VR-Based Relaxation Therapy for Customer Service Staff - A Pilot Study.

Customer service staff are the frontliners of any organisation. They act as the first stop centre for customer or client to report complaints or feedback. However, this job also comes with a stressful working condition. For this reason, XperionVR™, a Virtual Reality-based relaxation therapy system was developed with the intention of providing easy access for employees to manage their stress by practising relaxation techniques. This paper describes the evaluation of XperionVR™ conducted among the staff of a customer service unit of a large utility company. This pilot study aims to gather participants’ perception of the effectiveness of each element in the therapy component of the VR-based relaxation therapy system in helping them to relax or reduce their stress level. The procedure involves participants going through the therapy session, and feedback on the experience was gathered using questionnaire, direct observation, and interview. Forty participants had voluntarily participated in the pilot study. Based on the result of the analysis, it could be observed that most participants felt that the system managed to make them feel more relaxed and reduce their stress level. However, two challenges observed were i) due to the nature of customer service staff who only have short break time, it is important for any VR-based relaxation therapy system to be designed with the ability to provide optimal therapy outcome within a short period of time and ii) the system should consist of a feature that can provide a quick demonstration for users with no experience of using a virtual reality system on how to navigate the system. Without the demonstration, users will have difficulty using the system, which in turn, will cause adverse effect to the overall therapy experience.