In 2016, Walmart had an emerging issue among its learning programs. The $4 trillion retailer has 1.5 million workers in the U.S., and most of them needed training on how to handle complex customer situations — specifically, training that wouldn’t be disruptive to the customer experience.
“We can’t do that in the store,” says Kate Kressen, senior manager II of learning content and development for Walmart in Bentonville, Ark. “And it’s very hard to recreate a live store environment in a training program.”
For a long time they relied on classroom instructors giving lectures and quizzes, or static online courses that associates clicked through on their own. But neither format could convey the heightened experience of dealing with certain situations in the flow of work.
“We can talk all day, but until you understand the tension that associates and managers feel, it doesn’t really translate,” Kressen says.
Armchair coach
Around that same time, Derek Belch was launching Strivr, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based athletic training company that uses virtual reality as an immersion tool to give athletes a way to practice their craft off the field. Belch had previously been an assistant football coach at Stanford while writing his master’s thesis on using VR to train football players. The project was so impressive that Stanford’s head coach provided Belch with funding to launch Strivr, which he co-founded with Stanford VR professor Jeremy Bailenson.
“When we started Strivr, we were only focused on the sports world,” Belch says. But about a year after launching, he got a surprising call from Brock McKeel, senior director of digital operations at Walmart, who’d seen Strivr’s VR software being used for quarterback training. “He wanted to talk about employee training,” Belch says.
By that time, Strivr had worked with more than 30 NFL and college teams, but Belch had never considered the potential of using his immersive training technology to teach store employees.
However, as he and his team discussed the opportunity, it started to make sense. “As I talked to Walmart about how they train their employees, and what they needed them to learn, we realized that our formula for athletes wasn’t that different,” he says. His developers wouldn’t need to reinvent the software, they just needed to reengineer the experience for a store environment. “It turned out to be a little easier than we expected,” he says. “Stores are a lot more static than a football field.”
Belch was convinced he could create a course that would work for Walmart, though the potential scale of the project was daunting. Walmart wanted Strivr to create programs that could be run in all 200 learning academies, which are training centers attached to larger Walmart stories. And eventually, the retailer wanted to roll it out to 4,000 locations. “It was important that Strivr be able to scale their solution to meet our needs,” Kressen says, “because we needed to get a handle on training 1.2 million associates.”
“It was a pivotal moment for our company,” Belch says. And it led to the first of many sleepless nights, as he and his team figured out how to meet the training needs of the largest employer in the country.
Black Friday in 3D
For the pilot program, which would be tested in 20 stores, they wanted to focus on a high-impact training experience that would replicate well in virtual reality. So Strivr placed a 360-degree camera in one store on Black Friday and let it record for 30 minutes. “What they captured was incredible,” Kressen says. “We were able to turn it into so much good material.”
They used the content to build a training module that allowed trainees in pilot stores to experience the chaos and pressure that associates face on Black Friday, without having to go through it in real life. VR goggles were used to immerse trainees in the store experience, while an instructor talked about what was happening and pointed out where associates did the right things and what to watch out for.
It was the perfect scenario for the pilot, Belch says. “It gave them the chance to experience Black Friday and to make mistakes without affecting any customers.”
The first round of content wasn’t interactive, but it gave trainees, managers and company leaders a taste of what they could accomplish with VR. Kressen’s team immediately saw the benefit. “It gave us a way to show associates what ‘good’ looks like,” she says.
Employees love it
Early numbers proved that not only was the training fun, it was having the desired effect. “The associates’ response to the content was so exciting,” Kressen says. “It was so different from what they were used to.”
Trainees who took the VR training reported a 30 percent higher satisfaction rating compared with trainees attending traditional courses, and the VR trainees scored higher on content tests 70 percent of the time. They also demonstrated a 10-15 percent higher rate of knowledge retention compared with those in traditional training.
The training also takes less time. What might require 90 minutes of classroom training can be completed in 20 minutes using Strivr content. That translates to millions of dollars in productivity savings, Kressen says.
Once they validated the concept, they focused on how else they wanted to use it, and how to expand the training to 200-plus stores. While the 360-degree videos were effective, Walmart wanted trainees to have a full VR experience that allowed them to interact with the environment, pick things up and engage with virtual customers.
But creating that level of immersive and interactive virtual content would be time- and cost-intensive. Belch wanted to be sure they would get value from any content they created.
“Everyone on my team was excited to start this journey, and we wanted to say ‘yes’ to everything they asked for,” Belch says. “But not all training content is the right fit for virtual.”
He notes that for every 20 ideas they brainstormed, only two or three warranted the time and expense of turning existing training into an immersive experience. “The challenging part was how to sift through the enthusiasm,” he says. “We had to have the confidence to push back when it wasn’t the right choice.”
To find the balance, they made sure every virtual learning program solved a specific need using virtual reality that couldn’t be achieved in a traditional classroom. It had to be attached to some return on investment metric to ensure the experience would deliver business value.
Some early courses included active shooter training, dealing with hazardous spills and severe weather, and practice stocking shelves in high-volume areas. Other suggested topics, however, like learning how to use new store technology, didn’t fit the bill. “You don’t need to recreate an existing piece of equipment in a 3D model when you can just train people on it in the real world,” Belch says.
Once Walmart and Strivr agreed on a topic, they worked collaboratively to capture the right content and script the immersive experiences so that trainees would have lots of opportunities for meaningful interactions within the virtual environment.
Thousands of headsets
As they built the courses, they also had to address the issue of scale. Providing the training to employees across Walmart’s retail network would require a significant technology investment. But once Walmart leaders saw the impact of the training and the enthusiasm to learn more, it wasn’t a hard sell.
In 2018, Kressen’s team got approval to acquire 18,000 Oculus Go headsets for its 200 academies, giving thousands of employees the chance to experience the Strivr training. Today, Walmart has 30 active VR training modules, and the company is rolling out headsets to stores across the nation, with four for every superstore and two per neighborhood market.
“It is a lot of real estate to cover,” Kressen says. Along with buying headsets, they have to make sure stores have the space to store and deploy them, and that managers are trained in how to use the headsets as part of their associate training programs.
It’s a huge undertaking, but it is worth it, according to Kressen: “Associates like the content.” However, the most valuable part of the program is the message it sends. “They appreciate the investment Walmart is making in their training. It shows how much we care about the people component of our business.”
