How Extended Reality will reshape commerce

   Points to discuss

The time for Extended Reality (XR) has here.

Extended Reality will be available to customers far sooner than predicted, maybe as early as the 2020 Christmas shopping season, because of rapid advancements in smartphones, AI, IoT, and 5G networks.

The future of XR is shaped by its early adopters.

The adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) will be mainly driven by improved customer interactions with items before, during, and after purchase. These augmented reality shopping experiences may influence expectations in other sectors.

The consumer experience is altered by XR.

More than merely enhancing current experiences is required when using XR. Customer experience strategies will have to be reimagined by businesses.

More adventures, more purchases

• 3.4 billion phones will have sophisticated augmented reality capabilities by 2020.
• By that time, billions of customers will be able to investigate physical items with digitally linked material and make more informed selections.
• The internet purchasing experience will be vastly different from what we have now in terms of commerce.
• Houzz, a popular online platform for home renovation and design, has launched an augmented reality tool that allows customers to visually tile their floors.
• Dismissing the ramifications of AR is similar to ignoring the emergence of internet commerce and the resulting disruption.

Shopping has progressed from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional experience.

• Until recently, our digital lives were flat, with only two-dimensional experiences possible on our devices.
• Data from these devices can offer rich, immersive XR improvements and visualisations as mobile usage grows and embedded AI and Internet of Things apps become more common.
• The advent of 5G has given XR a huge boost in terms of development and acceptance. The line between digital and real encounters will become increasingly blurred as time goes on.
• The consequences for how businesses engage with their customers will be enormous. Will this have an impact on customer preferences and habits, whether they are online or offline?

Expect four big changes.

• Getting a feel for a thing before buying it
• Developing a relationship that goes beyond the transaction
• Improving the customer's in-store experience
• Using the XR avatar to represent the brand

Preparing for an XR world

• XR could revolutionise customer experience strategy, reframe customer relationships, and fend off competitive disruption.
• Early movers who master XR could upend existing channels, just as the digital age shattered music distribution.
• An organisation needs to consider its XR customer interaction approach.
• XR is not a future state, it's happening now.
• Marketers, developers, and experience designers need to quickly become fluent in the expanding uses of XR.
• The need for XR fluency extends to product design, customer service, warranty, repair, sales, logistics.

How Extended Reality will reshape commerce 

 Explore XR possibilities from your customers’ perspective

Your XR experience should provide a real improvement for your customers. If you perceive it to be too cumbersome, inconvenient, or irrelevant, they won't use it. Your customer experience strategy needs to be designed from the ground up in order to work. Design thinking is a good way to start.

Experiment to learn quickly, then scale

In-market experiments will help determine the best use cases for continued investment and scaling. Take into account the current status of your product and customer data, infrastructure, and cloud capabilities to decide which experiments are most feasible, and from which you'll learn what you need for the next round.

Use internal pilots to accelerate learning

Your XR team can also launch internal training pilots and mobile apps. Consider how your internal projects can model the customer-facing XR applications you want to create for your XR teams. Your XR staff can then apply these lessons when they roll out XR pilots for customers.