Focus on what will customers want, rather than what they want.

According to Gartner, customer experience, more than products or solutions, is the new battlefront for business, with 81% of marketers saying that by 2020 they expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of customer experience. However, with customer expectations constantly rising, businesses continue to fall behind.

Forrester’s Global Customer Experience Index continues to find that most companies are rated as poor or very poor, year on year. Even the organisations that scored good in 2017 either fell in 2018 or did not improve. In order to future-proof their business, organisations need to be asking themselves not what do customers want, but what will customers want.

Technology, without a doubt, the platform on which most of our future is built, is key to divining what customers of today will want tomorrow, and what yet-unimagined requirements tomorrow’s customers will have. Disruptive businesses like Netflix realised this early on and created intelligent algorithms that were able to predict and recommend what customers might want to watch next.

In the past, introducing new technology involved the arduous installation of expensive, on-premise equipment. However, new technologies such as automation, Internet of things, and artificial intelligence are allowing businesses to become more agile and increasingly able to deliver the seamless, personalised, and real-time experience that represent the future of customer experience.

While technology is now able to deliver, organisations still need to ensure that their processes, and even mindsets, are geared towards ensuring a frictionless, personalised, and real-time experience for customers.... Read more: http://bit.ly/2GkQHqC