Why it’s time to adopt a disruptive mindset
In a week when SpaceX announced passenger trips to the moon and Google’s sister company Boston Dynamics previewed its jumping robot, the future suddenly seems a whole lot closer!
Disruption was obviously uppermost on the agenda at our Disrupted Customer Contact 2017 conference held in London last week – particularly as the clear message from our speakers was that it’s not just a future trend, disruption is very much a reality that’s already impacting organisations across all sectors.
What’s also becoming more evident is just how ominous the giant consumer tech firms such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are in terms of impacting the customer experience. For example, did you know that Apple apparently already has 1,000 engineers focused solely on an Augmented Reality (AR) project scheduled to surface in its iPhone 8? These firms are currently spending billions of dollars on key disruptor technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, Augmented Reality and Big Data – and it’s starting to have an effect in surprising ways.
For example, at our Disrupted Customer Contact 2017 event, Nuance’s Seb Reeve talked about digital home audio specialists Sonos. The firm was busy doing great things with multi-room sound systems, only to find that their customers – having experienced the benefits of voice control through assistants such as Siri and Alexa – wanted the same kind of interface for their music systems. So instead of just focusing on the music, the debate is now all about home voice services and everything seems a lot less certain than they thought.
Seen from this perspective, it’s important to remember that disruption can work both ways. Also speaking at our event, Now Interact’s CEO Magnus Åström illustrated this by highlighting the challenge facing travel agencies. If consumers planning holidays are starting to get all the information they need from their Google search results, then what happens to the travel agency website?
In this issue of SabioSense we’re looking at the impact of challenger firms such as as Tesla on the insurance sector, reporting on why customer support is ready for AI-enable devices, and questioning whether the customer experience actually needs its own department.
- Tesla tries to match safety records to insurance premiums – If autonomous self-driving cars were able to cut 90% of all car accidents, then traditional industry business models are likely to be disrupted. Business Insider considers the impact on premiums.
- Why Virtual Assistants have reached a tipping point – VentureBeat suggests that Cortana, Alexa and Siri are only the first in a long line of assistants who will be applying for work in the customer service sector.
- Who actually owns the Customer Experience? – An interesting report on an Econsultancy debate that suggests it might take more than breaking down silos to really deliver on Customer Experience.
