How VR consultations are received by customers

As part of the ERGO Innovation Lab's "ERGO VR Experience" project, Hakan Kilic provided customers with immersive advice on travel health insurance in a 3D mountain environment. This involved explaining and visualising potential risks that can arise during a mountain hike and that need to be insured against. We asked Hakan how the virtual consulting experience was received by customers.

Hakan, how did it come about that you provided VR advice for ERGO?

As a customer advisor in ERGO's "omni-channel sales", I'm at home providing customer advice by telephone, in writing and in person. When my boss introduced me to the topic of VR consulting and we had our first exchange with the project team shortly afterwards, I quickly realised that I wanted to get involved!

I myself first came into contact with VR glasses at the "Consumenta" (trade fair) in Nuremberg in my youth and was already enthusiastic about the technology and its potential back then. However, the idea of utilising this for sales purposes would never have occurred to me back then.

I now have two boys, aged eleven and twelve, who are of course also out and about in the VR/AR world (in gaming) and always take me with them as their dad.

How did the first VR consultations go?

The VR consultations I conducted were very positive for me. As a salesperson, it was super exciting to gain new, important insights from our customers' perspective.

The first use case we provided was travel health insurance. The user story in the VR application was thematically based on this. For the customers, this was a completely new atmosphere tailored to the consulting situation. This was very well received by the customers. It was a completely different dialogue situation to face-to-face consultations, for example.

The dialogue within the project with all colleagues involved was also very enriching and we all put our heart and soul into it.

Do customer meetings work differently in the Metaverse?

Yes, definitely. In my experience, there are great parallels to face-to-face customer consultations, but there are also very clear differences.

In my view, the decisive factor here is that the technology works perfectly and the customer experience offers real added value. The preparation, post-processing and also the time required for the consultations themselves is significantly longer and places high demands on the customer advisor and customer. These are, for example:

• Both must have sufficient time (more than in a face-to-face)
• Customer and consultant need to have an affinity for technology
• Both must have the appropriate technical equipment
• The customer must provide access to the app in advance