Cara Motowidlo, Senior Director of Sales at STRIVR, tells us about how practical applications of VR/AR can help a company for more than just short-term uses. The following is a transcript of our interview with her.
3E: Tell us about yourself, STRIVR, and what makes you unique.
CM: I’m Cara Motowidlo, I am Senior Director of Sales at STRIVR, and I lead our east coast efforts. STRIVR is an experiential learning platform – what we do is help companies transform the way that they train by utilizing immersive technologies like virtual reality. In recent years, we’ve worked with partners as sizable as Walmart. We’ve also worked with other blue chip companies like BMW, Fidelity. People in the industry will think about VR for visual training, but it can also be a really great way to promote open conversation and training on customer service.
3E: Can you tell us about a specific implementation of your platform?
CM: We partnered with Fidelity hoping to better the training at their call centers, allowing their junior level employees to basically use the technology to be immersed in a setting where they were inside of a busy call center, and when their customer, their virtual customer, would call them, they would then be able to see the customer’s home on the other end of the line. It allowed them to gain perspective of their customer’s challenges, and what their life really looked like. So for us, it was really about how can we build empathy. So first, giving them a visual perspective of what their customer’s life looks like. The second, though, is allowing them to practice skills like active listening, asking probing questions, and really being able to better navigate the conversation with a sense of compassion.
3E: What have you heard at VRX that’s exciting to you and why?
CM: I definitely hear a sense of candor when people talk about the installation or a sheer application of whether it’s AR or VR, and of course there’s always going to be a few bumps in the road, but what everyone seems to agree upon and what is paramount is really the need to commit to virtual reality, or AR for that matter, and understand that it is a cultural transformation. And a company cannot view either of these tools as toys, but they really need to think about them as solving practical business issues that exist inside of their companies, and most people agree that, again, this is something, especially when you think about VR, that is not meant to sit and collect dust on a shelf. It really has to be embraced by an organization and allow for employees to learn inside of the flow of work so that doesn’t mean they’re using it on a one-time basis, but in fact they’re using it through the lifetime of their tenure at a given company.
