Organizations can offer unique services and enhance customer experience by utilizing augmented reality.
Through a simple Google search for ‘customer experience,’ one can find hundreds of blogs that offer insights about analyzing and improving customer experience. By seeing the countless search results, it is evident that customer experience has become the new brand. Hence, business leaders across the globe are looking for newer ways to enhance the customer experience. To enhance customer experience, businesses have started leveraging immersive technologies such as augmented reality. Augmented reality can offer innovative applications that support customers’ decision-making during purchases as well as enhance the overall customer experience.
Utilizing AR to enhance customer experience
Businesses can implement AR to enhance the customer experience in the following manner:
Improve decision-making
Augmented reality technology can allow customers in making informed decisions while buying certain products. For instance, retailers can release apps that can enable customers to transform their home to a virtual showroom, where they can try out various types of furniture. Using such virtual environments, customers can project furniture in 3D and place it in any room to understand which furniture would be suitable for their homes. With this technology, businesses can eliminate the uncertainty involved in buying products online. Similarly, businesses that sell clothes, accessories, glasses, and makeup can utilize augmented reality to help customers in making informed decisions while purchasing products. By utilizing AR-based product trials, businesses can effectively reduce return rates.
Find trending products
Customers often prefer to buy trending products and businesses can help customers find such products. Businesses can display trending products using virtual product catalogs or showrooms. For this purpose, organizations can display the number of likes for different products that are collected from different social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. Businesses can also integrate this service in-store, where customers can open an app and point their smartphone camera to a specific product to view the total number of likes, the number of friends who have liked it, and like the product themselves. With the help of AR, businesses can enhance customer experience by helping them buy trending products.
Teach new skills
Customer education is one of the most effective ways to enhance customer experience and customer loyalty. Businesses can launch products that can offer a unique experience to their customers and educate them about different products and services or teach them various skills. For example, stationery brands can create an AR-enabled coloring book app that can be a great alternative to mobile games. Such apps can teach kids and adults about different artistic concepts and help them develop essential skills. Also, businesses can educate their customers about different features and core functionalities of a versatile product. For instance, a software firm can create an AR-enabled app to educate their customers about various features of specific software. In this manner, organizations can practice customer education.
Immersive experiences
Organizations can develop in-store augmented reality experiences for customers using AR-enabled apps. Customers can use such apps to unlock interactive visuals by pointing their smartphone camera at specific objects. For instance, a coffee shop can install interactive artworks that can display information about the roasting and brewing process, products, and facts about coffee after being scanned by a smartphone. Alternatively, retailers can utilize in-store AR technology to display ads about different products. Such immersive experiences will help organizations to offer a unique and fun in-store experience.
Self-service support
Organizations can enable customers to self-service purchased products with the help of augmented reality technology. With the help of a smartphone, customers can view a product’s knowledge base, including manuals, training instructions, and FAQs using an AR-based overlay. Such AR-based self-service solutions can guide customers in setting up or using different functionalities of a product. With AR-enabled self-service, customers would no longer need to call customer support.
