“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” Atticus Finch famously told his daughter Scout in the American classic “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” It’s impossible, of course, for an employee to literally walk around in a customer’s skin. Virtual reality is making it close to literally possible, but for many organizations, using virtual reality in training is cost- or technologically-prohibitive. Is there another option?
A new company called Ethos Farm says there is. Launched last year, Ethos Farm provides end-to-end customer service solutions, including learning solutions aligned with clients’ brands and customer service strategy. The training is especially designed for customer service teams in the retail and travel industries, where founder and CEO Sally Alington has a great deal of experience and where, she says, excellent customer service is an important competitive differentiator.
“The infrastructure can be refreshed, and there can be excellent offerings … but if the people aren’t up to scratch, if the people aren’t representing the brand in exactly the right way … then all of that investment in infrastructure is lost, really,” she says.
Brand ambassadors, according to branding consultant William Arruda, are “employees who are thoroughly engaged, connected and committed,” who understand their employer’s brand and can deliver on it. Based on her experience working with companies like Heathrow and Dubai Airports, Alington says that training customer-facing employees to be brand ambassadors is a key to improving customer brand loyalty, customer service scores and sales.
Ethos Farm’s performance rooms are one of their major products to make that happen. These transportable rooms provide templated or customized experiences in which learners actually experience different types of customer situations. According to Josie Barton, co-founder and head of Ethos Farm’s learning and development services, the rooms are about “really connecting each learner with the values, the spirit, the goals of the organization [and] moving them along that journey in a very immersive way so that they interact with the content and really make an emotional connection with it.”
As Carlo Peratoner, co-owner of TRI Corporation, a provider of experiential learning and simulation programs for executives, says, “The most memorable learning is through action.” Through immersive experiences like Ethos Farm’s, learners can try out new skills, make mistakes without suffering real-world consequences (like an angry customer) and learn from those mistakes to make better decisions on the job.
Of course, as Training Industry, Inc. research has shown, most training leaders believe using multiple modalities leads to better learning. Ethos Farm offers e-learning as well as several apps organizations can use to distribute information, communicate with team members and provide online training. In industries like retail and travel, where customer service staff are rarely sitting at a desk, mobile communication and mobile learning are particularly important.
This year, Ethos Farm will begin using virtual reality for orientation and customer service training. Barton says, “The beauty of virtual reality of course is that you can give people a realistic experience of either a location or a situation – all in a safe environment – and they can become familiar with a number of scenarios they are likely to encounter in their real job and gain practice in how to handle these.”
By offering a number of customer service training options, aligned with an organization’s strategy and brand, employers can start to shift the needle from having staff who move through the motions of serving customers to having staff who understand customer needs and represent the brand in a strategic and impactful way.
