Emerging technology trends for CIOs and CDOs to consider for Customer Experience (CX) strategy.
The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Techologies for 2020 is now published. If one were to carefully parse through it versus the Hype Cycle from the previous year, one sees advent and strengthening of technologies with a stress towards improved Customer Experience (CX) type of applications.
Even on ground, we are seeing newer ways to connect and interact, and interactions based on newer kinds of stimuli. The rapid movement of technology and new possibilities necessitate for even a Digital Transformation strategy not to be written in stone, but to be flexible.
The following three trends appear rather empowering from a CIO / CDO point of view.
Real-time event-driven application architecture
We have always been a proponent of starting with the fundamentals, in this case at the architecture level. Event-driven architecture (EDA) enables capturing of real-world business events (e.g. customer placing an order or a shipment missing deadline). Monitoring event streams (emanating from various channels including Edge devices, mobile applications, or social and business networks etc.) will help organizations be aware of current contexts and aid in better, intelligent and acutely context sensitive decisions thus translating to identification of new business opportunities, better customer service and greater business success.
To make this happen, the CIO/ CDO team will need tight coupling with business teams to identify key business events, opportunistic business moments, and associated business decisions and outcomes that define customer experience.
The immediate AI worlds
Gartner is predicting 70% of customer interactions, by 2022, to involve ML based applications, chatbots and intelligent mobile messaging; in contrast to a mere 15% in 2018. Some organizations are already opting for role-based intelligent assistants to improve interactions with customers, partners, employees etc.
CIOs / CDOs need to continually identify the appropriate use cases for maximum impact, and possibly even co-create with their customers. This will help them focus on not just the simple and factual interactions, but also provide the opportunity for AIs to take over slightly complex interactions. The goal, of course, being to reduce overall customer effort through technologies.
On the other hand, the volume, channels and types of consumer insight data available has grown at a logarithmic scale. At the least, structured and unstructured data, today, includes text, sentiment, voice, video, live feeds, interactions, surveys and even human driven IoT stimuli. The speed and intelligent precision offered by AI based analytics engines is worth considering for the CX of the future.
An extreme use of integrated data analytics and autonomous AI, of course, would be to let the AI do the above mentioned definitions, prioritizations and decide on action patterns; but that is too much into the future, though some prototypes are starting to emerge.
Omni-channnel customer engagement
Covering the above two bases enables AI implementation at customer journey pain points. That helps understand customer behaviour and use and enhances a seamless customer experience across different channels (e.g. email, chatbot, human customer service, messengers, social media, IoT etc.) providing a single source of truth in truly understanding customers.
CIOs / CDOs must use this base to enable personalised communications and interactions and deploy augmented technologies to help automate analysis, while ML and NLP provide insights.
Extending the conversation, interactions (in B2B scenarios) will eventually get delegated to connected devices (away from human), thus providing further touch and learning points. The situation to ponder for a CIO / CDO then, is what CX will mean for a robot, a machine or an algorithm. They will need to understand the role of the non-human, its influence on a decision making process and the series of adjustments to be made to ensure the devices can help deliver a superior customer experience.
If you are a CIO or a CDO, this might be worth considering for you and to extend your horizons. If you lead the organization, then the above should be a conversation to have between your business heads and your technology enablers.
How ready are you to use emerging technology for engaging your customer better? How nimble is your Digital Transformation strategy to incorporate these changes on the fly? We would love to hear from you.
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