Immersive technologies are driving a whole range of new shopping experiences – from getting your personal avatar to try on a potential outfit before you place an order online, to dropping a virtual refrigerator into your kitchen to see how it looks before you buy.
Adoption of immersive shopping, which uses simulation-based technologies to create interactive, personal experiences, is still relatively low. Only 30% of consumers interviewed for our recent report, Beyond the Metaverse: CX Predictions for 2023, had used an immersive shopping experience. But 78% of these were satisfied with the experience, and an impressive 48% ended up making a purchase, which illustrates the potential power of immersive shopping to drive customer engagement and sales.
While immersive shopping is being explored across multiple sectors, automotive is the industry that’s currently leading the way. In fact, 70% of the people we spoke to for the CX predictions report believe their car buying journey would be improved by an immersive shopping experience. Moreover, according to a 2022 Acxiom CX study, 31% of people said the seamlessness of the last experience influenced the brand of vehicle they last purchased.
The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for investment in immersive technologies in automotive, with both car manufacturers and dealers looking to digitally engage customers that were no longer able to come into physical showrooms.
So let’s take a look at what immersive experiences in auto look like today, as well as how they might evolve in the future.
Immersive shopping in auto today
Right now, immersive shopping in automotive is largely about getting hands-on with a virtual vehicle – exploring it and customizing it to suit your needs before you go anywhere near a showroom. And the reason automotive is leading the way in immersive shopping is because configuring a virtual car is relatively simple, at least compared with getting countless uniquely-shaped virtual people to wear the same item of clothing in a natural way.
In my opinion, the auto brands currently doing these immersive experiences really well are the luxury electric vehicle (EV) brands such as Lucid, Tesla, and Rivian. The Lucid experience, for instance, really makes you feel like you’re getting inside the car, allows you to customize all the details, and even lets you change the scenery you can see through the windows.
It’s well worth these EV brands investing in immersive experiences because they have a very specific business model where they own the entire customer journey from purchase to delivery. Many of their vehicles are built to order and sold directly to consumers, in small production numbers. And at this point their vehicles are still expensive (although some manufacturers announced price cuts in January 2023), appealing most to affluent customers who understand they’ll need to wait many months for their vehicle to be built – but expect it to be exactly what they want when it’s eventually delivered. Luxury EV brands can justify investing in incredible immersive experiences that help these customers put themselves in the driving seat of a car that will hit the production schedule as soon as it is ordered.
Of course there’s no reason more traditional automotive brands can’t offer similar immersive experiences. And many of them do. The limiting factor is that after a customer has customized their ideal car – with the perfect interior, wheel trims, and paintwork – they’ll probably end up settling for what their local dealership has to offer. In a world of instant gratification, most traditional car buyers won’t wait months for a car that doesn’t yet exist to be built. They’d rather compromise on some elements of their wish list for a car they can drive away immediately.
It might be harder for traditional automotive brands to deliver on customers’ needs through immersive shopping. But it’s still worth investing in these experiences given the granular data they can generate about what their prospects and customers want. If this powerful data can be brought together with other types of information (such as data that flows from the car itself about where it drives, parks, and fuels up) the resulting insight can be used to create seamless shopping and ownership experiences.
The technology already exists to bring all this data together. Now, collaboration and clearly defined data-sharing agreements between the brands that are capturing different data points across the ecosystem are needed to make it work.
Taking immersive experiences to the next level
The immersive experiences available to car buyers today are only the very start of the story. The future of mobility is unfolding at a rapid rate and the traditional journey of choosing, buying, servicing, and trading-in a car is being disrupted. In the foreseeable future, the focus of auto brands will shift from the actual car itself, towards the experiences they can deliver inside those vehicles.
As we’ve been talking about immersive shopping, let’s start there. In the future, immersive shopping in auto will be less about how you buy the car, and more about how you shop for other items from inside that car.
These purchases might be linked to your immediate journey, such as ordering and paying for takeaway food from within the vehicle. In fact, new in-car technology was unveiled at this year’s CES that allows drivers to order, pay for, and then pick up goods from a variety of restaurants, and convenience or grocery stores. This type of in-car shopping presents an area of untapped opportunity, and we expect it to really take off over the coming months.
Of course, you might well be shopping for items that are entirely unrelated to your journey as you travel in a vehicle. Passengers already provide a captive audience, and drivers will too once autonomous vehicles begin to emerge. As a group in need of entertainment, people in cars can be the ideal audience for retailers and other brands that can deliver the right experiences. It’s easy to imagine a passenger popping on an in-car virtual reality (VR) headset and having their avatar put on a fashion show to pass the time. A year or two further down the line and they’ll be able to meet up with friends to go shopping in the metaverse.
The above are all examples of a wider trend that transcends shopping and is more about turning the vehicle into a leisure or entertainment venue through immersive in-car experiences.
CES 2023 offered up more new developments in this area, such as the innovative car audio systems from Harman, a subsidiary of Samsung. These systems enable customized audio experiences that can travel with the user between vehicles, as well as augmented and mixed-reality acoustic techniques to enhance the sound and deliver advanced audio immersion.
There were also a variety of announcements around in-car gaming, with GM and Microsoft showcasing a concept that enables the vehicle to be used as a car racing simulator – when it’s not being driven on the road of course.
These are all things that seem quite possible today. But just consider what will happen when the all-electric, autonomous ‘flying cars’ currently being developed by the likes of Hyundai and Bosch hit the skies. We’ll all be treating in-car entertainment like in-flight movies.
Immersion is the future of CX
Immersive experiences may be in the early stages of adoption, but they present exciting possibilities for engagement throughout the entire customer journey, and across a variety of industries. Whether used remotely, in a showroom, or in store, immersive technologies aren’t just about digitalizing the existing purchase journey – they provide an opportunity for brands to rethink the entire customer experience and make it more relevant, personalized, and impactful.
To find out more about immersive shopping, or the other major trends that will be impacting CX this year, check out our report Beyond the Metaverse: CX Predictions for 2023.
