5 Key Trends in Banking and VR Training

Banking and VR Training

‍Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being adopted in the banking sector for training purposes. This blog outlines five significant VR training trends shaping how banks train their staff, enhancing skills and customer service efficiency.

Like most industries, technological developments have proven to be major disruptors. Even 10 years ago, stepping into a bank was an entirely different experience. Traditional banking required customers to visit a branch in person, even if just to withdraw money, now, that era seems to have come to a close. https://digikhata.in/blog/traditional-banking-vs-digital-banking-a-comprehensive-comparison#:~:text=One of the most significant differences lies in the accessibility,also differs between the two.

Immersive Skill Development:

• Traditional training often requires a trainer to travel from branch to branch to administer the same training.
• The trainer carves out a portion of the employees’ day for an average of 1-2 hours of training.
• Effective training sometimes requires the use of actors, complicating logistics further.
• VR eliminates these complexities, needing only software, headsets, and a management system.

Banks are utilizing VR to create realistic simulations for training on complex financial procedures, customer relations and generally as a way of bolstering security and risk mitigation. Virtual reality allows for true-to-life training with out the real life risks, costs, and limitations of traditional training.

For example, traditional training often requires a trainer to travel from branch to branch to administer the same training. The trainer will carve out a portion of the employees’ day for an average of 1-2 hours of training. The trainer then administers the training and moves on to the next branch. Though, often effective training requires the use of actors as well. Simply put, this makes the logistics more complicated, not only to the trainers have to be on-site at the right time and employees also available for the training, but the actors will have to be there too, and fully prepared to carry out the role-play training.

What does this have to do with immersive skill development? All these measures - having the trainer on-site and incorporating actors to mimic real-life situations - are done with the intention of making training as realistic as possible.

Banks are quickly finding that, with the end goal being to create true-to-life training, it is much easier and more effective to use virtual reality. It is true that to incorporate VR training, you’ll need a few things - software, headsets, and a management system, but let’s consider how those compare to the requirements of traditional training. As stated above, traditional training will require a trainer and live actors if you hope to match the training quality of VR. Compared to VR training, you’ll need headsets and the software to create scenarios and align everything. While that more or less lays out the necessary ingredients for training and how they compare, it says nothing for the benefits. We’ll start by ceding that training in real life is going to be more realistic. That is, assuming that the quality of actor, training, location, time of day, and attendance are all in order. If those do all fall into place, there’s still one major issue - repetition. To be blunt, people need to do things more than once to become proficient in them.

Enhanced Customer Interaction Training:

• VR scenarios are uniform, ensuring low variance in trainee experiences.
• Useful for high-stress or complex customer interactions.
• Allows for uniform training across all employees, reducing discrepancies.

VR helps staff practice customer service skills in a controlled environment, preparing them for real-world interactions. Expanding on the idea of repetition, VR scenarios are uniform, meaning that the variance in experience between one trainee and the next is very low. While some trainees may make different decisions or take different actions, the path to success will be mostly the same.This is very beneficial when it comes to navigating high-stress or complex customer interactions. Generally, there will be a right way of doing things, a “by the books” way, and a wrong way. For example, a customer who is yelling or acting belligerently should be addressed in a specific way. This means banks or any organization can train its employees uniformly.

This is an ideal case for VR training because while real-life on-the-job training can also train for very specific interactions, it’s a more reliable path to choose VR due to its low variance and high repeatability, not to mention scalability, which we’ll touch on below.

Stress Management Simulations:

• Provides a controlled environment for practicing responses to uncomfortable situations.
• Examples include resolving customer disputes or handling security threats.
• Helps develop critical skills like empathy, decision-making, and conflict resolution.
• Enables repeated practice to perfect handling real-life challenges.

Bank employees are often met with uncomfortable situations, whether those are related to customer satisfaction and service, or to security. VR training provides a controlled environment where staff can practice handling these situations through interpersonal interaction simulations. For example, a trainee might navigate a scenario involving a customer disputing a transaction, where they must use communication skills to resolve the issue while adhering to bank policies. These simulations help employees develop critical skills like empathy, decision-making, and conflict resolution, enhancing their ability to manage real-life challenges effectively and maintaining a high standard of customer service.

Anytime that a company has a standard procedure for dealing with a conflict, that procedure can be captured on 360 video, distributed to employees, and trained repeatedly until perfected.

Regulatory Compliance Training:

• External regulations define specific behaviors or actions for compliance.
• VR can script and create scenarios quickly based on these behaviors.
• Scenarios can be distributed easily across the workforce.
• Enhances understanding and adherence to regulations through immersive training.

Another care for training standard procedures is with regulatory compliance training. Through VR, banks can simulate scenarios that require compliance with legal standards, ensuring that staff understand and adhere to regulations. Again, regulations are set by external bodies, not by banks themselves. That means that they should have a defined set of behaviors or actions that need to be followed in order to be considered compliant.

That means that by understanding those behaviors and actions, VR scenarios in 360 video can be quickly scripted and created. Then, it’s a simple matter of distributing them to the larger workforce.

Scalable and Accessible Learning:

• Once created, scenarios can be distributed globally.
• Eliminates the need for trainers to travel.
• Scenarios are typically hosted on platforms and accessed anywhere.
• Ensures uniform training quality across all locations.

This brings us to scalability and accessibility. Banks won’t get far without a scalable learning infrastructure, whether it’s for complex training programs or one-off upskilling. A huge benefit of VR training is that it enables banks to deliver consistent training across global operations, ensuring all employees, regardless of location, receive the same training experience.

Once a scenario has been created, say, for following procedures for compliance training. That scenario can be easily distributed to multiple locations. No more need to send a trainer back and forth. Scenarios are typically hosted on a platform, like Warp Studio, and then accessed anywhere around the globe.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, VR training offers some unique benefits:

• Consistent, realistic training experiences.
• Elimination of the need for trainers and actors.
• Higher efficiency and scalability.
• Ability to repeat training until proficiency is achieved.

As VR technology continues to evolve, its application in banking training programs is set to expand, promising to significantly improve the way banking professionals are trained, with improved outcomes for both staff and customers.

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