Il Sole 24 Ore: Covisian lands in the metaverse, the new frontier of customer care
Over the years, customer experience has taken on a decisive role in the business development of companies, fostering customer engagement has become one of the development drivers on which the entire market is focusing.
Covisian, a leading BPO company with a strong international vocation, is also moving along this line. Already active in supporting companies in the customer journey stages by following a strategic approach that uses digital and traditional channels, Covisian is now setting a new goal: the launch of the first customer care in the metaverse with an offer designed for customers who want to seize this opportunity.
Today the Covisian Group has more than 23000 employees and 38 offices between Italy, Spain and Latin America, where they work on exporting the models and technologies developed, and boasts a customer base of more than 150 companies operating in the insurance, banking through large-scale distribution, to public administration sectors.
Covisian’s is a challenge represented by identifying new digital channels in order to improve the experience of its customers and diversify markets, a new frontier of customer care that now involves virtual reality. With this in mind, Covisian is implementing a series of conscious choices to meet the needs of new customers interested in seeking innovative solutions that meet consumer needs.
We discussed all this with Gabriele Moretti, Founder & Chairman Covisian, one of our country’s most forward-thinking entrepreneurs in the field of technological innovation in the BPO sector, capable of being ahead of the times and always “one step ahead.”
“After the Internet, smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence, today we land in the metaverse. The massive adoption of these immersive technologies, which in fact transport people to other worlds, will have a far more deep impact on humanity than the internet and social have had to date.” declares Gabriele Moretti “For twenty-five years I have been an entrepreneur in the world of customer care services and I have experienced numerous technological revolutions that have led us every time to reinvent our company in order to maintain or increase our position in the market. Regarding the metaverse, we have immediately taken advantage of the opportunities, activating our Innovation Lab in Milan where we make people wear different types of visors to test the new customer experiences we are designing.”
Proving that dreams create our reality, almost all the latest innovations are inspired by science fiction novels or video games, so even the word ‘metaverse’ comes from a 1992 cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash). The term is the union of meta and verso, which together denote the concept of a ‘universe beyond.
“Today, the metaverse is discussed through the many podcasts on the web, where cyberpunk novels, video games or science fiction films are referred to. There are those like David Chalmers who make interesting arguments about the metaverse, considering it better than physical reality, others like Paolo Benanti describe this new space as a utopia, a future without a place, where the dream risks becoming a nightmare. I hope there is time at all levels to think deeply about the social consequences and to define the right rules and ensure that all this is not, as many thinkers prophesied, one more step on the road that will turn homo sapiens into a new species.”
There is no such thing as “the metaverse,” but there are many metaverses: simulated worlds that a user can access and act upon according to rules different from that of the physical and social reality in which humans live. The metaverse was not born these days, simulation games have been around for many years but unlike years past, today technology allows increasingly realistic immersive experiences. Just think of the businesses within it using nft systems and cryptocurrencies: it really seems to have all the characteristics to be the so-called ‘next big thing.
“It is essential that companies are not unprepared to seize the new opportunities, but it is also crucial that they are consciously in the deployment of a technology that could prove dangerous. I believe the right path is to preside over emerging technologies and to build multidisciplinary teams that do experimentation but also ask deeper questions,” Moretti continues-“Even on the metaverse we at Covisian are banking on the principle adopted for artificial intelligence, ‘also not instead’ in which we believe deeply and which we place as a guideline for our activity”.
What Covisian wants to realize are real life experiences,” Moretti continues, “Living and working in the real world by taking steps in metaverses where the laws of physics are a limitation: for a car enthusiast it could be a tour in a museum of historic cars or, for history lovers, a walk in ancient Rome ”
As ‘virtual outings,’ where there will be a need for a new kind of assistance and where Covisian agents will provide customer experiences unimaginable today, a model that can only work, however, if well integrated with in-person work, where empathy and socialization can benefit from millions of years of evolution.
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