In the fifth in our blog series cutting through the metaverse hype, we’re looking at what’s in store for customer experience. We’re right on the frontier of CX in the metaverse, and in this blog, Pavel Soukenik, Executive Director, Digital Content and Marketing Services, shares some of his insight, experience, and our thoughts about what’s coming next.
As the metaverse continues to evolve and mature, there is much that will change. We’ve already looked at what that future might have in store for both brands and their customers, but in a world of infinite possibilities in which you can be anywhere doing anything (which is – let’s face it – an integral part of the promise of the metaverse), what does that mean for your CX offering?
What does CX look like in the metaverse?
To maintain the trust and safety of people in your community, the customer experience in the metaverse might need to encompass everything from content management of assets to community management and moderation of the users within it.
We’re seeing this for ourselves because at Webhelp we’re already doing some of this in the metaverse, partnering with The Sandbox to deliver CX for their users. The Sandbox is a virtual world where players and creators can build, own, and monetize their experiences in the Ethereum blockchain.
It provides creators with true ownership of their own user-generated content (UGC) creations through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and rewards them for their creative participation in the ecosystem.
What was their challenge?
The Sandbox is a good example of how the metaverse sets the bar quite high in terms of it being such a brand new concept for potential users, particularly around ideas of players creating (and then monetizing) their own content.
As you’d imagine, the challenge that The Sandbox wanted a CX partner to help it solve, was primarily around helping to familiarize new players with its worlds and the multitude of possibilities they hold. The other issue was the need for its CX to earn and maintain the trust and safety of users within the world, through community management and moderation.
What is the role of a CX team in the metaverse?
Our role as CX partner to The Sandbox is to guide visitors into and through the myriad worlds and experiences on offer. Our teams act as ambassadors in this new world and provide the trust and safety element that is so important to creating a healthy online environment.
As well as that in-game role, our CX teams are also effectively acting as event organizers outside the game too, on social channels, Discord, YouTube and more, talking about the game and helping people into the experience.
On one level there is a requirement to provide what would usually be known as player experience (PX). Where it’s different from usual PX is that we’re also there for the creators, and plenty of those interactions happen outside the metaverse, as we support them with their creative activities like 3D modelling, building their worlds, or buying a piece of land.
As you can imagine, all this requires that your CX team members hold a variety of skills:
- They need to be creators who understand the tools for building things because you’ll be supporting their use
- They must be able to understand the virtual world’s economics, including NFTs, crypto-currency, e-wallets and purchasing land.
- They need ambassadorial skills to support players as they familiarise and acclimatise to life in The Sandbox, as well as excite them to explore. They might find themselves tour guiding in an NFT art gallery, or looking after people at a metaverse pop concert.
- They’ll have the moderation skills that help create an environment of trust and safety for players.
Finding people who can do all of this isn’t easy. The demands are always-on too, since the number of areas for which you need support is much higher than in the real world, whether it’s helping people navigate the world, get to grips with their crypto-currency or moderating their behaviours.
The kind of demands on the CX team that needs to be built for this kind of metaverse experience means you’re probably looking for gamers, who are either already skilful with these tools (or are willing to learn) but can also be skilled moderators since one of the biggest pain points can be the unpredictability of dealing with real-time customer behaviour and UGC.
Getting the right people in place
When it came to putting our CX team together for The Sandbox, we created a 2-week on-site training program for our first batch of ambassadors based in Colombia. The training they received was a combination of theoretical and hands-on, and they trained on everything from The Sandbox’s creator tools to learning the conduct moderation guidelines suitable for an 18+ audience.
Looking forward to the future of CX in the metaverse
All predictions are inherently guesswork, and it’s important to remember that we are still in the (very) early days of the metaverse. The Sandbox itself is still a nascent platform in ‘alpha,’ perhaps an early iteration of what it could ultimately become. Just as we look back now at the first decade of this century as ‘social’ media first arrived, perhaps in 20 years’ time we’ll look back on this decade as the MySpace era of the metaverse.
That said, there are still things to learn from where we are already, and what it means for where we might be going. One of the challenges CX in the metaverse will definitely face is scaling up moderation to match the growing metaverse population. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) need to have a role to play in helping to filter out the signal from the noise, turning over the moderation issues it finds to human moderators to deal with.
Ultimately though, it will be a CX team of humans who give the most value, since people’s passion for what they do is contagious. Just as humans will continue to venture into the metaverse in search of other humans to interact with, so they will need other humans to help them in this new world.
In our last and final blog in the series, we’ll look in more detail at the people skills you’ll need in your wider CX team in the metaverse. In the meantime, you can find out more about our Metaverse solutions, or talk to us about any aspect of the metaverse by reaching out below.
