How IoT is Making Customer Experience Obsolete

The digital and physical worlds are converging. The internet revelation enabled a two-way communication between the brand and the consumer. IoT took the conversation even further. They created the possibility of every element of the brand experience to have a voice. Sensors to objects and environments generate data by merely existing. Data delivers insight. Applied insight improves products, services, and ultimately customer relationships and experiences. And every IoT device that generates this data becomes a channel. The result is empowerment of the consumer across an infinite number of channels, instead of the mere traditional channels that we are accustomed to today. The result is that the product experience becomes the customer experience as consumption becomes a continual phenomenon.

This also means that brands will need to change their business models. In today's world, we often advise our customers to look upon Marketing, Sales and Service as a cyclic phenomenon. But implementations often have had a narrower focus. For most companies, the historical paradigm has been a one-off transaction, especially for service. Integrating Customer Experience is already a challenge for companies today. Given that, most companies never stop to study on how consumers actually integrate and consume their purchased products. As IoT enables a continuous open ended experience, businesses will need to change their models address this paradigm shift. In other words marketing, sales and service will need to integrate their processes with one another as well with other back office functions even more than they do today.

Brands will also need to do their bit towards safeguarding customer privacy. IoT enables personalization on a mass scale and has the potential to make every experience connected. For example, Gmail has a feature that allows events like flights, hotel and restaurant reservations to be added automatically to Google Calendar. Convenient for those who would like updates and reminders for reservations made without having to worry about keying in the information themselves. But a use case that allows retailers to use IoT devices at malls and where banks can push relevant offers to a customer's mobile device based on an analysis of her/his purchase behavior as extracted from their credit card transactions, may simply be creepy. We have heard this one before when marketers spoke about personalization and PII data, but with the IoT, data is highly personal and given that the number of devices used by any one person multiplies, anonymization can become very easy to ignore. 

Where privacy goes, security follows. Imagine if hackers got control of a car by remote control and shut it down in motion. Well it's already been done before. Imagine if they got control of health devices and caused critical failures. That would be fatal, no? Given that a customer's IoT ecosystem will consist of multiple connected devices and often from a variety of companies, establishing and enforcing universal security standards is actually everyone's problem. 

All said and done, IoT is here already. We are already seeing it in action in Retail, Manufacturing, Automotive and Healthcare. And it’s all about multi-way communications between objects, brands and consumers. That's what IoT does for you. It enables that network where everyone can speak with one another. The Internet and social media age empowered customers via access to information. The Internet of Things will empower consumers in the form of engagement in an infinite channel world. And the product experience becomes the customer experience. What's now Sales, Marketing and Services will cease to exist as we know it.

Customer Experience as we know it is dead. Long live Customer Experience!