Age of the Customer

FountainBlue’s September 2 VIP roundtable was on the topic of Embracing the Age of Personalization. Please join us in thanking our gracious hosts at Hitachi. The executives in attendance at this month’s roundtable represented a wide range of industries, roles, functions and company sizes. Therefore, their perspectives on who the customer is, what the customers’ needs are, and how best to address them varied widely. Below is a compilation of their collective thoughts regarding serving the needs of the customer.

• Companies can’t be everything for everyone. They must have a clear idea of which customers they serve and know how to serve them well, to the point of even anticipating their needs.
• Serving the customer means also that the business must morph, depending on the needs of the customer. This in general means offering more customized professional services, offering platforms for customizations, offering integrated products and services, etc.,
• Companies from all industries are better leveraging technology to deliver to the needs of the customer.
• Companies must adhere to the policies and requirements of the company where their headquarters are located, as well as all the countries where their customers reside. Interactions and services may become quite complex and complicated.
• Gone are the days when people await the formal glossy newsletter. Real-time, social communications and interactive mobile applications are the best ways to connect with your customers, partners and other stakeholders.
• The attention span of the customer has gotten really short. Think about offering a 20 second sound bite as a teaser so that they will see a 14 minute video show.

Here are some predictions from our group of execs:

• Pay-as-you-go software-as-a-service offerings will become an essential requirement for vendors.
• Customer expectations will continue to rise exponentially and companies will be continuing to scramble to get customers the level of instantaneous, detailed information and analysis they seek.
• The Intelligence of Things will be focused on solving real-world problems.
• The role of the channel will become much more important and channel leaders will be chartered with translating the needs of the customer and simplifying and mapping these to solutions which are scalable, leveraging technology.
• Immersion experiences will become more integral to better understanding the needs of the customer.
• Ease of use and intuitiveness of flow will be so much more important as customers will have low tolerance for things that are too complex, confusing or complicated to be usable. It’s an Age of Convenience!
• Configuration platforms will help customers customize to their own needs, following an architecture and structure designed by companies.
• Companies which offer integrated services from soup to nuts will earn a large and loyal customer base.
• Companies who can best understand and sell to niche international markets will see better returns. An example is Coke, who has a separate formula for different locations. In fact, most companies already do this, with the BMW3 series being an exception.
• The same can be said for companies who can successfully connect with specific industry verticals.
• There will be more money available in general, but it would be offered to fewer companies who truly understand the needs of the customer and seamlessly deliver to those needs.

Resources:

• 5 Tech Trends Redefining the Customer Experience, Information Week, August 2016 
  • Create Multi-modal instant content, integrating words, images, sounds and video.
  • Think of IoT as devices that provide the next major channel of communication.
  • Leverage data science to deliver differentiated and personalized experiences. 

  • Automate business processes with bots, agents and supervisors.

  • Invest in a modern microservice cloud architecture, where applications are divided into hundreds of independent microservices. 

• The Age of Personalization: Why Curated Content Is Good For Business, Magnify Team, July 21, 2016
  • Personalization has transformed from a marketing objective to a larger value system that guides how we produce and consume content