Reimagine Your Customer Experiences by Looking Through the Lens of Virtual Options
Leaders who have looked through the lens of virtual options have identified viable opportunities to build fascinating virtual businesses in categories where the virtual previously never played a part. Whether looking at real estate or exercising, holding meetings or talking to the pediatrician, getting help with our taxes or tutoring for math, the spectrum of disruptive innovation categories is wide and only getting wider.
Virtual may feel like an obvious lens right now. But it is—as it always has been—the most challenging. You want to aim to create a meaningful experience virtually, one that can stand up to comparison with and even best real-life options. This requires you to know what you are offering, grasp the technology on which you rely to offer it, understand within an inch precisely what your clients want from their experience, and offer them an experience that exceeds that expectation.
When exploring adding a virtual dimension to a product or service, before you dive into all the cutting-edge technology, you must first be clear on the benefit you want a virtual experience to deliver. The best approach to guide your virtual exploration process is to start by identifying customer insights into the current brand experience.
An insight is an issue consumers have with an existing experience that they typically do not share either because this is how it has always been or they cannot envision how it could be improved virtually.
Here are a few examples of experience innovation created by looking through a virtual lens and using customer insight to guide the program.
IKEA Place
Consumer Insight: When buying furniture, the items always look great in the store/showroom or online, but I always struggle to imagine what the item will look like in my house.
Through its augmented reality app, IKEA Place, customers can see how furniture and products will look in their own homes before making a purchase. The app automatically scales products based on room dimensions.
The AR technology is so precise that consumers can see how the room’s lighting impacts the fabric’s appearance of the furniture item they are considering. In addition to digitally placing IKEA products in a room, the app allows people to capture the setting in the app and share an image or video with friends so they can hear their reaction (I think that looks great, or I would not put that in the room.) before purchasing the product.
Audi
Consumer Insight: When I take my car in for a repair or service, I am always skeptical that the problem has been diagnosed correctly and the repair performed as promised…I can’t crawl under the car or inside the engine compartment to see for myself.
When you take your Audi in for service at one of their dealerships (and likely many other car service experiences now), you get a text with a short video from under your car or inside the engine compartment showing the problem they identified, and then another showing the successful repair.
A simple virtual enhancement to a customer experience (CX) that has not changed in years can transform the car service experience from skepticism to confidence.
L’Oreal
Consumer Insight: I wonder how this product will make me look when I use it. The products always look great in the ad, but that does not help me decide if it’s right for me.
L’Oreal has introduced a virtual in-store and online experience that allows consumers to try makeup virtually. This personalized and interactive shopping experience enables customers to explore and test dozens of beauty looks in real time, catering to all skin tones. This virtual experience allows consumers to see how products look on them before making a purchase, reducing uncertainty and increasing satisfaction with their choices.
The new virtual experience has expanded L’Oréal’s product portfolio and created more opportunities for engagement.
Undoubtedly, technology allows us to do many things in a virtual space that we used to do face-to-face and now enhanced with AI virtual will become more powerful and sometimes even better than human-centered experiences. We’ve all experienced it, and it will likely continue to play a part in what we do in the future profoundly. What will be interesting to note and/or attempt to control will be what reverts to more traditional methods and what remains in the virtual realm.
