Immersive Customer Experience: A Business Trend to Watch in 2023

“Businesses can grow revenues between 4% and 8% above their market when prioritizing better customer service experiences.” - Bain & Company

“89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.” - Salesforce Research

“93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service.” - HubSpot Research

Customer experience is crucial while running a business, especially in this digital transformation era. Even if you have outstanding products at competitive pricing, you'll lose customers, if you can't deliver a great experience. As more businesses become aware of this, it's essential to take it a step further and set yourself apart from the competition by giving your customers an immersive experience. What’s immersive customer experience anyway?

What Immersive Customer Experience Is

Immersive customer experience refers to a multisensory experience that spans a journey and is contextually relevant, facilitated by a combination of user interactions that provide intuitive and emotional value for the customers. Immersive experiences have the potential to give customers the feeling of having superpowers when properly developed and implemented with the goals and desires of the end user in mind. Hence, businesses may distinguish themselves from the competition and leave a lasting impression on their customers by utilizing immersive experiences.

There are 6 types of immersive customer experience that are commonly used by modern business in this digital era. What are those?

6 Types of Immersive Customer Experience

1. 360-degree content

360° content enables us to seamlessly combine two or more videos that have been shot from every angle possible, with 2D instructional content overlaid on top of them.

2. Digital Twin

It's a "carbon-copy" representation of a real-life structure. A digital twin machine that actively engages with our environment is updated with real-time tracking data and powered by 3D modeling techniques.

3. Virtual Reality

It immerses a user in a virtual world with controls like GPU, responsiveness, or sound, enabling them to communicate through their digital avatars.

4. Augmented Reality

It uses object recognition to uncover hidden characteristics of real-world objects and displays informative content over it.

5. Mixed Reality

It combines AR and VR into a more advanced form of AR. It creates virtual characters for the real environment and adds digital overlays of information.

6. Extended Reality

It's an umbrella term for all immersive technologies. By including digital counterparts in the form of writing, videos, or animations, this technology extends reality logically.

How Immersive Customer Experience Benefits Business

Enhancing reality with new levels of experience can help businesses increase more engagement and strengthen their brand. Therefore, the following are how immersive customer experience can benefit business!

1. Drive Purchase Decisions

Customers can get a better idea of how a product would function in real life, making it simpler to decide whether to make a purchase.

2. Improve Conversions

As customers are able to know how the product functions, it will increase the conversions as they are more likely to complete their orders.

3. Decrease Return Rates

Customers already know how the product will appear in real life by the time they make a purchase so it lowers the return rates.

4. Deliver More Efficient Services

It enables technicians to practically "see" the issue which enables them to address the issue more quickly for the customers.

5. Boost Customer Loyalty

Customers are far more likely to stay as they have developed a deep emotional bond with your brand through those immersive experiences.

In conclusion, building a great customer experience is the foundation of business growth. As customer expectations continue to evolve, these immersive experiences emerge as a critical difference for businesses.