Virtual Reality (VR) Simulations for Employee Training on Dealing with Angry Customers

Whenever an angry customer confronts an employee, their response represents your brand and its values. Also, customer engagement teams need to maintain quality standards for such a crucial responsibility. With the breakthrough in VR technology, here’s how your company can enhance the client engagement team’s performance while dealing with angry customers.

Jay, a Customer Service Executive for one of the world's largest retail stores, adds, “Role play exercises with coworkers for dealing with angry customers cannot really simulate the feeling of panic, or teach what tactics to use to defuse such a situation. Training in VR offers a unique advantage that I can practice this in a shorter span of time in a space where I could test multiple responses and their impact, while feeling the pressure of facing a virtual angry customer”.

With the advancement of virtual reality in training, a whitepaper by Intel estimates that their first VR-based corporate training course has a potential Return on Investment (ROI) of 300% over the next five years, with 94% of trainees requesting more courses on VR. Also, recently, companies including BMW, Walmart, Verizon, and Ford are training their employees in design, sales skills, empathy, and customer service.

Virtual Reality VR Training for Customer-facing Employees

With the VR experience, the trainees feel like they are directly interacting with the customer.

However, how does all this apply to challenging situations in retail, like dealing with an angry customer? The customer-facing staff of your company needs to understand all the aspects of representing your organization, starting with the mannerisms and appearance befitting the organization's reputation.

Employees need to gain better insights by training and understanding common causes of conflict within the department they are serving, the different ways each situation has historically been addressed, and company policy towards exceptions. The challenge is to keep a customer happy and not cause financial stress to the company. It is essential to provide better service with the utmost civility towards the customer no matter the situation. It is a delicate balance harder to achieve with high attrition rates, and most companies witness these roles.

Imagine your customer-facing employees and trainees can simulate commonly encountered scenarios with angry customers on their own devices. They have imposed variations of the tonality and facial expressions they are likely to encounter in such a setting.

Saying the right thing at the right time is crucial, or you might aggravate the situation, thereby leading the customer to walk away in a huff and report your behavior. Virtual Reality modules built on GMetri can help you recreate these and allow employees to train on multiple such scenarios in their own time, on their own devices.

While considering all the possible scenarios for training your employees to deal with customers, having a blended learning approach can be beneficial. Incorporating a few critical elements should ideally be part of the Employee Training modules. They include understanding conflict and the common causes of competition in your domain or department. Employees can identify body language that can help them in diffusing conflict.

Tips on dealing with aggressive behavior and proper communication in the face of aggression can be simulated with VR. Other elements such as escalation procedures and company policy might also come in handy to employees while being trained to deal with angry customers.

The advantages of virtual reality to train customer-facing staff in handling conflict are that you can design multiple scenarios and create an experience that gives choices between possible responses and how the customers receive them. The VR solutions by GMetriXR can provide the staff with these experiences repeatedly, on their own time. Statistically, it makes them ready for the shop floor in 30% of the time than that of classroom training.

Benefits of Virtual Reality Employee Training on Dealing with Angry Customers

There is a wide array of benefits of customer interaction VR Training on gamified VR modules by GMetri, the Augmented Reality Company.

GMetri provides a controlled, monitored learning environment on the trainee's phones to help them understand customer behavior and handling by experiencing situations in a setting that feels just about real.

VR modules help train remotely, saving time and money on logistics, trainers, and real estate. There is an unbeatable margin on engagement, retention, and recall rates compared to the conventional classroom or video-based training.

GMetri modules for VR assure a shrink in onboarding time for a new person and improve skills faster by leveraging spatial cognitive learning. There is controlled exposure to stressful situations.

About GMetri

GMetri enables the training staff to keep track of skill assessments with our analytics tools.

Use GMetri to create a standardized sales pitch for meetings or conferences on VR. Sign up now on GMetri and create interactive modules for Free. If you thought this article was interesting, you might be keen on learning how to onboard your employees virtually. Start the journey today; you can request a callback here.