Will VR create better customer experiences?

In a broader sense, virtual reality is a way of creating an illusion that makes a person believe that he is present somewhere—a sort of virtual world, which is drastically different from the place he is at in reality. Who did not like Inception? I myself saw it like 4 times just to get the gist of the abrupt ending.

Think Virtual Reality of a dream you can be in whenever you want; you can interact with it and can end it whenever you want without ever feeling dizzy or lost. All you need is a standalone VR Headset or a VR head-mounted display with a compatible device.

The Principle

VR or Virtual Reality takes advantage of how human brain processes images to create an illusion. It processes two-dimensional images from each eye into a single object of three dimensions.

VR or Virtual Reality takes advantage

The design of the popular Google Cardboard, a low budget VR head mounted displays for mobile phones, is based on this principle.

Google Cardboard is one of the cheapest VR devices on the market. It costs $15 each.

First VR Headsets

Although the principle has been around for quite a time, Jaron Lanier coined the term Virtual Reality in the year 1987 and commercialised the technology by launching the first Virtual Reality goggles EyePhone HRX $49,000. This marked the beginning of marketers’ interest in VR technology.

The industry and the technology have evolved a lot since then both in terms of sophistication, and affordability. For example, Google Cardboard costs $15 only ($25 for a pair) and you can watch movies, live sports, play games, and even visit Milky Way with it.

Product marketers, service providers, game developers, and even porn industry are testing waters on VR to drive customer satisfaction with their offerings.

Popular YouTube channel, BuzzFeedBlue checks people’s reaction while they watch porn on a VR Headset

Let us find out how marketers are using VR to improve their ratings.

If, at the product launch, you want people to interact with the upcoming products, rather than making them watch their demos on a large screen, consider distributing VR headsets at the start of the event and let them interact with the products as they launch, before they could buy them.

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If you are live streaming the launch, start selling the VR Device on the website at least a month prior to the launch to create necessary anticipation around the event. Imagine, how pleased your audience would be if they could drive a virtual replica of your upcoming smart car at the event itself.

VR Devices are also making inroads into education sector with smart education mobility solutions. They make the classroom room experience a lot more interactive.

With too many products hitting the market, product launches are just too often to care about any. For product marketers, this is a word of apprehension. Who wants a product launch in which you put many man-hours and money turning out to be a failure.

Standout of the crowd, launch your products in VR. Anybody who attends it in-person or over a web channel ask them to enter the event wearing a VR headset. The concept sounds way cooler than traditional launches.

Furthermore, VR launches tend to generate a lot more buzz about an upcoming event, sell more tickets, result in larger interaction on social media, and broader media attention.

OnePlus inviting people for OnePlus 3 launch event in VR

OnePlus, a smartphone brand, is known to bring flagship smartphone experience in easy reach of everyone. Their last smartphone, OnePlus 3 was an immense success and is considered epitome of perfection by many. Millions of people watched the event wearing a VR headset provided by OnePlus.

Training personnel is a lengthy and costly affair when it comes to product training to a batch of inexpert newbies. Though videos and images help a lot more than dumb training manuals, trainees still struggle to understand the product especially if it is highly technical in nature and there are too many aspects to it to put in single video or image. Giving each of them a product hands-on is always the best idea, not when you are training too many people at a time or the product is too fragile to let a bunch of unqualified novices play with it.

In such cases, give the trainees product training using VR. It won’t add to your cost much. VR headsets are cheaper than they were ever. You can buy those headsets for you entire training batch for less than $1000.

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Trainers will complete the training exercise in lesser time and sale’s trainees will have a better product knowledge than the last batch had. Better product knowledge means lesser recursions, better sales, and customer satisfaction.

Remember, how we, as kids, could never get enough of First Person Shooter (FPS) video games. Be it Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Doom, the granddaddy of counter strike, Half-Life, or the mighty Unreal Tournament, we have invested countless hours of our early teenage life playing those games.

Although todays FPS games look closer to reality, the game world, characters, their interaction, animation all look as if a scene from a Hollywood movie, the concept remained, more or less the same. You are the protagonist and you’re preventing an evil force, trying to destroy the world. You kill monsters and other bad guys and save good guys. It is not about story; it’s about experience.

I used to play Flight Simulator for hours, just because it made me feel like an actual pilot. I sat outside a gaming store in my neighborhood for 3 hours straight to be the first one to grab Doom 3 when the game was launched; it exceeded my expectations.

Better graphics, higher resolution indeed helped bringing the whole FPS experience closer to reality. However, game developers were zealous to bring it even closer. However, the constraints remain. One of the prevalent constraints was this that the computer screen is at a distance from eyes, leading to deterioration of graphics quality from its rendered form before it could reach the eyes of the gamer.

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Well if you’re a game, product, or simulation developer who wants to have first-hand experience or want to deliver the experience of owning the product to potential online customers, VR has the way to go. The game world is restricted by resolution size of the screen. VR overcomes this restriction with 360 degree view. If you’re playing a FPS game and you believe somebody is shooting you from behind, simply turn around and kill him—no need of a mouse or keyboard.

If you’re safety experts for an automobile manufacturer or airline, investigating a mysterious car crash at the intersection, you no more have to imagine the sets of events leading to the crash. All you need do is put yourself in the driver’s seat, with the help of VR Technology, and see for yourself who is at fault—the driver himself, a pothole, a crossing cattle, someone else on the road or the car manufacturer. If the fault lies at the car manufacturer’s end, you work with its concerned team to sort the issue out, make your car safer, and raise credibility of the brand and customer satisfaction index.

VR wasn’t there at the time of Sherlock Holmes. He had Dr. Watson though. You don’t. You have VR, which is one and the same thing. Introduce this amazing technology to boost your marketing efforts and the morale of your marketing team. Who knows it might turn out to be the paramount driving force behind your products’ rising sale’s volume and customer satisfaction index!