Brian is an associate at Bank of America with an attitude. His lunch breaks run late, he is careless with his cash drawer, and he bristles at feedback when his manager points out these faults.
Chelsea works alongside Brian. She is a top performer but could do better at encouraging her customers to share more about their goals and financial priorities, and improve how she handles tense situations. Recently, when a customer complained about a cashier’s check fee, she simply overrode the fee without exploring the problem with her disgruntled customer.
Brian and Chelsea are fictitious. But actors play them in scenarios that Bank of America employees can watch by donning virtual reality headsets as part of their training through The Academy, Bank of America’s onboarding, coaching and development organization for customer-facing employees.
On Thursday, the bank is announcing the rollout of virtual reality training for branch staff. As part of the soft launch, Bank of America has distributed 50 headsets in 50 branches. Next month, both numbers will rise to 1,000, and by the end of the first quarter it plans to have goggles in every branch.
Virtual reality is a nascent technology that experts expect will be more widely used in financial services in the near future. Bank of America appears to be the first large bank to use it for training purposes. Unlike watching a training video, employees working through exercises virtual reality can interact with lifelike scenarios and hear how they sound, reflect on what could have gone better, and practice in privacy.
Bridie Fanning, who leads the talent and organization group for financial services at Accenture, predicts that virtual reality and extended reality (the umbrella term for technologies that merge physical and virtual worlds to create immersive experiences) will reach mainstream banking in the next couple of years. She has already seen early adoption in banking over the past year, as companies look for more immersive experiences for remote workers and the costs of headsets and software have declined.
Virtual reality, which allows the user to interact with a simulated environment, is less common in the financial world today than
But, “it will only be a matter of time before banks will start considering virtual reality to improve process efficiency and collaboration,” Hoppermann said.
To enable customer service training, Bank of America's academy provides hundreds of online simulators to familiarize employees with tasks like opening an account. It also provides a library of recorded customer service calls. A simulator called iCoach uses artificial intelligence to hold dialogues with trainees and provide instant feedback about whether they are introducing themselves properly or conveying empathy.
Virtual reality is Bank of America’s newest addition to its academy. It’s meant to help reinforce customer service skills and help employees feel comfortable navigating delicate situations before they occur.
Virtual reality gives people a training experience they will remember, said Mike Wynn, innovation and design manager for the academy. It gets at the difference between knowing what to say and actually saying the right thing. It also lets people polish these skills privately rather than feel flustered playing roles in front of a classroom.
John Jordan, head of the academy, still remembers the first angry client he spoke to many years ago.
“Those are situations you dread going through the first time,” he said. “You don’t want to say the wrong things.”
Jordan landed on the idea of using virtual reality in employee training three years ago when he was surveying different technologies to incorporate into the academy and met with a vendor of the technology.
“I went in skeptically thinking there was no way it would have real applications,” Jordan said. But a session that put him in the shoes of a Chipotle manager made an impression.
“I put those things on my head for maybe three minutes, and three years later I remember vividly what I saw,” he said. (The bank did not want to name its virtual reality headset vendor.)
Bank of America is soft-launching the VR training with five modules — which will rise to 20 by the end of 2022 — for both managers and customer-facing employees. They cover coaching direct reports, sussing out the needs of small-business owners, introducing the importance of retirement planning to different life stages, discussing account options and processing transactions.
In one exercise, viewers watch an everyday scene in a Bank of America branch unfold. Brian returns late from lunch and casually throws his bank keys on a table. He checks his personal phone. Chelsea ignores the first customer who enters. The two later make several mistakes as they interact with customers.
Throughout, the viewer will click on problematic behaviors as they happen with a controller and decide whether these behaviors merit addressing immediately or later in one-on-one conversations. A manager, “Marcus,” models sample dialogues for the situations to be addressed right away. Another session delves into the kinds of conversations a manager would have later, asking the viewer to select from a variety of key statements that would help the associates reconsider their actions. In a third session, the trainee will record feedback, play it back and rate it. Employees can access detailed reports about their performance.
For now, branch employees will take a headset into a back room to practice. Over time, Bank of America plans to extend the use to contact center employees, wealth managers, financial advisers, commercial bankers and more. They could potentially help tellers or relationship bankers practice skills to become potential managers, and young trainees understand different life stages to build
“Virtual reality can create an effective setting for simulated human interactions, which can help workers enhance people skills such as communication and empathy — all critical in customer service environments in banking,” Fanning said.
For now, employees are said to be excited.
“It’s not often people say, ‘I can’t wait to do this training,’ ” Wynn said.
