Hilton
A Hilton team member uses the company's VR system.
- Virtual reality has become part of onboarding for select employees at Fidelity and Hilton, where the tech is used for empathy training.
- At Fidelity, this means contact center associates can better respond to customer needs.
- Hilton uses VR for internal empathy, specifically in helping corporate workers understand the experiences of employees involved in more hands-on work at the hotel.
- Read Business Insider's list of power players using VR to shape the future of the workplace here.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Top companies across industries are turning to virtual worlds to help their employees understand and better interact with people in the real one.
Fidelity and Hilton are key examples: both include VR programs as key parts of their onboarding, all with the mission of training empathy to new recruits.
Fidelity built a VR empathy-training course to help call center associates understand their customers.
Adam Schouela, who leads the emerging technology group within the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, told Business Insider that call center workers tend to be younger and may not have experience working with others.
"The idea was, can we create a VR experience for our associates to better help them understand the perspective of our customers?" Schouela said. "What is going on from our customer's perspective?"
Fidelity joins the ranks of companies like Hilton in trying to improve existing empathy training by incorporating VR. For both Fidelity and Hilton, adding simulated scenarios provided a step up to help employees better understand each other, as well as the customers they serve.
Emotional intelligence, that umbrella term that encompasses empathy, is actually high in 90% of top performers. Using VR in empathy training resulted in better overall outcomes for both companies, they told Business Insider.
VR lets workers see the impact of the service they provide
Fidelity's VR training virtually transported workers from call center to the homes of the customer in the mock interaction. The workers address the problem while seeing it play out, so they're connected to a real-life experience they may not have felt personally.
They then virtually see the impact of the service they provide, whether positive or negative. This all underscores the bottom line of helping associates understand what the customer is going through, and why they're acting a certain way, to better serve them.
The VR training replaced more formal instruction within a classroom. Previously, select staff would enact a role-playing exercise while other new employees watched. With VR, everyone gets to go through every experience as many times as they want.
"It changes the dynamics of learning," Schouela said. "It changes from one person being active and everybody else being passive to almost the whole process being an active learning process."
Schouela tracked the customer satisfaction scores of associates who went through the VR pilot training versus those who didn't. The team found enough of a difference to expand the pilot and think about scaling the program.
"We've probably built 30, 40 different virtual reality experiences in order to understand all of this stuff and really, truly see where we can apply these technologies internally within Fidelity and have it make a difference," Schouela said.
Corporate hires at Hilton 'virtually sweat'
VR made a difference within Hilton by exposing corporate hires to an indispensable part of Hilton's business: hotel operations. Most of Hilton's corporate hires (80%) don't have direct hospitality experience, but they are tasked with supporting operations. The company looked for something that would build empathy, but not take corporate employees out of their roles for too long (or cause operational difficulties).
That's where the VR Business Immersion program came in.
"The experience allows Team Members to move through different hotel departments including housekeeping, engineering, kitchens and front desk," Gretchen Stroud, VP of talent development and team member engagement at Hilton told Business Insider. "They complete modules and 'virtually sweat' as they work through tasks like setting up a room service tray or cleaning a room."
Nearly everyone who completed the pilot program last year said they had more empathy and appreciation for operations workers. The pilot was so successful that the VR-based program is now part of Hilton's six global corporate offices, and is required for all team members within their first year, Stroud said.
Since the program officially launched, more than 1,200 people have participated in the training, 87% of whom said the experience gave them more empathy and appreciation for the experiences of direct hotel staff.
Instead of further detaching people from the real world, VR appears to help people better understand it.