COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—One credit union has ditched the formal training room and turned to virtual reality to educate staff. And the move, in its early stages, is already making a big improvement in staff/member engagement, the organization says.
The biggest advantage of the new training approach, which involves members wearing virtual reality headsets (see photos) and interacting in a digital environment, is their confidence in speaking with members has been boosted by more than 75%, the $9-billion Ent CU said.
“The employees put on a headset and they enter a virtual center of ours. Then, a virtual MSR comes up and talks to them,” Marnie Gerhkardt, director of learning innovation, explained. “I love it because it's distraction free.”
Gerhkardt said the physical training room has not been completely discarded, and employees come into the room to put on their headsets.
Lori Benton, VP of learning and cultural enrichment, said Ent made the move because the organization is always trying to find better ways to engage employees in learning.
“A lot of corporate learning is retention, quizzes, you take a course and then take the retention quiz,” Benton said. “Then you go about your job and you don't take the training again for another year or two. What we are trying to do is push learning in the corporate environment, more into what we do in our regular day-to-day lives, which is more interactive learning.”
Less Intimidating
Ent sees VR training as “low stakes” education.
“VR is an opportunity for us to get people to interact in a learning environment, but in a very low-stakes way—meaning the instructor is not there, kind of scrutinizing whether or not you did it correctly,” Benton said, adding the VR training is used now for new hires. “Not that our trainers do that. Our trainers are very supportive. But live training with an instructor feels a little more high stakes to people. The last thing we want to do is take somebody who just did some version of online learning and put them in a center and expect them to interact with members.”
Instead, the VR training provides a nice, “soft” way for people to learn—how to interact, how to ask the right questions, Benton said.
“We are working with Aequilibrium. We’re scratching the surface on what this might look like for future learning,” she said
A key reason the new training is working, according to Benton, is more people are becoming accustomed to interacting with virtual reality in their lives.
“We’re just mirroring what's already being done with VR outside work environment, bringing it into the workplace,” she said. “And VR is engaging. Trainees also get to set their own pace. If they get something wrong, they can go back and redo the conversation. It allows them to explore the learning in a very different scenario than in an in-person environment.”
Gerhkardt said Ent believes the virtual training will help the organization better evaluate an employee’s training progress.
“We think it will help us there, but we haven't gotten to that level yet,” Gerhkardt said. “We have been in discussions with Aequilibrium to talk about things as detailed as eye movement. But, overall, we haven't yet determined what would be the best way to do that, to evaluate a trainee. I think we need to get further down in testing. We have to get much more refined to determine what is the right amount of eye contact (with a virtual member). If you think about it, we have some MSRs that out of the gate are still trying to remember everything they've learned in training while having a confident conversation with a member. No matter what level you're at, that can be an intimidating scenario.”
Next Steps
Benton said Ent strives to be best in class when it comes to member service.
“We’ve got to make sure we train our team so they understand that,” she said. “Eye contact and engaging with the member, that's important to us.”
Down the road Ent hopes to use VR training with existing staff.
“If we can get additional iterations built,” Benton added. “I can see a use for it for current employees, for example, when a new regulation comes out. Then everybody has to take the training.”
New hires are also getting up to speed on credit union policies and procedures faster with VR, Benton said.
“First of all, you don't have as many distractions. You are focused. You are in this virtual scenario,” she said.
VR training is consistent and scalable, Benton added.
“It is something that if we have a change in a process or procedure, we can scale this out much more quickly, than if we had used our previous methods,” she said. “What we like, too, is that you are not just reading something, you are actually practicing in a virtual environment with virtual members.”
The training was launched early in 2024.
“As we noted , the main objective was to build confidence in MSRs, their frontline conversations with members,” Gerhkardt said. “Results show 73% of those who tested said they felt more confident in talking with members after using the VR tool. There was an 82% improvement in their retention, as well. And, nearly 100% of employees preferred it to role-playing.”
Staff are simply less concerned about “messing up” during training, Benton said.
“That's exactly what we hoped would happen, and we have seen that happen,” Benton said. “We want people to feel safe and comfortable in the learning environment. That actually helps them lower their flight or freeze response, and be more open and take risks, in a healthy way. That's exactly what the VR allows us to do. This is a comfortable, safe space.”
The CU is fine tuning the training and working with Aequilibrium on next steps.
“This has a lot of potential and we're excited to see if we can expand partnerships with other credit unions to combine resources, maybe create a course catalog of sorts for folks who are doing this, as well. We can leverage each other's resources more efficiently,” Benton said. “Using a baseball analogy, it’s too early to say it’s a home run, but it’s certainly a solid double right now.”