Customer engagement is defined as the customer’s emotional or psychological attachment to a brand, product, or company. Customer engagement is vital for businesses as it drives sales and growth, and we will examine virtual reality as a new component of customer engagement.

How Virtual Reality Can Enhance Customer Engagement

Customer purchasing decisions are influenced by emotional factors. Behavioral economics has shown that rational decision-making accounts for approximately one-third of people’s decisions and behavior. Feelings influence engagement and engagement boosts sales, as engaged customers buy 90% more frequently and spend 60% more per transaction.

Interaction Is Key to Customer Engagement

Being emotionally-driven, truly effective customer engagement implies an ongoing interaction between the company and its customers. Interaction is what allows people to develop feelings towards others and towards a brand. Customers are engaged when they get personalized purchasing experiences. This means individually tailored brand experiences, efficient interaction with company representatives, and fast customer services.

Social media and the direct interactions via social networks between companies and customers, as well as live chat widgets that have lately proliferated on company websites, have clearly shown the importance of the social component and of the company-to-customer interaction in engaging customers.

The New Frontier of Customer Engagement: Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is becoming the next frontier in customer engagement. Enterprise VR is emerging as the branch of VR that allows customers to better interact with products and brands and get the efficient and personalized experience that they are desperately looking for. But if we take a closer look at the VR landscape, there is more: Social VR for the Enterprise.

Social VR for the Enterprise as the New Engagement Platform

Social VR for the Enterprise is a unique and novel concept that combines the benefits of Enterprise VR with the power of the real-life interaction, typical of gaming and Social VR. Social VR is the ability for people to interact with each other in a virtual reality space, while Enterprise VR empowers customers to interact with products and content in virtual reality and preview in 3D, touch, flip, and customize the products they are interested in.

It is easy to see how these two powerful elements – combined to form the notion of Social VR for the Enterprise – will be the key to incredible engagement in the near future.

Interacting and talking with other like-minded people and company representatives in a branded VR environment is a completely new experience. All the other previous and current methods of communication, from telephone to conference calls, emails, and live chat widgets are heavily technology-mediated. Being technology-mediated means that the presence of technology is always perceived: you know that technology is there all the time. This creates an involuntary barrier between you and the other speaker that cannot be overcome with any traditional communication method.

Social VR Can Replicate Physical Presence

Even when you are talking to someone via webcam, which is the closest surrogate of presence available thus far, you are always aware of the technology layer that is present between the two of you, that constantly reminds you that you are in separate and distant locations talking through a flat screen. This creates a distancing effect as technology never goes away, it never becomes invisible. You’ll never really feel you are there with someone, sharing the same space and experience.

Social VR, instead, replicates physical presence. And presence means that the technology finally disappears. As you engage with someone in a shared VR environment, with avatars that replicate the body presence and move around in the same space as you, allowing you to see and share what the others are doing in the same space, with positional audio that replicates the same patterns of physical communication, your brain starts forgetting about the technology behind all that. Being immersed, your brain feels like you really are sharing the experience with others. And technology is no longer there because your brain does not perceive it any longer. In Social VR environments, there is no more distance between people.

“The best technology is invisible” is a fundamental concept for all user experience designers, usability, and UX/UI experts. Finally, Social VR is here to allow people to interact in a new way that is perceived as non-technology mediated. This makes VR a better-suited technology for interaction. Because interaction is so important for businesses, the notion of Social VR for the Enterprise takes interaction a step further as it allows combining interaction with a personalized brand and interactive product experiences. Customers can thus relate to the brand, enjoy it, talk to company representatives, and to the entire community in a shared and trusted environment. This drives higher engagement – which is the ultimate goal of businesses across the globe – and is a major factor for competitive advantage, growth and success.

Learn How #VirtualReality can Create #Customer Loyalty to Your #Brand by @martina_ori #RocksDigital
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Virtual reality (VR) is here and growing. Businesses that understand this technology and put it to work will move themselves real steps ahead of the competition!

Virtual Reality Marketing Gives Businesses A New Way to Interact with Consumers

Virtual reality allows people to interact with virtual environments in a fully immersive way. Social VR, where people interact with others as if they are sharing the same physical space, is opening the door to virtual reality marketing. Because of the ability to interact with objects and people in a natural way, social VR is a great new opportunity to conduct effective research and marketing.

Social VR replicates real-life dynamics: it creates the sense of physical presence through avatars, and the avatar becomes the person in their interaction with others and objects. This gives businesses the opportunity to know more about their audience in greater depth than ever before, and in a cost-effective way.

Virtual Reality Marketing Strengthens Market Research

Traditionally, market research is conducted by observing how consumers behave and by asking people about their behaviors through surveys or questionnaires, whereas virtual reality allows businesses to know the reason behind every customer behavior without asking.

How is that possible? Let me give you an example. Assume you are selling shoes on your website. You can pull analytics that give information about people’s behavior on your site by tracking clicks.

Now, let’s assume you have a VR-store, a store accessible in Virtual Reality. People can enter your VR store and look around as avatars; they can walk up and examine certain shoes before physically picking the ones they like. Through VR, you are able to follow the decision-making process that led to the action.

The 3D Store Environment

But there is more. Because avatar-based social VR takes place in a three-dimensional space, you can also spatially re-create a store environment and place objects in many different ways to draw attention to certain products. The way people pay attention to items in VR reflects the way people pay attention to things in real life. That’s a huge advantage as you set up your VR environment.

In VR, there is no longer a need to ask people about their behavior through boring surveys and questionnaires. This also removes the biases generated when people think about why they acted in a certain way because as we all know, the verbal response to the question “Do you like this product?” may not always be the true answer. Market research in VR allows marketers to assess spontaneous behavior and directly infer the reasons for behavior through unbiased results. Social VR can help capture people’s responses at the subconscious level.

What Avatars Will Do For Your Business

How can this be achieved? This is possible because it is social VR and therefore, avatar-based. It is possible thanks to eye and avatar tracking capabilities that measure viewing time, interactions with products, brands, other people; by tracking navigation (where do people go first?), dwell time (how long do they spend on each item?), and by depth of interaction, as well as conversation with company representatives.

The real revolution actually lies within this last element. Real-life interaction with company representatives allows brands to build stronger relationships with customers. Interaction means engagement. For the first time, you can make your brick-and-mortar corner store accessible from across the globe in VR and meet and greet every person that comes in.

Your Virtual Reality Marketing Wake-Up Call

Starting with social VR now is a tremendous opportunity that can get your company an amazing competitive advantage over those that conservatively opt for a wait-and-see attitude. The power of sharing a physical space with others with the ability to engage with them, talk to them the natural way, go around together in a physical virtual reality space and do business in VR can lead to more direct interaction, unbiased data, closer relationships, and can help businesses advance faster in their marketing and sales goals.

How #VirtualReality #Marketing Can Advance #Business by @martina_ori #Rocks Digital
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