Digital twins in customer experience create virtual replicas of objects or places and reflect customers’ behaviors, preferences, and interactions.
Let’s imagine you are walking into a store and accompanied by an assistant who knows what you like, remembers your previous purchases, and can even predict what you might require next. Now, imagine this assistant in online stores who offers you a seamless and personalized shopping experience. This is what the digital twin does in redefining customer experience.
According to Fortune Business Insights, the global market of digital twins is anticipated to reach US$259.32 billion by 2032 from US$12.91 billion in 2023. The market is exhibiting great potential growing at a CAGR of 39.8% during the forecast period.
But what exactly do digital twins mean for your customers? Before diving into this, let us understand digital twins.
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What is a Digital Twin?
A digital twin is nothing but essentially a digital replica of a physical entity. As one of the revolutionary technological innovations, digital twins create a virtual model of a physical object, process, or system for simulation, analysis, and monitoring in real-time.
Digital twins incorporate Industry 4.0 technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, automation, and 3D printing. These technologies help create simulations and solve performance problems while enhancing customer experiences.
Reimagine Customer Experience With Digital Twins
Initially, digital twins were popularized in manufacturing and engineering for simulating and optimizing processes. However, with its potential and increased use cases, organizations across industries now are leveraging it to enhance customer experience.
Imagine you as a customer have a digital twin that reflects your interactions with a brand right away from the websites you visit and the products you browse to your purchases and the feedback you give. Digital twins collect data across multiple touchpoints. These touchpoints create a comprehensive profile, helping businesses understand the customer’s preferences, needs, and behaviors on a granular level.
Let’s explore how Digital Twins are transforming customer experience:
- Personalized Customer Journeys
Today, customers look for experiences that are tailor-made just for them. According to a Gartner report, 89% of businesses will compete majorly on customer experience.
Embracing the power of digital twins, businesses can develop highly tailored customer journeys. The technology enables them to analyze past and real-time data. By understanding individual preferences, behaviors, and needs, organizations can predict customer actions and deliver proactive, personalized interactions.
- Immersive Customer Engagement
The data from Statista shows that customers who enjoyed exceptional past experiences exhibited a remarkable 140% growth in spending compared to those who encountered less favorable experiences.
With digital twins, companies can create immersive and interactive customer experiences. Companies in automotive, retail, and real estate can make the most out of this technology. They can allow their customers to interact with digital models of products or environments, making informed decisions without physical presence.
- Predictive Maintenance of Services
Digital twins help companies monitor service performance and customer usage patterns, especially in sectors like telecommunications and utilities. With this proactive approach, companies can envisage and prevent service disruptions, thereby improving reliability and customer satisfaction.
Creating a Digital Twin of a Customer
If you are thinking about how you can create a digital twin of a customer, we got you. Typically, it involves replicating a customer’s profile, preferences, behavior, and interactions in a virtual environment.
Have a look at the detailed overview of creating a digital twin of a customer and how it works:
Data Collection
This is one of the first and foremost steps to creating a digital twin of a customer. You must have familiarity with data analytics and machine learning techniques that will help you develop analytical models combining online and physical interactions.
You must have:
- Demographic data
- Behavioral Data
- Psychographic Data
- Transactional Data
- Interaction Data
Data Integration
In the next step, aggregate data from different sources such as e-commerce platforms, social media, CRM systems, and customer surveys. Leverage data integration tools to consolidate this information into a centralized system.
Data Processing and Analysis
Once you collect and integrate data, use data analytics to interpret and understand the collected data. Use machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and correlations.
Modeling the Digital Twin
In the next step, develop a virtual model that represents the customer’s attributes and behaviors. Make use of AI and machine learning to update the model in real-time based on new data. After that, run simulations to predict customer behavior under different scenarios. To see how the digital twin reacts, test different marketing strategies and product offerings.
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Redefining The Future
Digital twins are not static. With every interaction, they evolve, continuously updating and refining the customer profile. This dynamic nature of digital twins allows businesses to understand the changing customer preferences and behaviors in real time, ensuring they remain relevant and responsive.
From traditional, one-size-fits-all approaches to a more personalized, data-driven strategy, digital twins in customer experience represent a significant shift.
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