If a banker and an actor had a meeting, which of them would be the likeliest to be asking for help?

The answer that springs to mind fastest, of course, is that a perennially "between engagements" thespian would probably be applying to a banker for some form of monetary assistance.

But that scenario is the opposite of what's been happening at an impressive number of financial institutions since the founding of e-Roleplay - a Toronto company that offers one of the most novel win-win propositions introduced into the business arena.

In a nutshell, says company president David Knechtel, e-Roleplay is an outsource venue for businesses that want to rev up their employee-training programs. But there's a critical difference between e-Roleplay and other corporate trainers.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge

e-Roleplay partner and professional actress Tracey Erin Smith shows some of her techniques.

And in the five years since the company was founded, he says that difference has attracted four out of the five top Canadian banks as clients, plus five of the top 10 U.S banks, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, as well as such other U.S. financial institutions as American Express and G.E. Consumer Finance.

What is e-Roleplay's edge? Here's where the shoe-on-the-other-foot twist, with showbiz pros coming to the aid of pinstriped bankers, comes into the story.

"What we offer our clients, and we believe this is unique," says Knechtel, "is a pool of professional actors who use their theatrical and improvisational skills to train both customer-facing and call centre employees" by impersonating actual customers during telephone training sessions.

Trainees - or learners, as they're known at e-Roleplay - range from newbies just starting work at call centres to veteran senior executives. "We often work with people such as, say, a district vice-president, with our actor playing a branch manager the VP needs to speak to about why the branch's performance is substandard," Knechtel says.

"We develop quite a cast of characters for each project," adds longtime actor Carol Lempert, who is e-Roleplay's vice-president of learning.

"For instance, in the first course we did for our first client - which was the Royal Bank - our actors roleplayed a married woman in her 30s who'd just bought a house, a 78-year-old senior citizen who was afraid of using the Internet because he'd just seen a movie about computer hackers, and a doctor in his 50s who was financially sophisticated, but didn't volunteer much info and had to be drawn into the exchange."

Summing up the range of characters routinely played by e-Roleplay actors, Knechtel says "it's everyone from a blue-collar, shaky-credit-history person with a pickup truck on cinder blocks in his front yard right through to someone who's got $100 million of investible assets."

Why are e-Roleplay's techniques superior to traditional in-house sessions, where teams of trainees take turns impersonating customers and employees?

Because, says Tom Muir, "in the 25 years I've been in the training field, I've found that very rarely can students play customers realistically or come up with realistic issues that need to be resolved. And they also tend to go easy on each other (for fear of retaliation.)" Formerly American Express Canada's director of training, Muir says the results "were just brilliant" when he engaged e-Roleplay to train the company's credit card employees "to help enhance their skills in handling phone calls.

"With actual actors doing the roleplays for us, the accuracy and the real-life effects were outstanding," Muir says. "It really did resemble exactly what customers typically do when they're on the phone with our agents - right down to yelling out: 'Will you shut up, I'm on the phone!' " So pleased was American Express with the results among the first batch of learners that Muir (who recently retired after a career that also included training stints at Pfizer and Xerox) says the company is continuing to use e-Roleplay for some of its training programs.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge

The techniques developed by e-Roleplay also seem "very effective" to another training expert: Andrij Brygidyr, who lectures on in-store marketing services at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and is founder and president of Toronto-based AA Merchandising Ltd.

In his opinion, having skilled actors train people by playing a variety of customers "is valuable because it gives trainees a wider breadth of experience (in handling tricky situations). And they get to do it in a safe environment, rather than on the job with real customers, which is obviously far riskier."

But e-Roleplay's key advantage, Knechtel says, "is the fact that we provide the critical vantage point of actual typical customers, as opposed to how a bank or any organization usually approaches training, which is from management's point of view.

"They've got objectives to fulfil," he says.

"Maybe it's rolling out a new financial product. So, in that case, a manager might tell the trainee to ask customers a lot of questions (to convince them that they need the product). But then the customer might feel bombarded and be turned off.

"What we do is extend that type of an instruction into how asking so many questions would actually make a customer feel. So, in the final part of that training session - after breaking out of whichever character he or she is playing - our actor would coach the learner to ask questions in a way that makes the customer understand why they're being asked, so they don't feel pressured or alienated."

Actors aren't the only show business professionals in e-Roleplay's stable of 150 employees, Lempert says. She has been with the company since it was founded five years ago by former president Amy Marcus - who is now on the board of directors, along with her former e-Roleplay business partner, Gerry Troy.

"We also have professional writers and directors, who work in collaboration with clients to produce courses that are tailored to whatever (the clients) need to achieve," Lempert says. "And we now have a waiting list of about 200 applicants" who want to get in on the action.

That demand is easily explained by the many advantages that working at e-Roleplay offers to theatrical professionals - which is the second half of the win-win equation in this tale.

"Being an actor is a lot like being a runner," Lempert says. "You've got to run every day whether there's a marathon or not. So the hardest thing for us is keeping our acting skills up between professional jobs. And if you have to pay the rent by temping in an office or being a waiter or driving a taxi, you can't do that.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge

"But actors can do it when they work at e-Roleplay. All the time, our people tell me: 'Oh, I had this great audition for a commercial today and I had to improvise being a certain kind of character. And I was totally up for it because it was just like somebody I played in our courses.' " Not only that, says Lempert, but "a lot of our people have been able to transfer the knowledge they've learned about sales and marketing into their own careers. They've been able to get a new agent or raise the money to produce their own shows.

"And then, on a personal level, in terms of their finances, they're learning a lot about handling money, whether it's the importance of having an RSP and how to set it up or cleaning up their credit rating. And it's practically unheard of for an actor to get a mortgage, but at least a quarter of my staff have bought houses."

All in all, Knechtel says he's confident that the potential for e-Roleplay's unique style of synergy is limitless. Delivering its services by telephone means being able to operate anywhere in the world. In fact, the company's actors recently began working with trainees at a call centre in India.

Although he declines to disclose either revenue or salary rates, Knechtel points out that, in just five years, e-Roleplay has grown from having a handful of actors in one small office to 150 employees working in 10 large training rooms.

Its client list has grown from a single client (RBC) with 3,000 trainees to about 18 major financial institutions, who are now signing up 20,000 of their employees per year.

As yet another measure of e-Roleplay's success, adds Lempert, "it's a beautiful world when actors can help bankers learn how to be more empathetic."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)