Building a metaverse mindset for customer experience

How many of us can look back 15 to 20 years and say we didn’t find some of the forecasts for e-commerce a little fanciful?

We may have had our doubts—but smartphones and apps have turned the modern customer experience into a reality. Take it from businesses that adapted the e-commerce challenge and those that didn’t. 

To be successful in the metaverse ecosystem, starting now CXOs and CMOs need to think bigger and further beyond boundaries than ever before. 

EXPLORING USE-CASES FOR AR AND VR TECHNOLOGIES

While the foundations of the metaverse are barely laid, TCS has been already developing customer experiences that will underpin the metaverse. 

Use cases for AR and VR are diverse and truly re-imagine experiences. Retailers have already started experimenting with virtual store models where users can enter into an AR version of the store, using their phone or tablet, allowing them to interact as if they were physically inside the shop. A B2B ecosystem benefits from immersive logistics and supply chain experience that facilitates real-time, virtual intervention in the fullfillment process. 

Imagine a supply chain specialist managing operations for a large retail chain. While relaxing at home, she gets a notification on her smart phone about a potential delay to a popular item. Entering the metaverse using a VR headset, she immediately has access to a bird’s-eye view of the entire ecosystem, being able to identify the potential problem. With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, she is able to access  every data point, right from shipping containers and stock-depletion rates to real-time location and status of delivery trucks, allowing her to quickly go the root cause of the issue and conduct a what-if analysis and come up with immediate solutions, and the team is notified on confirming orders, shipment changes, and the rerouting of delivery trucks. 

A task that required a room full of people can now be handled by a single person with VR gear.

Training of nursing students using VR headsets can simulate scenarios such as delivering bad news to relatives of patients or dealing with emergiencies such as cardiac arrest. The system can track eye movement, pupil dilation, heart rate, perspiration and more using wearable sensors to assess how well the student is coping with the pressure of a stressful situation. 

The system also provides constructive feedback to the students by playing back the simulation. Seeing themselves from a third-person perspective helps students relate to the situation as observer and reinforces better techniques they can use in real-world scenarios. 

THE MOMENT TO GET MOVING 

Businesses considering setting out on their metaverse transformation journeys should be well prepared for a long road with a steep learning curve. But this is, undoubtedly, the moment to get moving. It’s only a matter of time before metaverse takes over the e-commerce apps.