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Eva Lihotzky

How the metaverse is speeding up the customer experience

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How can I use the metaverse for my brand? How will this new digital universe transform the customer experience? And what exactly does the term ‘metaverse’ even mean? Strategy expert Eva Lihotzky provides an overview and four recommendations for action for brands.

It was Neal Stephenson who coined the term ‘metaverse’ in his breakthrough sci-fi novel ‘Snow Crash’ back in 1992. His visionary story is about a pizza delivery guy who, as a hacker, roams an immersive, virtual world by night. Thirty years later, the idea of a three-dimensional, immersive online environment where people interact with each other in real time and can create, buy and sell things is no longer just the stuff of sci-fi novels. The potential of social and commercial interactions in a virtualised setting is huge, and investments in technologies and newly created virtual spaces have increased significantly over the past few years. After all, technologists, companies and investors already believe that the metaverse will become a stage of the future and therefore a huge source of revenue. A study by financial service provider Citigroup confirms this: the possible business potential of virtual worlds is expected to reach up to 13 billion US dollars by the year 2030.

The metaverse – more than just a singular space

But what is the metaverse exactly? As well as 173,000,000 hits, my first Google search brings up various definitions. However, most of them have one thing in common: they understand the term ‘metaverse’ to mean more than just a single technology or end state. Rather, they refer to the convergence of several separate technologies, which in the coming years will all gradually reach market maturity – and therefore pave the way for the Web3 era. As well as the increasing use of blockchain and interactive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), the focus is on Internet of Things (IoT) applications (such as the use of sensors and network communication solutions), computing technology (like 5G and 6G networks) and cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and gaming technologies.

Virtual spaces are resulting in new meeting places

The smart combination of these technologies can create the experience of an immersive, three-dimensional environment where consumers can interact with one another, with a particular company and with its individual surroundings as if they were together in the same room. In the future, this space can have several attributes. First of all, we can assume that both the physical and the digital-virtual worlds will be integrated into the user experience and merge into one. Secondly, reactions and social interactions are enabled there, meaning that there is an ongoing exchange between the consumers, companies, influencers and their avatars. Thirdly, creativity, product definition and product optimisation will be boundless in the space and, ideally, will also be interoperable between individual spaces, resulting in entirely new contact opportunities, communication channels and business models. Fourthly, virtual spaces are available at all times and can be defined and shaped by the users themselves.

Next-level customer experiences

As a result, real-time communication and personalisation will become an even more important differentiating feature for companies that enter into a dialogue with their consumers in the metaverse. This is why the concept of the customer experience needs to be rethought, extended and the communication and interaction speed of brands needs to be raised to the next level. Because as well as the existing touchpoints that companies continue to use when communicating with their customers, there are now touchpoints in the metaverse or virtual spaces to consider as well. This will lead to many new interaction points that companies should take on board in their brand and communication strategy.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Metaverse Experiences

Brands are therefore advised to follow these four recommended courses of action:

  1. Identify metaverse potential and implement a long-term strategy
    Companies should determine the metaverse potential that is relevant for their business and incorporate a metaverse strategy into their existing communication and marketing strategies. These should be flexible enough to allow them to react quickly to ongoing technological advances and, in turn, to respond to changing customer requirements and behaviours.
  2. Incorporate relevant technologies flexibly and successively
    It is the aforementioned technologies that make virtual spaces possible in the first place. However, not all technologies are needed for every use case at the same time. Instead, companies will use different technology combinations at different touchpoints. This makes it all the more important to ensure we have the relevant technologies ready for use and can adapt them to customer behaviour along the customer journey. In the future, a diversified technology architecture that can be flexibly applied to the corresponding requirement will be crucial to a company’s success in the metaverse.
  3. Intensify consumer behaviour and emotions in virtual spaces
    A compelling customer experience will also remain a differentiating factor in the metaverse. This being the case, companies should concentrate on also creating consistent and engrossing experiences in virtual spaces that are able to maximise the benefits of immersivity and interactivity. By skilfully combining the relevant technologies – such as AR, sensors and online and offline combinations – brands can approach their consumers through new angles. They can also enable them to identify with products more through ‘tangible’ storytelling, thereby exerting a positive influence on purchasing behaviour and customer loyalty.
  4. Shift the focus onto trust, authenticity and responsibility
    Trust and security will come even more to the fore when defining the customer experience in these new virtual spaces. This is because it will only then be possible to gain acceptance of the newly created experiences that consumers will have with companies in their respective immersive interactions. The more the lines are blurred between the physical and virtual worlds of the consumers, the more important existing considerations – and concerns – relating to data protection, security, IP protection or accessibility will be. So it is up to companies themselves to take a responsible approach and make their products and services inclusive.

Brave new worlds

Technological advances and the resulting immersive spaces are changing the basis of physical and virtual interactions and the way they function. However, we are still a long way off a final definition of how the metaverse will develop further or which gradual developments and functionalities we can expect to see. Even though some of the technologies and building blocks are already in place, the full implementation of immersive, reactive and continuously expanding virtual worlds will take another few years. This is because many of the required technologies will still need time and remain dependent on the progress of other technologies before their capabilities and potential can be used on a wider scale. And even then, they will gradually develop further and set new benchmarks.

But trying to explain what life in the metaverse will be like in the future and how it will affect companies would be rather like asking someone back in 1990 to describe what would become of the internet one day. Perhaps we should just ask Neal Stephenson? After all, the way he envisaged the direction things would take 30 years later was pretty spot on.

This article first appeared in TWELVE, Serviceplan Group’s magazine for brands, media and communication. In the ninth issue, you will find further inspiring articles, essays and interviews by and with prominent guest authors and renowned experts centred around the magazine’s theme „Speed! The Winning Factor in the Digital Age“. The e-paper is available here: www.serviceplan.com/en/lp/twelve/twelve-2023.

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Plan.Net Group

Interview with Plan.Net and MINI

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In order to support the journeys their customers take in a comprehensive and integral manner, automotive manufacturers are faced with the question of how to effectively set up their end-to-end customer experience management. MINI is regarded as a pioneer in adopting an excellent approach to customer centricity, and in doing so continuously develops the brand and corporate processes along the customer journey. How this is achieved is described by Ulrike von Mirbach, Head of MINI Europe, and Wolf Ingomar Faecks, Executive Board Member Serviceplan Group SE, Plan.Net Group and The Marcom Engine, in an interview with Lünendonk. The Marcom Engine has been responsible for pan-European and data-driven product and marketing communications for the BMW and MINI brands since 2020.

LÜNENDONK: Ms. von Mirbach, you have been with MINI for 17 years and have been Head of MINI Europe since July this year. Where is the brand today?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: Over the course of time, MINI has positioned itself as a strong brand in the market. Thinking in new ways, seeing challenges as opportunities, taking people’s wishes and needs into account in an open and unconventional way – all this is firmly anchored in the tradition of the brand that is MINI. We know what is required of us and understand how to encounter our customers and fans with the right emotions at the right instances. This is reflected in our very active community of millions of fans – not only on the street, but also online with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

It is clear to us that we have to focus on our three core target groups – customers & fans, multipliers and retail partners – in order to be successful. That’s why, together with The Marcom Engine, we are firmly embedding experience management into our marketing and sales organization as a central element.

LÜNENDONK: That sounds like a huge makeover. So let’s take a look behind the scenes at what’s been going on. Can you please outline how you are going about this?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: With pleasure. First, we put the customer journey at the center of our transformation. This means that everyone in our organization – regardless of discipline – asks ourselves what added value we can offer our customers at each touchpoint along the individual customer journey. It is important to us to put people at the center of every step we take in our brand communication, taking into account their respective needs and emotions. This is because we believe that customer centricity is not just a buzzword but ‘the’ differentiator of the moment in order to keep your finger on the pulse of the times – or, more specifically, on the pulse of your fans and prospects.

LÜNENDONK: How exactly do you feel the pulse of MINI fans?

WOLF INGOMAR FAECKS: We continuously monitor the online and offline behavior of our prospects and customers and analyze the resulting data for relevant behavioral patterns. This places us very close to our fans and allows us to react quickly should their behavior or needs change.

We derive the requirements for marketing and communication measures from our integral and comprehensive customer experience management and implement them at the appropriate points so MINI customers can see and experience them at the right time.

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: Just take a look at the communication taking place in the social media community: our fans enthusiastically post photos of their MINI, talk to each other and ask about anything and everything to do with MINIs, and share stories about their latest road trips. This creates a genuine dialog with added value for the individual. Our MINI sales advisors throughout Eu-rope – as the face of our brand – play a central role here for the customers they serve and also for us as a brand. They act as “key opinion customers and sales experts”.

LÜNENDONK: An end-to-end customer experience management approach certainly places complex demands on an organization. How do you make the networking, the individual marketing and communication silos work?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: At MINI, we are constantly optimizing processes so that we can respond quickly and with agility to external influences and new requirements. To achieve this, we are developing MINI into a customer-centric organization – with integral and comprehensive horizontal experience management, an effective marketing and communications strategy, a technology architecture tailored to the strategy and, last but not least, the requisite corporate processes.

WOLF INGOMAR FAECKS: These four components are aligned at MINI to pave the way for experience management, track KPIs across individual channels, facilitate integral and comprehensive cross-channel management and optimization, and accelerate feedback from the customer data to product development.

LÜNENDONK: So you could say that MINI is undergoing a process in which you are continuously optimizing brand communication in a data-driven way?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: Absolutely. Nevertheless, having the right gut feeling is not something you should forego either.

WOLF INGOMAR FAECKS: By taking the technology landscape to the next level, we can align performance management with the customer journey to optimize touchpoints. With the help of a test-learn-adapt approach, we are continuously testing different designs, presentations and selections for their effectiveness. Atomic asset production makes it possible for us to play out assets in a more specific way, optimize the use of advertising media and implement new communication ideas.

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: So this is how we continuously review the effectiveness of our measures throughout the entire sales funnel and optimize them where necessary. We opt for various, innovative implementations in the result, and offer our fans a MINI-specific brand experience which in turn satisfies customer expectations, increases brand loyalty and leads to higher sales figures in the long term.

WOLF INGOMAR FAECKS: We can therefore say that a product marketing loop is created which we can feed with the relevant product and communication data around the clock with the help of customer data management (CDM) and a digital asset management (DAM) system. Accordingly, this product marketing loop also has a major influence on how digital media assets are deployed and played out.

In this way, we are moving away from a rigid campaign logic and towards individualized always-on communication in which motif content, tonality and messages are individually compiled and played out on the basis of data points. This process is largely automated. In this area, we are in the midst of a transformation in terms of technology and processes.

LÜNENDONK: What exactly does this mean for your corporate structures?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: We are committed to a common European approach. This is not an end in itself, but a prerequisite for taking personalized, data-driven marketing to the next level and creating cross-channel management and a consistent brand experience that works across all EU countries. This is because the brand MINI is firmly rooted as an emotional premium brand in all European countries. In what we refer to as core units, we create digital standards that are fed by the findings and needs of the European countries.

Based on country goals and budgets and standards from the central core units, recommendations are then developed in hubs for country organizations to implement and activate. Al-ways with a strong feedback loop. We act efficiently and consistently across all European markets in this way, playing out the respective campaign nuances along our brand promise. The characteristic MINI feeling and the individual, urban mobility character noticeably permeate every brand communication. At the same time, we increase efficiency alongside effectiveness.

LÜNENDONK: Surely steering the campaigns in multiple countries in this manner also has an impact on the team structure.

WOLF INGOMAR FAECKS: Teams are now working much more cross-functionally, with people contributing their different skills to solve complex requirements together. For the MINI Editions, for example, we planned, designed, produced and executed a complex multi-channel campaign as part of a fully integrated team.

LÜNENDONK: And how does that translate into concrete successes?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: For one thing, the flexibility of the pan-European campaign allowed us to ensure that the brand experience was consistent and aligned from the first point of contact through to the point of purchase. Secondly, by involving the countries and their requirements at an early stage, we were able to intensify the activation of the campaign across the countries. The result: an actionable response from more prospects using the same amount of resources with an accelerated speed of response.

LÜNENDONK: How important is the team here?

ULRIKE VON MIRBACH: Paramount. Our successes and the continuous development are due to our closely inter-linked sales and marketing teams. This is because each individual in our European teams brings different experiences and expertise to the table, and at MINI they have the chance to incorporate this and “put it on the road” – in true MINI style. I’m therefore delighted that we are all focused on the brand and our sales with a 360- degree mindset – true to our MINI motto “We are all different, but pretty good together.”

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Christian Waitzinger

Building Best Brands in the Digital Age

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Since summer 2021, Christian Waitzinger has been Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at Plan.Net Group, one of the leading digital service providers in the field of customer experience and commerce. As an experience and design expert, Waitzinger is responsible for defining a service and product portfolio for designing and implementation of data-driven customer experiences. In the following Experience Manifesto, he describes what experiences means in today’s world, what it needs to represent, and what the requirements are for a high-quality experience.

The way that customers perceive and interact with brands – whether at home or on the go, via digital channels, in stores or when contacting a service hotline – has changed. Brands today need to provide a seamless, contextualized, and data-driven customer experience in order to meet customer expectations. This is nothing new. Yet, it is also no secret that very few companies have managed to satisfy rising customer demands and create a truly differentiating brand experience.

This is precisely what we are striving for with our holistic customer experience management: Our goal is to understand customers across every interaction, touchpoint and organizational unit – from marketing to sales to customer service departments. Our task is to orchestrate and systematically improve all of these areas, because the key to lasting customer loyalty is a brand experience that is unique, personalized, appropriate anytime, anywhere, and constantly evolving.

Ideally, this process is managed centrally by collecting and evaluating customers’ experiences and data. We utilize this information to continuously improve the experience across sales, customer service and e-commerce. The result is a loop optimized incrementally by decision-makers via a process of distilling the insights gained from customer interactions and incorporating these into communications and further product development. The primary task is to build a personal relationship with the consumer: to create an ongoing dialog that calibrates the right time, place, and information with the customer’s personal interests.

Alongside a number of specialized disciplines – such as data, media, tech, user experience design and creation – what is needed above all is a cohesive experience strategy along with overarching organizational structures and processes within a company that are attuned to customer needs. To achieve this, companies must network their individual expertise and create synergies between creation, media, data, and tech – in other words, they must think about and orchestrate their customer experience holistically.

INTRODUCE OVERARCHING ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES

An experience strategy must be supported by all departments. It requires the right resources, skills and tools as well as the empowerment of individual employees and departments to be able to make decisions quickly and independently. However, this is often difficult within the traditional organizational structure of a company. A better approach is to establish customer journey teams that collaborate across departments, as some of our customers are already doing today.

Holistic customer journey mapping plays a key role in the organizational process, allowing us to centrally collate key insights in terms of customer expectations, data, and processes. With these as a basis, we are able to identify customers’ rational and emotional needs and a range of potential areas for improvement, as well as the necessary tools and systems, and the KPIs we need to measure.

Another crucial task is to ensure that the insights gained from a customer journey are implemented and result in genuine improvement. This requires an ROX (Return On Experience) model across the journey to plan and monitor the entire experience.

ESTABLISH A FUNCTIONING BRAND SYSTEM

The brand core itself serves as the basis for the holistic experience along the customer journey. Decision-makers should critically reflect on whether their brand’s fundamental visual identity is designed to allow the brand to withstand the continuous evolution of digital products and services, and thus remain successful in future. The necessary components of the brand identity are constructed in a manner that allows them to quickly and
consistently convey a uniform and harmonious image across all channels – and whether the way that the brand is perceived will still make sense in the future if parts of the brand experience are automated.

Today, many brand guidelines still consist of 90 percent print and offline instructions, thus criminally neglecting the brand’s digital component. Yet interface design will continue to evolve in the direction of “Zero UI”. People will increasingly talk to computers and expect an intelligent response. Data will serve as the basis for almost all services and products – today and in the future. A coherent, modular, and centrally orchestrated enterprise design and asset management system is therefore indispensable. Without this existence, it is virtually impossible to create a coherent and personalized customer experience. In addition, further development of the design system must be approached not as a one-off project but instead as a program that is managed centrally and across all departments.

FOCUS ON CREATIVE EXCELLENCE

As well as digitization and automation, constant performance tracking and the latest tech stack, experience requires passion, soul, creativity and innovation. The best digital ecosystem is worthless if it is not brought to life through good content, a differentiated user experience, and emotional storytelling.

In terms of the user experience in particular, there is need for improvement because digital products and services often appear interchangeable. Currently, the majority of them are designed according to best practices in order to make the experience for users as simple as possible. This is not wrong itself – the aim is to ensure that applications are easy to use. But the result is that every app works in the same way, virtually all e-commerce checkout processes are interchangeable, and most websites share a similar structure with familiar navigation.

It is time to ask whether the development of the user experience has been shaped too much by the notions of utility and usability – and whether there is an over-reliance on branding and marketing activities to provide brand differentiation. User experience design must return to its own creative strengths and no longer act in isolation. A good user experience can also provide differentiation – especially when combined with appropriate marketing and branding, attractive storytelling and emotional content. This allows us to create special, memorable moments and a coherent, stand-out brand experience for consumers.

ALIGNING DIGITAL PRODUCTS WITH MARKETING AND BRANDING

Digital products and services today need to be fused with marketing and branding in order to create a perfect brand experience. Consumers should feel a positive sense of engagement at every touchpoint by being appealed to at the right time in the right context and always finding themselves in the ecosystem of the brand world.

That’s why it’s desirable to closely dovetail product and marketing activities: The insights gained in the product world regarding consumer behavior are extremely relevant to the creation of branding and marketing activities. Marketing data in turn informs product development. After all, you want to make the right decisions in all areas.

This requires merging the marketing and product loops, aligning content and experience, and orchestrating all the creative disciplines to create a unique brand experience for customers. Because a great user experience boosts a brand, and a strong brand has the power to positively influence a digital product.

GREATER LOYALITY AND INCREASING CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE

Everyone knows that it is many times more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep them within the brand ecosystem. And a positive experience is key here, too: After all, customers who are enthusiastic about the entire product experience have less reason to look elsewhere. So the better the experience, the greater their loyalty and customer lifetime value (CLV), one of the core customer experience KPIs. And the harder and more expensive it is for competitors to regain the customers they’ve lost.

At Plan.Net, we are convinced that a successful customer experiences will in future require an integrated strategy and organizational processes, a brand system equipped for the future, and, above all, creative excellence. As the most creative digital service provider in Germany today with a high level of expertise in data-driven tech, our aim is not only to not only generate the brand promises for our customers, but above all to actually deliver on them – with consistent, seamless, and creative appeal across every platform and touchpoint.


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Brett Cameron

Rethinking the shopping experience

Brett Cameron, Managing Director at Serviceplan Group Middle East, talked with Euan McLelland from INDEX about the retail market that has been transformed a lot by the digital revolution. One aspect of this change is that shopping can now be done almost entirely online, especially in Dubai, what leads to the question if it is essential for outlets to start incorporating digital elements into their interior design.

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