Have you ever dealt with a difficult airline employee while trying to check in for your flight or seemingly waited a lifetime just for a refill on your cup of coffee?
In today’s world, great customer service is simultaneously a cornerstone of almost any successful businesses and yet somehow a continually neglected element in so many of our daily transactions.
A Silicon Valley startup says the solution to training better customer service employees exists in the emerging world of virtual reality. “Taking a new hire and setting them free into the retail world can be a daunting prospect,” says Portico Studios CEO Franklin Alioto.
Alioto and Jeff Meador, Portico’s COO, have created a virtual reality system that uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to create some of the most common and challenging scenarios that a customer service employee faces in jobs ranging from waiter to hotel staff and even those in the medical field.
Instead of throwing a new employee into the wild, where they could upset a real-world customer, Portico’s system allows them to interact with a continually evolving “virtual customer.” Unlike a generic training manual or video, the interactive world of virtual reality allows the training system to not only decide if the trainee made the “right” decision, but can actually measure the “intent” of their response to help fine tune, and weed out, certain behaviors.
“Rather than just command with an answer, we’re having a conversation,” Meador says.
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Source: Money Good