When it comes to helping newly onboarded employees develop the skills and knowledge needed for success in their positions, most organizations use traditional methods like expansive handbooks or long lectures. While that may have worked for previous generations of workers,
In so doing, it joins a small, but growing, group of financial institutions seeking to help the next generation of front line staffers acclimate to the responsibilities of their roles — without the stressors of "trial by fire" training sessions facing real customers with supervisors watching.
The $10 billion-asset Ent began working with the Vancouver, British Columbia-based Motive.io and Aequilibrium in October to explore how the credit union could make training programs more interactive by leveraging virtual reality. Both firms specialize in the catch-all concept of extended reality, which in addition to virtual reality also includes augmented reality and mixed reality.
"Often with new member service representatives, they stress over wondering if they said or did the right thing during a traditional scenario-based learning session with a human [respondent]. … The really cool piece about VR is that they get to play and go down that rabbit trail basically, and figure out where their mistakes were without it being high risk," said Lori Benton, vice president of learning and cultural enrichment at Ent Credit Union.
Digital consultants at Aequilibrium helped develop the credit union-specific scenarios in the software on behalf of Ent and provided the institution with VR devices. They worked closely with department heads at Ent to better understand what skills need to be emphasized, explained Adrian Moise, founder and chief executive of Aequilibrium.
In addition to technical skills, the scenarios his firm created also help sharpen soft skills such as etiquette for interacting with members, Moise said.
The Aequilibrium team uses Motive's software development kit to work in the cross-platform game engine Unity. Through the SDK, the three-dimensional environment can be programmed to include moveable objects and other interactive elements like virtual AI-powered avatars that simulate conversations by acknowledging user responses and progress along a prewritten script. The credit union is creating avatars using the text-to-speech avatar tool in Microsoft's Azure AI platform.
Aequilibrium designers then move to Motive's Storyflow tool after the test environment is established to write the step-by-step progression of the scenario, which involves prebuilt modules that represent different prompts like visual cues to advance the story as well as actions to interact with props. Modules also include vocal phrases for the aforementioned avatars to activate when conversing with the employee.
In Ent's case, as employees talk to the avatars, the AI will compare their responses against a bank of understood phrases and generate scores based on how close the employee was to the list of acceptable answers. This characteristic, also known as intent recognition, provides the avatar with a greater element of flexibility when compared to focusing on exact matches.
Peter Wittig, director of customer experience at Motive, said the adjustability of the platform helps reduce the necessary time needed to update the scenarios.
"Most people make VR like a music box, where the tune is part of the machine and if you ever want to change the tune, you have to send it back to a bunch of software developers," Wittig said. "The approach we take is [more like] allowing users to create a stage that they can then create scripts to play out on it."
Once the storyboarding is complete and rolled out using the firm's content management system, employees will receive a code to complete a session using the VR device of their choosing. Results are compiled in the CMS for training staff to review and identify problem areas on an individual and aggregate basis.
"We're really trying to walk away from a lot of [traditional training methods] and use modern technology because the people we hire use modern technology in their day to day lives," Benton said.
Ent is the latest financial institution to use virtual reality to help new employees get up to speed.
Other forays into the extended reality space range from
Banks and credit unions need to use proper due diligence when training AI bots, experts said. They also need to recognize that users will have varying levels of reception to the technology.
"Sometimes AI can surprise us by doing something in a way that we wouldn't have thought of. So how do you trust it enough to do the right thing, and distrust it enough to always double check and make sure that what you're doing is [both] accurate and appropriate," said Donna Z. Davis, director of the immersive media communication master's program and Oregon Reality (OR) Lab at the University of Oregon. "At the end of the day, there always has to be a human looking at the whole picture."
The campaign is still in the developmental stage at Ent, but is slated to be put to use with member service representatives as the resources near completion.
"Depending on who facilitates the training, you can get a varied experience. … With the virtual reality tool, it's a fairly consistent experience," said Marnie Gerkhardt, director of learning innovation at Ent. "So it can build that consistency with the responses and the behaviors within our teams."
