Look to Immersive Technology to Get More Value From Existing Assets

Immersive experiences, and the blend of technologies that deliver them, are driving improvements in customer and employee experience (EX). According to Forrester, a quarter of remote workers will have intelligence automation support and 25 percent of brands will significantly enhance their CX by the end of 2021, thanks in part to immersive CX and EX implementations. It’s clear that immersive experiences can increase revenue in different ways, such as enabling furniture shoppers to customize their selections and preview the results in real time or by helping to train automotive workers virtually to enhance safety and protect costly components during the learning process.

However, we also see an opportunity for organizations that deploy immersive experiences to serve customers and employees using the same technologies to derive more value from systems they’ve already invested in. That’s because the immersive technology and applications that improve the buying experience and facilitate training and collaboration can also drive more complete adoption of platforms and solutions that help the organization work more efficiently and scale effectively.

When Human Nature and New Processes Collide

When companies invest in new technology, the return on investment comes from the improvements in efficiency and performance that the new system is built to deliver. When the system operates with incomplete or out-of-date data because employees are keeping some of it on their desktops, the ROI decreases. However, it's human nature for employees to stick with established ways of doing their work, even if the new way is more efficient, because of the learning curve.

When employees handle data outside of the new system, it creates risk. For example, a sales team that doesn’t have the most current pricing and configuration options available to everyone may quote a client the wrong price or offer products that are no longer available. That can lead to reduced margins, lost revenue and damage to the customer relationship.

Due to these risks, it’s important to get everyone onboard with the new technology with as much speed and as little stress as possible. Immersive technology can be an ideal way to help employees overcome the learning curve quickly, so the organization can benefit from the new technology sooner.

Identifying Gaps in Technology Adoption

The way to find out if employees are using new technology as intended is to see how they use it. For example, a financial services enterprise might launch a self-service chatbot for employees to quickly submit helpdesk tickets without going through the legacy process of navigating to the help portal and filling out the right form. One might assume that with a chatbot ready to file requests faster, employees would simply switch. However, habits can be hard to break, and employees who are unfamiliar with the chatbot may not trust it to process their tickets.

For these reasons, it’s important to measure the metrics of new internal technology use just as you would for a new customer-facing technology. If the financial services organization reviews its helpdesk ticket metrics and finds that half of all tickets came in through the old system even after the chatbot was deployed, it’s time to dig deeper and find out why. Of course, metrics can also show companies whether they’re getting the full value from systems they’ve had in place for a while, not just new technologies. For example, metrics from your enterprise CRM can show you who’s leveraging that app most effectively, who could be doing more with it, and what’s standing in the way.

Using Immersive Experiences to Support New Processes

When you understand how employees are clicking through or interacting with elements of your systems, you can see where they’re spending the most time, where they’re hitting obstacles, and what parts of the system they ignore or avoid. Then you can evaluate this data, get employee input, and improve the user interface (UI) so that it guides employees along the most effective paths more intuitively and seamlessly. You can also use your immersive tools to create trainings that engage employees more effectively than flat-screen tutorials and help them get comfortable with new technology faster.

Your findings and your solutions may also be applicable elsewhere in the organization. For example, you may be able to take lessons you learned from analyzing the way your sales teams use your new unified customer data platform and apply those to the way your customer service group learns to use the same platform. Having someone from the technology group or the innovation group monitoring technology use issues and developing immersive solutions can maximize the value you get from all the technology your people use.

Using immersive approaches to drive technology adoption can reduce organizations’ risk, improve EX, and lay the groundwork to scale successfully. Ultimately, though, immersive strategies like these are most effective and sustainable when they’re part of a company culture of measuring outcomes, experimenting with novel approaches, and being willing to innovate. Companies that dedicate resources to maximizing technology adoption, find new ways to help employees make the switch, and apply their findings across the enterprise will get the most value from their immersive investments, their existing systems, and their talent.

Charlton Monsanto is executive vice president, digital customer experience at Capgemini in North America, a global leader in consulting, technology services and digital transformation. Mike Buob is vice president of experience and innovation at Sogeti US, part of the Capgemini Group.