We are not too far away from that kind of scenario playing out for all of us every day. Maybe three to five years, if not sooner. This is coming and it WILL require a change in how organizations need to evolve to market, sell, deliver and support their customers As companies design their support sites they are going to have to consider how the data they have about customers will be used, not just by their own company but by other companies in a common data cloud. They will need to know and understand and proactively support and engage customers like George. They will also still have to know how to engage the more old-fashioned customers like me too, perhaps less proactively. And they will have to do this seamlessly over multiple devices and across multiple sessions.
In addition to an inclusive strategy that embraces data, companies have to have a culture that supports that approach. As Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” The CIOs, many of them at this time still baby boomers, will have to be open and ready to support and market to millennials. It’s a new way of thinking for many of us. It’s about engagement, connectedness, and personalization – in exchange for benefits.
The companies that do not get this will not last. I was shocked to hear seventy percent of the companies that were Fortune 500 companies in 1990 are now gone! Fifty percent of the companies that were Fortune 500 companies in 2000 are now gone. The message seems to be evolve or die. We have to move from just gathering information to displaying it in the correct context at the correct time. To sharing it and making inferences from it. Support centers will have to move from solving problems to predicting them. George will not call about his missing camera. He will be called about it. And software companies have to offer the ability to easily integrate cloud data to allow for these sorts of inter-organizational sharing scenarios. There will no longer be your cloud or my cloud. There will be one huge data cloud.
When you consider the behind the scenes computing involved in the scene above, you realize that Cloud is the only choice… it’s the only way that companies will be plugged in enough themselves to support customers like George. Another statistic I picked up is that the average company spends about 82% of its IT budget just maintaining existing services. On top of migrating from on-premise strategies to the cloud CIOs will have also have to consider both the business technology and the IT structure and see where the human data can be used to help drive appropriate and contextual and deep engagement. And that will drive revenue so that the companies in business today are still around tomorrow.
