Should You Embrace Metaverse?

image source: dazed

To understand the logic behind and to decide whether join or not, a systematic approach can help and support the decision making process. First, understanding how comprehensive is this new area is important to grasp the potential outcomes. Then, you should decide if you should try to achieve these outcomes and how you should do it.

What Can You Actually Do with Metaverse?

There are different use cases of the metaverse. Even though it is the most well-known way, joining metaverse does not necessarily mean opening a store on a blockchain-based platform. It is the first use case that comes to mind because, for users, it can be used as a platform where they can experience daily life social activities, shopping, or learning in a more immersive way. It is an effective way for some companies to join metaverse, but, some other alternative use cases should be considered too. For example, it can also be used to have full control over the production processes with digital twins, a new financial marketplace for different varieties of investments, creation of more products without the limitation of the laws of physics, improvement of the education process of teams, or more interesting online meetings.

All of these different alternatives should be considered to find out the use cases that fit you the best. But, before starting to consider, you should understand the process to have these outcomes in a beneficial way. Approaching in detail supports the process to have more comprehensive use of metaverse or to decide if not to join. There are different questions to be asked to understand and plan the process ahead.

Four Things to Consider Before Deciding

Defining the reasons to use metaverse is the first step. So, you should start with why. Why do you want to join, what is your purpose? Is it selling more products, improving customer satisfaction, improving the process of production, or just for advertisement? These are directly related to the use cases. If you want to sell more products, opening a store would be beneficial, whereas having a digital twin of your stores, on which you can see the heat maps would also help to manage the customer traffic. Or, for the improvement of customer satisfaction, a customer relations office in the metaverse would be more satisfactory for most customers rather than a phone call. The reasoning behind such a decision should be carefully considered.

Knowing the wishes of your customers is an important part of the process. What do your customers expect from you? It can be a great opportunity to improve the services that you already give. For example, using the new technologies for educating the workers of the company would be an awesome use case. Creating a place or a simulation that fits your target area of education, then giving the required education to the workers would contribute to having a better customer experience. At the same time, it may reduce the time and monetary costs by solving some problems like traveling between all the stores.

There are also factors that limit imagination. What do your current capabilities allow you to do? All of these may require lots of computer power, cloud storage to share all these online, a very skilled team, or outsourcing. There is also the time cost of making your team busy for creating a whole new platform. Expenses may be more acceptable if you already have some of the requirements, but still should not be underestimated. Depending on the alternative use case that you plan to choose, there can also be additional needs.

Your capabilities are not the only limitation of the process, you should also consider the risks of such an investment. It does not necessarily mean the financial risks, there is also the risk of uncertainty that should be carefully considered. There are no regulations yet and the ethical aspect of most of the use cases is still in the grey space. Currently, most governments consider how to regulate cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects and platforms, including NFTs. But, because of decentralization, it is hard to decide on technical issues. The usage of crypto wallets is even harder to apply some taxes on, and it is harder to prevent their usage. That directly affects the evaluation process of regulation on NFTs because a crypto wallet is a necessity for buying NFTs. So, if you are planning to use a blockchain-based metaverse platform on the adoption process of metaverse for your company, it is even harder to estimate the alternative risks for your company.

For other platforms, even though regulations are a lot easier and mostly decided, there is still lots of room for improvement. There is also the ethical aspect to consider carefully. Some parts are defined by law as forbidden, some parts are legally accepted, and since metaverse is a new topic of discussion, there are lots of aspects of it that do not exactly fit these classifications. In other words, there are lots of parts in the grey space. You should consider how your company will be using such undefined parts and see the risks of possible outcomes.

image source: energycapital

How to Adopt?

If you decide to join after thinking about all of these, it is time to find an adoption strategy. After selecting the use cases to focus on and deciding which purposes will you use the metaverse for, defining the wants of your customers, evaluating your capabilities, and considering possible risky outcomes, you should decide on how will you adopt all of these and how will you provide the new technologies to your company and customers. If you are having difficulties to understand and evaluate, or if you have further questions, you can check here, we would be happy to help.