Black Friday is just around the corner - and with the discounts also a large number of customers, who pose a challenge for retail employees. To prepare its employees for this day, Walmart relies on VR training.
The 360-degree footage Walmart employees see via the virtual reality headset was shot during a previous Black Friday. The scenes are as you would imagine them to be: long queues, crowded aisles and annoyed customers. Quite a horror!
Hughes, one of the trainers at Walmart's training academies in St Petersburg, says it used to be very difficult to show employees how something like Black Friday would go. "It's wonderful that we can now immerse ourselves in this real-life situation with VR without employees having to worry about making a real mistake," Hughes explains. "They can make those mistakes here in this training with no consequences. It makes them better prepared for real life."
Hughes points out a few spots that might escape the untrained eye: A little girl standing on a shopping trolley; a man not having a question answered; a manager asking for the key to unlock an electronics cabinet. With each problem, Hughes interrupts the exercise and explains what an employee should do in the same situation.
The retailer has been using virtual reality in a big way for a while now, training over a million employees with VR goggles.Walmart uses virtual reality to train employees in all kinds of scenarios, not just for Black Friday. Right now, they're using it in five shops in the Bay Area. Soon, however, the company will have it in all of them.
Source: wtsp
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