Customers can be won or lost in a single moment of interaction. Leading customer service organizations focus on creating a consistent brand experience to optimize customer loyalty. With Immersive Learning for customer service training, employees get the unique opportunity to walk in the shoes of their customers and practice the right reactions to challenging situations and interactions.
We need to be able to immerse people in an experience with a customer before they can provide live customer service.
Cleopatra Scott, Director of Global L&D, Verizon
Frontline Customer Service training
Every customer deserves great service. Customer service training in VR allows associates to walk in the shoes of their customers so they’re better prepared to provide excellent, empathetic service. In the headset, associates practice interacting with customers just as they would in real life–whether in the store, hotel, call center, or other location. They learn customer service processes, how to handle different customer scenarios, and the overall customer service culture of the company. With VR as part of a robust customer service training program, companies can improve customer service outcomes at scale.
A powerful way to improve customer service training for employees in the call center is to humanize customers on the phone. VR training builds empathy by placing learners into a virtual call center simulation to help understand the impact of listening and helping customers through real-life scenarios. VR helps bring them to life as more than just a voice on the other end of the line, and helps boost customer satisfaction scores.
Throughout the training, the employee is ‘transported’ between the call center and the customer’s living room to view the environment, facial expressions, and personal perspective.
-VP Emerging Technologies, Leading financial institution
Empathy training
Dealing with unhappy customers and complex situations is pretty common, yet can still be uncomfortable and requires empathy and emotional intelligence. Associates are transported from the store or the call center, to inside the home of the customer. They are able to experience the lives of their customers in VR, rather than simply read or watch videos about it, which helps them relate more sincerely and offer better assistance.
Frustrated customers are a difficult, yet regular part of everyday life in customer service. Employees must stay calm and say the right thing to help the customer and avoid escalations.
Immersive Learning helped Verizon better prepare call center employees to understand, manage, and de-escalate angry customers. The Customer service VR training not only helped employees feel more confident and prepared in difficult customer situations, it also helped employees understand the cause for the customer’s frustration and build empathy to provide better service.
Immersive Learning gives you perspective on what the customer might be feeling when they are calling.
Verizon employee
Challenge
Delivering consistently excellent customer service and coaching employees to be empathetic by understanding why customers are acting the way they are.
Learning Objective
Immersive Learning leverages VR’s unique ability to generate a social presence, and enables learners to feel present with another thinking, feeling person. It allows them to have interactions and emotional responses similar to those they would experience in real difficult conversations. This helps the employee understand why the customer is so upset, and helped them build empathy instead of resentment.
Immersive Data & Insights
In our experience and research we have found that verbal fluency is a key predictor for a person’s handling of a difficult situation.
By analyzing this fluency, we can measure learners’ comfort and confidence level as they de-escalate conversations with unhappy customers.
Result
Performance change before and after 3 repetitions
After three repetitions in VR customer service training, the group had significantly improved verbal fluency and calmness, making them more confident and calm, which are key factors for de-escalation and customer satisfaction.
Are you ready to take your training to the next level?
We look forward to hearing more about what you do and showing you how we can help. Send us a message and a member of the Strivr team will get back to you soon.
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