On the day of a match, football clubs normally sell tickets to around 40,000 people and these fans usually frequent the stadium for a few hours and possibly buy a shirt from the souvenir shop. Iimagine now that 800,000 other people are watching the same game, but in 3D in the virtual world. What experience could and should the club offer these people? How should he interact with them? And not just for the duration of the match, but continuously, if they want to spend more time there?
The arrival of the metaverse is starting to raise these kinds of questions on corporate boardrooms around the world. The concept of the metaverse has dominated the tech and business landscape this year – Computing devices can now connect people, via virtual reality headsets or even simply via their browser, to a digital space of real-time virtual experiences that users really want to interact with. Although still in the experimental stage, use cases from brands and professionals are now added to the use cases of the gaming and entertainment industry. Brands such as H&M, Heineken and BMW have each recently launched projects in this area.
Commerce will soon take hold and bring with it a whole new and exciting world of brand experiences and ways to buy and sell as businesses seek to connect with consumers in a completely new paradigm. Thanks to the creation of 3D models, travel agencies can present hotels, tourist sites and means of transport in high digital quality. This can make the vacation planning and shopping experience a whole lot easier, saving you from spending hours reading endless reviews on the internet to find out if places are worth visiting before you book. Similarly, the real estate industry may soon offer 3D guided tours of real estate, removing the need to travel for endless in-person tours.
For these new customer experiences to be more than just a passing fad, it will be equally important for brands to think about the customer service strategy that will support them. But where to start ? Here are some areas you might think about.
How do you best integrate your customer service agents into the metaverse?
The metaverse is all about immersion – once you’re there, you don’t want to have to exit the platform and go back to traditional support channels, like email, if you run into a problem. As more and more of us meet in the metaverse, customer support will become more and more essential to delivering a positive experience. We’ve seen this before in gaming, where chat devices allow you to get help from the platform. Conversational service – with agents in the form of avatars – will be key to effectively resolving issues without having to leave the experience space. Brands should think about how they view the metaverse as a new support channel where agents or even help articles could “pop up” in our view. If done right, early adopters who are already exploring virtual worlds will soon be converted into brand ambassadors.
How the integration of the metaverse in customer service changes the buying process? It could create experiences freed from the constraint of inventory to virtually try a product before buying it and give more power to consumers, especially in comparing prices. For a car purchase, for example, it could allow shoppers to visit a single dealership to view multiple brands and virtually explore, shortlist and pre-configure the cars they are interested in.
But what should a company’s customer service look like when the products are sold by a third-party distributor? How do you make sure you’re setting up your service at the right time, if a buyer needs more information? It is by thinking about these issues, as well as the potential impact on how goods are purchased in the real world, that we can ensure that the service in the metaverse is set up in the right way. way from the start.
How will we find the brands we don’t yet know?
Virtual worlds will create a new way for consumers to research goods and understand how products work – much like the arrival of Amazon’s Alexa did several years ago. It’s going to change the way we connect with brands, but it’s also going to allow us to bypass a brand through a third party – just like we can do with Amazon on the web. Retailers should therefore study the digital revolutions that have already taken place in order to think intelligently about the next one.
Businesses must prioritize customer service as if their very growth depends on it. Sooner or later, this will also include customer service in the metaverse. We must start planning for this evolution now, especially since at this stage, less than a third (30%) of European companies have included conversational customer service in their toolkit and only 40% are in able to integrate customer service with other business channels.
In many ways, the arrival of the metaverse represents the next phase of digital transformation : it is a new version of the Internet. And as brands begin to take notice of this new virtual world, the worst thing they can do is to do nothing, ignore it, and not start thinking about a strategy, even if they haven’t yet. quite ready to take the leap. After all, we’ve seen what happened to brands like Kodak and Blockbuster that neglected previous digital leaps. Whether the metaverse will embody the same level of subversion remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that it opens up a whole new world of opportunity that would be hard to ignore.