Digital Reality is Customer Success

Physical store is dead, long life to online shop!

This could be the title of a newspaper in 1995: Amazon.com just launched its online shopping site, Ebay was introduced the same year and Pizza Hut opened an online pizza shop the year before. In the first years of the new century, many retail companies opened their online shops and many others were founded to catch the big opportunities of this new business model which allows high profits.

In the last two decades online shops have become an essential standard for almost every business and people around the world expect to buy clothes, electronics, furniture, food and services with their smartphones comfortably lying on their sofa bought on Ikea store online.

Even if new digital native masses born with internet in their veins, a smartphone in their pockets and every kind of product and service available with one click, the physical stores never closed and many people still used to go shopping leaving their sofas. In fact, for many product categories, like clothes, furnitures, vehicles, and many others, people still want to touch and try with their hands before buying. The human relationships in sales is another key element that supported the face-to-face selling and keep the majority of physical stores in our cities (except for the Blockbuster disappearance).

Today the Covid-19 has changed the world! The lockdown forced every company to close their physical stores, while Amazon.com hired 100,000 employee to support the increased demand of the online shop, and even when the lockdown stopped, people are still scared to go shopping and want (must) avoid overcrowding typical of big malls. However, even if people cannot move, it does not mean they did not buy anymore. The lockdown, one of the most uncertain and worrying period of the 21th century for humanity, demonstrated that times are mature to carry out the online shop revolution and the key turnaround is digital transformation!

Only few months ago, it would have been impossible to assist a Digital Fashion Week or to attend an Auto Show using virtual headsets without moving from home. Today, even if theoretically possible with some restrictions, majors decided to move their physical events and trade shows to digital. This is possible by leveraging technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) with collaboration tools for videoconference: in this way presenters (or models) can be connected in real-time with audience around the globe and the experience for attendees is becoming more and more "real", like they are sit just in front of the stage. The virtual event revolution is entering forcefully also in sports: NFL, NBA and Wimbledon are only the first leagues that started to offer VR live broadcasting in the last years and many others followed while technologies to record, transmit and experience these matches evolved and matured to ensure high-end digital capabilities and new ways to interact with players and supporters.

The digital revolution for Retail is even more disruptive:

• Microsoft closes all its 32 physical stores and focuses on the online
• Gamestop closes 320 physical stores, especially those too close to each other
• AT&T focuses online and closes 250 physical stores
• Victoria's Secrets closes 250 of its physical stores, 1/4 of the total
• Gap rethinks the size of the stores and closes 89
• Macy's decides to cut the non profitable physical stores, 125
• Bose closes all its physical stores in different countries
• Hallmark focuses online and closes 18 of its physical stores

Many of these brands closures do not refer to the current economic situation, but rather they say that they want to (re)focus online and meet the growing expectations of customers, which have certainly increased in recent months. These companies, and many others not listed here, understood how digital engagement can be much more efficient, costless and with high impact on brand awareness while ensuring a customer centric tailored experience. This is more visible in fashion industry where AR is showing its powerful capabilities and brands have stepped in to test and acclimate their customers: virtual try-on, 3D product inspection, smart mirrors are some of the new popular AR applications tailor-made for fashion.

The are plenty of examples of the most elite fashion brands implementing augmented reality in real life. One of the first 3D Instagram filters was a Dior lens that put beautifying stylised sequins all over your face. Louis Vuitton used Snap’s image recognition to augment postcards to showcase a new bag. In the app universe, Wannaby created the Wanna Kicks app that tracks your foot and throws shoes on your feet – a prelude to the full clothes shopping future discussed above. Once web-based AR became available, Chanel created their iconic holiday snow globe in lifelike augmented reality. Users could view the experience on Snapchat and shake to activate the snowing. If they didn’t have Snap, the user got pushed to the web experience on a microsite.

Most recently, IWC Schaffhausen launched the new Portugieser 2020 models with full AR experience: the potential buyer get a far better sense for the volumetric and overall aesthetic qualities of an IWC timepiece so he can visually ‘try before you buy’.

“Apart from the very practical aspects of understanding the physical attributes of our watches, this combination of AR/VR & Video, that we like to call ‘Augmented Horlogerie’, is a fascinating way to help communicate the core essence of the emotional world that our products live within,” says Dominic Weir, IWC’s Chief Digital Officer. “This is one of the most fundamental opportunities offered by our Augmented Horlogerie experience, to transport our customers into the highly emotional and evocative universe of the collection and all that it represents.”

We see more and more brands and industries embrace the great potential and capabilities offered by Digital Reality (Virtual and Augmented) as technologies and devices become more powerful with the aim to thin the boundaries between physical and digital experience and give the consumers the feedback of a real event, shopping or any other activity. These technologies is the really glue between customer engagement, experience and retention that unlocks direct relationships with end users with a new set of "try and buy" tailor-made services.