Effects, Camtasia and Storyline enables Hegidio to “jump in” and fast-track projects that use Vyond, and build videos in hours, rather than days or weeks. Script changes are also rapid, and Hegidio uses integration between Vyond and Wellsaid to update dialog and voiceovers in post-production, much more rapidly than in the past.

In the future Terminix will continue to expand its use of video animation both in the U.S. and abroad. Hegidio says that the company is already taking advantage of Vyond’s built-in collaboration capabilities and will likely expand its internal user base, as more instructional designers learn the platform and the internal team tries to “push it a lot harder right now.”

“Even if you're doing video production in-house, the old way is going to be way more time consuming and just labor intensive,” commented Hegidio. “That’s why Vyond has been such a great solution for us. It is faster and less expensive, and using video animation helps us come in way under budget versus live production, while getting the results we need – which is a big win for our team and for management.”

About Vyond

Vyond is the leader in AI-powered video creation. More than 65% of the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of businesses, and millions of end users use Vyond to transform mission-critical content into vibrant business communication that engages customers and employees, and drives positive business outcomes. In June 2023, the company released Vyond Go – a generative AI script and video creator – that dramatically increases the speed and ease of creating business videos. Vyond is the leader in hundreds of verified customer reviews on G2, Capterra, and GetApp.