Consumers have very high expectations of their brands at every touchpoint, and these expectations have grown rapidly in the past few years. A large part of this is the acceleration of online buying, ushered in by the pandemic, forcing businesses to invest heavily in digital transformation.
Additionally, Big Tech has revolutionized the AR and VR space, igniting consumer enthusiasm and further bolstering the ecosystem. Altogether, these advances are driving the evolution of immersive customer experiences at breakneck speed.
Due to all of these major changes, it’s clear that companies need to create better experiences to build and sustain meaningful and lucrative customer engagement.
Today, as more customers buy goods online, the shopping experience often falls short of their expectations. While 75% of Fortune 500 companies accelerated their technology transformation in light of COVID-19, those businesses that still rely on traditional e-commerce frameworks, with static 2D visuals and rudimentary configuration tools, fail to capture consumer attention and loyalty.
As this realization grows, retailers and brands are increasingly looking to immersive and personalized experiences to help stand out and deepen connections with consumers. They must seek innovative solutions that can drive engagement, conversion, and sustained profitability. In retail, for example, AR experiences have proven to boost sales significantly by improving purchase confidence through placing items in real-life environments and allowing closer inspection in 3D.
AR spending by retailers is expected to reach $60B by 2023*. The majority of customers now start their shopping with online research; in the automotive industry, over 80% of new-car customers now begin their journey online. Brands first compete digitally by providing interactive and immersive experiences: Using AR to place a new car in your driveway or a virtual couch in your living room, exploring a new factory layout in virtual reality before any physical construction begins, or even visualizing complex surgical procedures using VR and 3D modeling. Some brands, like Don Julio Tequila, even go as far as transporting their audiences to a whole other (virtual) destination to experience the magic behind the product. These digital experiences are transforming industries, providing interactive and immersive engagements for users and paving the way for a digital-first competitive landscape.
Beyond B2C, nearly two-thirds (65%) of B2B companies across industry sectors now offer e-commerce capabilities. XR applications are emerging as a valuable marketing tool for brands to drive purchases, improve shopper confidence and conversion, and enable brand storytelling.
*Harbor Research, RT3D E-Commerce (2021)
With customers expecting more during the purchase cycle, they need to trust that what they’re seeing is what they’re buying. With this comes a variety of challenges. For example:
The demand from consumers has built a need for seamless, immersive, and personalized interactions across all platforms in the digital journey. Companies are also awakening to the profound impact of 3D product views, which have been shown to generate 50% more engagement compared to static imagery. By utilizing tools that build XR experiences, businesses can elevate engagement, conversion rates, and brand storytelling to drive increased revenue for many different scenarios, from virtual try-ons and virtual showrooms to virtual photography and more. Here’s how:
Automotive | Audi
Audi is renowned for its innovative automotive design and progressive technology. To showcase the Q6 e-tron, Audi developed a fully immersive virtual exhibit, integrating real-time car visualizations with advanced AR/VR capabilities. The fully immersive space combined complex technology with multimedia content, demonstrating the Audi Q6 e-tron’s technological innovation to journalists, content creators, and other media representatives. With the Apple Vision Pro, the audience was able to view every detail of the car’s exterior, down to its rear electric motor’s oil cooling circuit, in real-time. By letting them experience the car spatially and immersively, Audi not only helped them easily visualize and understand the complexities of the product, but also reflected their commitment to driving innovation in a highly competitive industry.
Manufacturing | Bosch
Bosch Rexroth built a virtual showroom that enables the exploration and display of large industrial products without the challenges of conventional real-world demonstrations. Their VR application provides a better sales experience and moves away from 2D sales enablement materials; sales teams can demonstrate the finer details of each product, by employing virtual product teardowns. To reproduce such demonstrations in real life would take hours of disassembly and reassembly. In the virtual showroom, it takes less than 30 seconds. The interactive nature of the experience allows for greater customer involvement compared to more conventional methods such as presentations, ultimately creating deeper engagement with their customers.
Healthcare | Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital has adopted immersive training methods and they’re realizing multiple benefits. For example, their surgeons are enabled to quickly create and utilize 3D models for urgent medical procedures; they have virtual environments allowing patients to engage in their own healthcare, and discuss side by side with their surgeon, helping to plan out what their operation is going to be. All of these allow them to share insights and plan surgeries with a level of patient and doctor interaction that was previously impossible.
Food and beverage | Tequila Don Julio
Diageo is boosting sales with XR by building experiences that deepen the customer connection with their brand. The first beverage brand to build with Apple Vision Pro, they created an experience to showcase the rich legacy, craft, and culture of Don Julio tequila in an immersive, engaging way.
While AR and VR technology has the potential to transform how businesses engage with their audiences, it is imperative to get those experiences right. Here are five ways in which AR and VR can help you enhance customer experience.
1. Increase visual engagement with photorealistic quality
With the fierce competition to market better online, a brand’s ability to captivate and engage customers through AR and VR experiences can provide an edge. You need technology that offers a blend of interactivity and visual fidelity that can streamline the pipeline of marketing content creation into an efficient process that produces scalable, photorealistic, high-definition assets – and brings your products to life in your XR environment.
Doing it right:
2. Build a personal connection by offering personalized experiences
Cultivating a connection between the customer and the product has become more important than ever. Luxury brands, such as high-end luggage manufacturer Globe-Trotter, understand that creating an emotional connection through customization and interactivity is more likely to lead to repeat buyers and foster customer loyalty. In fact, 40% of consumers reported that they had purchased something more expensive than originally planned when their experience was personalized.
Doing it right:
3. Go beyond the screen, offering interactivity and immersion in the digital world
Creative ways of getting customers to interact with products can be a big differentiator. From interactive showcases, hands-on demos, or immersive virtual reality experiences, businesses can change the way customers engage with their brands, deepening the connection between them.
Doing it right:
4. Take your experiences anywhere, to any device
The experiences you build should be scalable across devices and geographies, enabling universal access, permission control, and engagement. You should also be able to easily update content globally, keeping experiences fresh and relevant.
Doing it right:
5. Leverage customer feedback to continually improve
Immersive customer experiences are a great way for companies to solicit, understand, and incorporate feedback from their users. In real-time, businesses can see how people are using their products, what features they like, and where they can make improvements. Such direct input from the users’ experience enables the company to refine its products to better meet market demands, ensuring a competitive edge.
Doing it right:
Unity Industry is a comprehensive suite of products and services for developers to build custom experiences for AR and VR across industries such as automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, transportation, and more. Here’s how it can radically transform your business:
Start now with Unity Industry and empower your business to create the experiences of the future.
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