5 Ways That Virtual Reality Can Help to Bolster Your SME’s Scaling Process – Real Business

Although the technology itself is nothing new, virtual reality is beginning to develop into a comprehensive tool for businesses to utilise across many of their processes. In terms of improving operations, providing more focused onboarding programs, delivering immersive marketing, creating more complete products, and many more key areas, VR can play a major role in securing business growth across a range of sectors. 

Because virtual reality delivers artificial digital experiences for users, it carries great potential for a number of different areas throughout businesses that are readying to scale.

(Image: Statista)

As we can see from Statista data above, virtual reality adoption is set to accelerate significantly as the decade continues, paving the way for far more commercial and enterprise use cases.

This opens the door for businesses to utilise the technology to secure greater levels of momentum when seeking to scale their operations. It also can hold many competitive advantages when it comes to heavily congested online marketplaces.

With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at how, specifically, virtual reality can help to bolster the scaling process for startups and small businesses:

Opening the Door to Global Collaboration

It can be profoundly difficult for businesses of any scale to bring in specialists from all around the world to work on product development, but VR can help to pave the way for more comprehensive communicative avenues in which multiple parties can collaborate, share insights, and innovate more effectively. 

Because virtual reality empowers us to work in the same digital environment from anywhere in the world, it’s possible for individuals to collaborate in a remote manner on shared models and offer real-time feedback for effective communication. 

This can be a revolutionary development for startups in niche industries that are unable to pay for flight tickets to bring in experts from overseas to share their knowledge. It can also be a great time-saving measure to gain actionable advice that can be followed up instantly. 

Enhanced Marketing Measures

For startups in the eCommerce sector that are yet to create their first brick-and-mortar store, the inability of customers to physically try out or see products for themselves can cause a significant level of cart abandonment. 

However, VR showrooms can be an excellent solution to this problem and give users the ability to view products from the comfort of their own homes and from a multitude of angles and perspectives. 

With the continued development of the metaverse, virtual showrooms are already becoming commonplace among its growing digital community, and it’s likely that more startups will see 3D VR renderings of both physical and virtual products as key marketing tools in the coming years. 

We’ll also see more VR marketing measures when it comes to advertising. Virtual reality has the power to make digital brands more visible online. These virtual showrooms can do much more than introduce customers to products, it can also become a social hub that has the potential to foster new online communities that build stronger bonds with your brand. 

Employee-Focused Onboarding

For many startups, the recruitment process can not only be costly and time-intensive, but it also comes with a great margin for error. Small teams are wholly dependent on hiring the right talent in order to scale effectively, and any oversights can stunt the growth of a company.

Fortunately, virtual reality can make this process far more effective in a number of aspects–all of which can help a business to discover its most high-potential candidate. 

From simulated office visits to better help candidates to assimilate to a company’s culture to immersive experiences that can fully get to grips with a candidate’s potential for specific on-the-job competencies, VR onboarding can help to reduce costs associated with employee travel while improving accuracy throughout the recruitment process. 

For instance, a customer service firm, TTec, opted to utilise virtual reality solutions to help prospective employees ‘experience’ their company culture and operations while optimising their recruitment process in terms of the suitability of the person they bring in. 

Low-Risk Employee Training in High-Risk Job Roles

When it comes to job roles that carry a high margin for error, virtual reality training can pay dividends in providing employees with the opportunity to grow their knowledge while minimising the potential for damage that a mistake can cause while they’re learning. 

Already, there are plenty of examples of oil firms like ExxonMobil and BP that use VR as a means of providing employees with sufficient training for work scenarios like a startup and emergency exit procedure initiations. The virtual environment means that employees can see the results of their actions all within a controlled digital space. 

These virtual reality practices can also help more manual workers, like assembly line employees to learn how to operate safely before moving on to real-world environments.

Once again, for startups, the prospect of an employee making a costly mistake in a high-risk role could be profoundly difficult to recover from. But with VR training, the risk of making a costly error is mitigated significantly.

Building a Better Customer Experience

Your customer experience model is another fundamental facet of a successful startup operation. With virtual reality, your CX strategy can be significantly enhanced to better promote your goods and services.

Whether it comes down to offering clients fully digital walkthroughs of your locations, 3D try-on experiences for products, or an added gamified perk to your loyalty schemes, the level of engagement that VR affords businesses can be passed directly on for the customer to enjoy.

This can help to build better brand loyalty and encourage users to spend more time on-site as they enjoy your advanced virtual capabilities.

VR can also help to deliver fully personalised experiences for customers and clients alike and help to inform purchase decisions due to the quality of renderings that users can be presented with.

Although we can think of virtual reality as a tool to grow the marketing strategies of businesses, VR can be a comprehensive tool that can be used to organically scale a startup into a far larger endeavour.

With better talent acquisition and training, staff can be better equipped to help their startup to grow while VR technology modernises internal and external processes to deliver an unforgettable customer experience. With this in mind, now has never been a better time for your startup to explore how virtual reality can help you to prepare for increased levels of custom.