IT departments have to get ready to build an engagement layer across the channels that leverage on robotics to interpret intent of customers, provide the right response, and trigger activities on the backend. What started with static chatbots has evolved into dynamic and learning bots that cover text, voice, and more recently video.

• Leveraging Analytics to Gauge Personality & Emotional State for Interactions – A profound understanding of the customer includes the understanding of the emotional state of the customer and an adjusted interaction that accounts for this emotional state. Voice analytics in a channel like call center drives better results for customer retention or up/ cross-sell attempts. Social media handles provide the ability to get a gauge on the personality type of customers by using publicly available data. The use of personality types for adjusting service experiences is very much at the beginning but has to be accounted for going forward.

Customer Journey

• Customer Journey Management as a key trending requirement requires the ability measure the experience along the journey with its smallest unit being the interaction/ transaction. To crystallize good and bad journeys, the quality of the experience has to be gauged – ideally without surveys to avoid customer effort but by taking indirect measurements such as heatmaps of browsing and clicking behavior on a website. This requires a robust set of KPIs for each journey step, tools to correctly and objectively gauge those KPIs, and a data model to associate the specific experience to the individual customer.

• Revamping business processes to support customer journeys seamlessness is a second crucial part. It is essential for such a revamp to work in cross-functional teams for agile decision making. For this, IT becomes a partner in the cross-functional teams both finding solutions to enable better experiences as defined by the business and to squeeze the existing technology for its potential. This has an impact on how IT is being organized. More decentralized business partner organizational structures known from functions like HR organizations become far more mainstream again for IT.

• This goes hand-in-hand with a DevOps approach that is required with smaller release drops, faster iterations, and immersion of the business users and end customers into the process.

Products

While technology has enabled us to provide more modular products in the last decades they are still far away from delivering personalized products that create emotional attachment. Creating this emotional attachment through co-creation builds loyalty, reduces price sensitivity, and creates even higher degrees of acceptance of product defects if they occur. The ability to co-create a product has reached various industries from the likes of the toymaker LEGO (https:// ideas.lego.com), to Starbucks (https://ideas.starbucks.com) or to the car maker Local Motors (https://localmotors.com) where customers design and assemble their own car. IT departments have to get ready to enable the inherent design and production flexibility that the trend to co-creation requires plus to create the collaboration platforms to actually enable this new phenomenon. For this product portfolio, simplification is the essential hygiene to be established.

Channels, journeys, and products are the three interdependent areas that touch every process in a “digital non-native” organization. Addressing these three areas holistically is a rare feature to achieve and requires full focus and determination from a management team. Done right, those areas have the potential to be sustainable sources of competitive differentiation in terms of customer experience and from an agility and cost point of view.