In today’s Experience Economy, businesses can no longer determine customer segmentation or dictate the experiences they deliver. The script has flipped. Today’s customers expect to self-segment, self-serve and self-compose their experiences. With the advent of m-commerce and social media reviews, today’s consumers understand that their time and attention have significant value to businesses and have gained new agency to self-segment.
Now, AI technology has completely blown up the framework of the business-to-consumer supply chain and has amplified consumer control to the point that consumers are now part of the production as they create and enjoy their own experiences.
Consumers expect every business product and service to adapt to meet their unique needs in terms of context, intent, and communications devices and modalities — business experiences can no longer be challenging, boring, and unappealing. They must be effortless, exciting, and rewarding to the point that customers see sufficient value in trading their personal information to drive an even better business experience on the back of the data that they agree to share.
Companies today must recognise and accept that they are all now in the experiences business. This means that they must be always fully connected throughout the entire customer journey, across every touchpoint, modality, and device, irrespective of channel, interaction, resource, or time, so that customers can interact and transact when they want, how they want, at the time they want.
Metaverse touchpoint
Today’s businesses are competing for attention, sales, and loyalty and in future, they will need to also do this in the metaverse. This is because, although the metaverse might evolve to be a lot of things - some of which may not yet be clear - it will almost definitely become a new touchpoint for customers wanting to interact or transact with providers.
Just imagine the convenience of being able to group all your favourite and important providers into one ‘town square’ so you can quickly and easily move from one to another without having to go in and out of separate apps or devices. In this metaverse tailored just for you, it will be fast and easy to sort your banking, medical appointment, try on a new dress and order a present for your cousin. You can even meet a friend for a chat before watching a movie together – all whilst physically sitting on your sofa.
Avaya makes you metaverse-ready
As a forward-looking contact centre solutions provider, Avaya is already building the links between the metaverse and the real world to prepare the way for end-customers who may wish to communicate with their providers within the virtual world.
Avaya’s approach is that the metaverse is simply another channel – an additional communications channel between contact centre agents and customers that can be integrated as a future touchpoint in the customer journey. Integration is straightforward because Avaya Experience Platform™ is fully cloud-native and designed to be open, which allows customers to innovate without disruption. They can experiment with the metaverse and add contact centre capabilities without having to bring in a new platform or go through a major upgrade.
The metaverse provides innovative new opportunities and business models, allowing companies to extend digital business to be persistent, decentralized, collaborative and interoperable. Avaya is well positioned to help its contact centre solution customers connect with their own customers in the metaverse if that’s what their end-customers would like, with agents on standby to communicate and contact via normal channels if needed. For now, Avaya customers don’t need to build a metaverse contact solution – maybe one day – because Avaya Experience Platform is capable of bridging them into the metaverse contact centres of the future right now.
Integrating business value into the daily lives of employees and customers requires having the ability to address very granular use cases. This requires a platform approach, and many businesses are using the Avaya Experience Platform to create and deliver the experiences that today’s employees and customers expect.