Building Your Foundational Metaverse Customer Strategy
Determining how to engage your customers in the metaverse? Start with your core CX artifacts.
By Andy Wegleitner, Jonathan Okon, Erik O’Brien, Sahil Bareja, and Eli M. Galayda
The complexities inherent with strategically launching your brand into the metaverse are significant. Much of the enabling tech is still in its infancy, organizational support may be tepid due to a lack of understanding, and internal teams that lead traditional brand rollouts may be unsure of the first steps to take in building their case for the metaverse.
There’s no playbook for entering a space in this emerging medium. Compounding this is the speed at which edge teams are forced to work, which can leave teams exploring the metaverse feeling like they’re building the rocket ship as it’s taking off from the launch pad. The one tried and true approach to developing any strategy is focusing on the customer.
Strategizing from your customer’s perspective
Today, the idea of putting customers first has become a foundational part of almost every company’s playbook, regardless of industry. Companies know the stakes are high. If they get CX wrong, they’re at risk of losing customers. Meanwhile — for those who get it right — the upside potential is huge. Customer experience requires implementing a disciplined approach to create customer-centric strategies and solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.
At Slalom, we preach an “outside-in” approach to developing customer strategy (including metaverse strategy), which is likely a subcomponent of your business, marketing, and brand strategy. Start defining your metaverse strategy from the “outside” by understanding your target customers’ experiences from their perspectives across interactions and touchpoints. Then align your people, data and insights, technology, processes, execution, and measurement to deliver what your customers value.
This essential outside-in approach enables you to determine your brand’s purpose in the metaverse and how immersive experiences can potentially layer into the larger customer experience. This approach is rooted in customer research and produces CX artifacts ranging from personas and journey maps to CX vision and product strategy.
As you start to define your foundational metaverse strategy, make sure it aligns with your overarching enterprise strategies — such as corporate, marketing, and CX. It also should work in coordination with other experience channel strategies to produce a cohesive and connected customer experience. As the metaverse matures and technology advances, there’s potential for your metaverse strategy to take more of a driving role in how you engage with your customers.
That said, the metaverse is still in the early stages of development, and there are major questions as to how it will unfold over the next decade. What we know about the metaverse today could be largely irrelevant five to ten years from now. Therefore, it’s not the time to reinvent your entire business, marketing, or customer strategy to drive towards the metaverse. As with any good strategy, it should evolve and be refined as you continue to execute and learn, and as the market continues to mature. The metaverse is simply another ripple within these larger enterprise strategies that needs to be accounted for.
While a “fully-baked” metaverse strategy is not necessary today, now is the time to start forming answers to basic directional questions that inform your strategy. If you’re not accounting for the metaverse in some aspect of your marketing, customer experience, or digital strategy, you’re missing the boat (even if that strategy is simply not to pursue the metaverse at this time). Eventually, the advancement of the metaverse will require organizations to rethink their enterprise strategies and make significant shifts in business models. For now, we recommend dialing into existing — and, hopefully, ongoing — customer research to establish opportunities for engaging your customers in the metaverse.
If you already have an in-depth understanding of your customers with defined personas, journey maps, and a competitive marketplace analysis, you can leverage those insights to help identify your metaverse purpose, opportunities, and use cases. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to metaverse customer research, but you do need to assess your customers through the lens of metaverse experiences to identify opportunities.
Realizing your vision
Given the uncertain evolution of the metaverse, we don’t recommend completely throwing out or redesigning your current vision. This is simply an opportunity to examine how metaverse experiences can accelerate the realization of your existing vision, or potentially build on that vision.
Even in today’s relatively nascent metaverse stages, emerging technology offers new immersive digital capabilities. These capabilities enable new ways of engaging with customers and delivering value, propelling your company further along in your trajectory to delivering excellent customer experiences. The metaverse and its associated technology should be viewed as possible additional tools to be added to a company’s repertoire.
For example, Mercedes Benz’s vision is: “We will continuously strive to inspire consumer confidence by supplying a transparent atmosphere and offering a premium automobile product with individualized customer care.” It recently enhanced vehicle service operations with mixed-reality technology to improve service efficiency and experience, ultimately pushing the company closer to realizing its vision.
As the metaverse continues to materialize with ongoing technological advancements, there will be new ways of thinking about customer experience that reach beyond anything we can envision today. There will continue to be new use cases, capabilities, and customer behaviors that come to fruition that may impact the direction of the organization.
If your enterprise vision is somewhat comprehensive and flexible, there shouldn’t be a need to make any quick pivots based on the evolution of the metaverse. However — as with any element of innovation — leaders should be creatively speculative regarding how their organization’s vision can be reimagined.
If you already have a CX vision or mission in place today, ask yourself:
- How would engaging our customer in the metaverse help us more quickly achieve our vision?
- Based on what we know today, how would we adjust our vision to capture the potential of the metaverse? And how does our vision maintain flexibility to account for innovation?
- How do we expand our vision to deliver virtual and immersive experiences that embody our core business strategy and mission?
- What’s our plan to revisit our vision periodically within the context of metaverse advancements?
Personas
It’s estimated that less than half of today’s online consumers are metaverse users. A major question that every leader should be asking is: “Will my customers even engage in the metaverse?”
Personas provide a foundational understanding of how your target segments use technology today. When you think about customers in the metaverse, you have to consider how users are interacting with new user interfaces (UIs), immersive 3D content, and onramps/offramps (such as wallets, NFT marketplaces, and cryptocurrency).
By combining insights gleaned from personas with ethnographic research and macro trends we see in the metaverse technology adoption, you can start to theorize how your customers will adopt new immerse technology. Forrester identified four segments that are likely to be early users of the metaverse based on their current gaming behaviors:
Forrester also suggests that tapping into your customers’ digital behaviors, social media behaviors, and life attitudes can be indicative of their propensity to engage in the metaverse:
Aligning what you know about your existing customer segments with the defining features of users who are likely to engage in the metaverse today, you can create a clearer picture of who you should be targeting in the metaverse. When analyzing your personas through a metaverse lens, ask yourself:
- How do our target segments match up against segments that are likely to engage in the metaverse? And how do we think this will change over time as our customers evolve?
- What is our customers’ proficiency with or propensity to use emerging technology? And what technology are they willing to purchase in order to explore new experiences with our brand?
- Of the segments that are currently in the metaverse, is there an opportunity to reach a new customer base?
The metaverse is not one-size-fits-all, and as with any emerging technology and digital innovation, certain industries, customer bases, and companies are going to be better positioned than others as early adopters. If you conclude that your customers aren’t likely to engage in the metaverse, then ask yourself:
- How do I plan to stay on top of changing customer behaviors so that we are ready when my customers engage in the metaverse?
- Are there customer acquisition opportunities to engage new segments in the metaverse?
Journey maps
Having an up-to-date view of a customer’s end-to-end journey gives us a clear understanding of our engagement opportunities along with pain points in the customer’s experience at each touchpoint. Metaverse technology provides us with new ways of solving existing customer pain points, along with new journey touchpoints altogether.
If we identify opportunities to better address existing pain points through the metaverse, it’s critical that there are clear gains — both from a customer and business perspective — in doing so. We must demonstrate the value-add if customers are going to change their behavior, and the value must clearly solve existing pain points for the business to be willing to invest. In this way, we can identify opportunities for elevating our current customer journey.
As the metaverse matures, it will provide new opportunities to extend the customer journey into new experiences and touchpoints. Many of these new engagement opportunities have yet to be visualized, but we can start to think through what we know about the metaverse today and apply those experiences to our current customer journey.
For example, home furniture companies have started to leverage augmented reality and virtual reality so customers can see 3D renderings of products in their home. This solves an existing pain point that customers face and also provides an opportunity to extend the existing customer journey into virtual interior design consultations.
It’s possible the metaverse will eventually force entirely new customer journeys to be built as customer behavior evolves. But for now, we recommend thinking about those additive metaverse-enabled touchpoints and experiences that either better solve existing pain points or extend the journey to elevate your customer experience.
When reviewing your customer journeys from the perspective of metaverse enhancements, ask yourself:
- Where are we not sufficiently addressing pain points in the customer journey? And is there business value in solving these pain points through immersive tech?
- How would the journey either shift or extend if we introduce metaverse technology and/or experiences? And what are possible pain points we could be creating in changing the existing experience?
Conclusion
While there are many unknowns about how the metaverse will unfold, starting from a foundation of customer insights will enable you to make strategic decisions about how best to experiment with customer experience in the metaverse. By looking at your existing customer research through the lens of metaverse opportunities, you can start to explore how to engage you customers in new ways. Even if brands are relying on educated hypotheses, there’s a major opportunity to spark a new era of customer and community-driven experiences.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
