Brian Solis's Blog, page 101

When Hospitality Becomes an Art, It Loses Its Very Soul

The title is credited to Max Beerbohm, English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson. Taken from his 1918 work, Hosts and Guests, I interpret his work for a new era of hospitality. We live in a connected society now and as such, guests and the experiences they have and share, form the foundation of marketing and service. If we try to scale experiences for the sake of doing so, we miss the essence of true engagement. Instead, we connect with guests, customers, at an emotional level.

Although way overdue, I’m finally sharing highlights from my tour in Paris and London for the release of What’s the Future of Business. It was all pretty exciting and to be honest, I miss it now that I’m not running from plane to plane and country to country. It was quite beautiful and the new friends I met should know that I already miss them and look forward to doing this again for my next book!

While in Paris, I was invited by WIHP and Pamil Visions to talk about the future of travel, hospitality and hotel marketing. The WIHP and Pamil team arranged for a floating event aboard the VIP Paris Yacht Hotel on the Seine. It was pretty epic and I was  surprised and delighted at the number of French marketing leaders who joined.

Shortly after the networking and brief presentation, I joined my friend (and event host) Martin Soler on camera to address the state and future of hospitality experiences. The result was a series of four short videos that regardless of your industry, can help you rethink everything from products to marketing to sales and service to loyalty.

Merci!

Part One

Martin and I tackle the question, “If you can give 3 things hotels need to do to adapt, what would they be?”

I’d share, but then you might not watch the video.

Part Two

Here, we discuss why hotels need to integrate new technology into their DNA, not as a reactive approach but designing their hotel using the advances in technology.

Part Three

Here, Martin and I talk about the future of technology and the need for digital anthropology in business.

Part Four

We’re aboard a yacht on the Seine right? Instead of enjoying the views, we continued the conversation. In this final installment, Martin and I set out to answer key questions for hotel marketers looking to understand and engage the digital customer.

How does Generation-C (Connected) affect the hotel industry?

If reviews aren’t everything for Generation-C, then what is?

How do hotels and hoteliers accept or not Generation-C?

How can they predict and improve their marketing and hotel experience in the future?

See some of pictures from the event on flickr.

For more information on hotel marketing trends visit: http://www.wihphotels.com/mag/

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How Marketers Can Thrive in an Era of Digital Darwinism

While in London promoting What’s the Future of Business (WTF): Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, I spent some time with the folks who produce The Digital Marketing Show.

In this short video, I share the rise of Generation C and how an era of connected consumerism created the perfect storm for digital Darwinism to accelerate. We also discuss how the future of marketing takes more than technology, it takes a philosophical shift to create meaningful and shareable experiences.

It’s short (3 minutes) and hopefully helpful…

Topic 1: The definition of Generation C and the cross generational market of connected consumers.

Topic 2: How mainstream marketers can survive in a digital Darwinism era?

Brian appears at 0:47

I want to say thank you to Martin Soler of wihp (World Independent Hotels Promotion), Phil Butler of Pamil Visions and Gabriel Laine-Peters for their help in organizing this event. Also thank you to Benjamin Ellis who shared pictures from the event available on Flickr.

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Habits are the Invisible Architecture of Everyday Life

Guest post by Gretchen Rubin (@gretchenrubin), one of the most thought-provoking writers on habits and happiness. Her new book, Better than Before, is about how we change our habits.

Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life. Research shows that each day, we repeat about 40 percent of our behavior, so our habits shape our existence, and our future.

If our habits work for us, we’re far more likely to be happy, healthy, and productive—and if our habits don’t work for us, we’ll find it tougher.

So if we want to change our lives, changing our habits is a great place to start. But that observation just raises another question: Okay, how do we change our habits?

Many experts offer a one-size-fits-all solution. Do it first thing in the morning. Do it for thirty days. Start small. Give yourself a weekly cheat day.

It’s tempting to look for a magic, universal answer—but as we all know from tough experience, no magic answer exists.

In my research for Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, I uncovered a surprising truth that—really—isn’t much of a surprise: We each must cultivate the habits that work for us.

Some people do better when they start small; others when they start big. Some need to be held accountable; some defy account­ability. Some like to work in quiet, spare environments; others thrive amid bustle and abundance. There’s no one right answer.

Also, it’s easy to expect that by copying the habits of productive, creative people, we’ll win similar success. What did Albert Einstein do?

But the fact is, everyone’s different.

Some productive, creative people have the habit of getting an early start (like Haruki Murakami) or working late (like Tom Stoppard); of living a life of quiet predictability (like Charles Darwin) or of boozy revelry (like Toulouse-Lautrec); of procrastinating endlessly (like William James) or working regular hours (like Anthony Trollope); of working in silence (like Gustav Mahler) or amid a bustle of activity (like Jane Austen); of drinking a lot of alcohol (like Fried­rich Schiller) or drinking a lot of coffee (like Kierkegaard); of produc­ing work for many hours a day (like H. L. Mencken) or for just thirty minutes a day (like Gertrude Stein).

We can’t make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people’s habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.

And once we identify those habits, we must make great effort to maintain them, even if others tell us we’re doing it “wrong.” Getting up early to exercise may sound great, but if you can barely make it to work by 10:00 am, you’re not going to form the habit of an 8:00 am run. Having a cheat day may work for a Moderator, but I’m an Abstainer—which means that I find it much easier to resist a strong temptation by abstaining altogether.

Now, when it comes to understanding our habit nature, it’s very helpful to know where we fall in the “Four Tendencies” framework.

In a nutshell, this framework distinguishes how you tend to respond to expectations: outer expectations (a deadline, a “request” from a sweetheart) and inner expectations (practice guitar, get more sleep).

Your response to expectations may sound obscure, but it turns out to be very, very important.

Upholders respond readily to outer and inner expectations (I’m an Upholder, 100%)

Questioners question all expectations; they’ll meet an expectation if they think it makes sense–essentially, they make all expectations into inner expectations.

Obligers meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves (e.g., a journalist who can write for an editor but can’t work on a novel in his free time).

Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.

To discover your Tendency, and its implications for habit formation, take this Quiz. More than 55,000 people have taken it.

Bottom line? When it comes to changing our habits—and changing our lives—the most important thing is to know ourselves. Then we can make the choices that will allow us to succeed, even if we’ve failed before.

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The Apple Watch Will Make Work More Delightful and Reshape Employee Engagement

Guest post by Jason Shah is the founder and CEO of Do (do.com), a collaboration platform that helps people run productive meetings and do work they love.

TL;DR Summary: Apple Watch will make work easier and more impactful. Through a constrained interface, powerful one-tap actions, and intimate data it will collect, people will be better at their jobs and form new bonds with coworkers previously not possible.

There is a widespread myth that a new device will only add more clutter–more noise–to both our work lives and our personal lives. More notifications, more distractions, and more intrusion. This is an understandable assumption, given the bombardment of new devices and new apps in the 21st century along with a real sense that we’re addicted to the Internet. But sometimes we forget that a fundamental objective of technology is to help us. While it may seem counter intuitive today to believe that strapping a screen onto your wrist could reduce distractions in the office and simultaneously make you more productive, the Apple Watch will do exactly that.

Take this example: When an employee gets a vibrating message notification—personal or professional—they must pull out their smartphone and, upon unlocking it, are instantly “pulled into a merciless vortex of attention suck.” On the Apple Watch, however, notifications are, by definition, quickly addressed: the primary action is either a canned response or a dismiss option. Both are specific and swift. When I get my Dropbox file notification, I’ll acknowledge it and confidently swipe it out of my life. Unlike on my phone, my Apple Watch swipe will not automatically open the Dropbox app as well as a Pandora’s box of distractions (or the Pandora app for that matter!). I will not check Facebook since the app is nowhere in sight and my psychological triggers will not onset an overwhelming sensation of FOMO the second I’m not holding my phone in my hand.

Constrained interactions with notifications will reduce the cost of distractions, even if they are more frequent and ubiquitous

Apple’s iOS operating system has evolved in that we can now deal with an individual notification without unlocking the phone, which was a big step forward, but not big enough (think: swipe to dismiss a notification). All unread notifications are still visible when a user checks his/her phone as opposed to only the most recent and/or relevant one.

This is problematic and here’s why:

Take a hypothetical situation where you check your phone after a flurry of notifications has accumulated. You want to followup on two of these notifications–say you want to respond to your mom’s text message and to star an email from your boss. You go to reply to your mom and, while doing that, you get a banner notification for another text message (you’re already in the messages app, so why not reply?). You then vaguely remember that there was something else you wanted to followup on, but cannot remember the specific notification. To make matters worse, you no longer have access to that initial list since you have already unlocked your phone. You forget to star your boss’s email and it falls through the cracks. This could have been easily avoided by dealing with notifications individually. Now imagine a (common) situation in which you want to follow up on more than two notifications. It would be far more efficient to deal with them one by one instead of as a large chunk, right?

On a 38mm or 42mm screen, dealing with a messy block of notifications is physically not possible. One notification. One action. One focus of attention. This is huge.

A constrained but powerful app means average employees turn into superheroes.

The obvious counterargument to all this is that the Apple Watch is too accessible. We fear that this seemingly innocuous device will allow technology to seep into areas of our lives which it should not (if this argument sounds familiar, that’s because it is). It is the same argument that was made before laptops took over desktop computers, before cell phones took over landlines, and before smartphones took over cell phones. Its most recent iteration is asking, “Why do I need a tablet if I have a laptop?” The response to this hackneyed objection is simple: regardless of whether one device does the same thing as another–just like the Apple Watch doesn’t seem to do anything you can’t do with your phone–product form factor makes a massive difference and will elevate the everyday worker into a superhero.

The limited interface of the Apple Watch forces developers to streamline their apps to enable only a few select actions. To make them count, these will be the most important actions one can take in an app. A small interface with all the power of a smartphone and the internet behind it means doing a lot with very little—a lot of bang for a little buck (even if you get the $10,000 Apple Watch!)

Like all good pieces of technology, this will not only have a significant impact on the CEOs and board members of the world, but will also empower the average employee. The average employee will be able to leverage the Apple Watch to perform tasks that are beyond what is expected of their position. Granting approval. Sending requests. Summoning information. Recording ideas. You name it. For example, today, distributing meeting notes would entail firing up an email client, knowing all the meeting attendees, asking and typing in all the email addresses one-by-one–all while trying to appear efficient and professional. However, one tap on your watch using an app can request a meeting agenda from tools like Do (Do.com) and another single tap can distribute it. In this way, the average employee both appears and is more efficient. The Salesforce Apple Watch app lets a salesperson report on quota while on the go between client meetings. Evernote lets you dictate a brilliant new marketing idea, so it doesn’t get lost to the blackhole of shower thinking. This is a sea-change in productivity.

Employee relationships and communication will be more impactful with the data and intimacy of the Apple Watch.

What’s more, the Apple Watch will allow us to connect with our coworkers better than ever before. As such a personal device, the intimate data it collects will know more and more about its user and it can then leverage that information to enable better team interactions. It knows can know who you work the most with, what you talk about with whom, how your heart rate and stress level react to being staffed on a project with Bob from accounting – you name it. One could foresee a situation where the Apple Watch informs someone trying to contact you that you are on a run and unable to answer. Further, when you are done your run, it could be set to automagically notify the person trying to contact you that you are now available to talk, all based on your physical activity. In the future, Sally will learn not to contact Bob on Wednesdays at 8pm because that’s when Bob likes to go on runs or spend time with his family.

This could help us, ultimately, make team communication between employees more efficient, more friendly, and more human. It could also help us make progress on the front of inundating users with a flood of notifications when they neglect their devices for a period of time.

The Apple Watch will usher in a new phase in the future of work.

Because of the limited physical real estate, the Apple Watch will streamline all actions–both from the developer’s end in terms of designing the app and from the user’s end in terms of engaging with it. This shiny computer on our wrist will make work more delightful, potentially reshaping employee engagement as we know it. Our intimate interaction with the Apple Watch may finally provide us with a tool to transcend the annoyances–to cancel out all the unproductive noise in the workplace–created by the very devices that came before it, and do work we love.

Facebook’s Messenger Becomes a Platform, The Sharing Economy Creates a Shut-in Economy + WTF Indiana – ContextMatters #8

Facebook Messenger Becomes a Platform

Following F8, Facebook’s semi-annual developer conference in 2014, I suggested that Facebook was evolving from a social network into a bona fide social ecosystem. In 2015, we can see that Facebook is thinking beyond the unbundling of its popular features but also turning them into independent and connected platforms. Following this year’s F8, Facebook introduced new features for payments within Messenger as well as opening direct lines of communication between users and businesses. Additionally, Facebook opened Messenger to developers to help augment and enhance the user experience and capabilities.

The Sharing Economy Begets the Shut-In Economy

Whatever you call it, the sharing economy, the collaborative economy, the rental economy, in the end, new services such as Uber, Instacart, Fluc, TaskRabbit, are making it too easy for consumers to get what they want when they want it where they want it. I call this the “on-demand” economy and it has some experts questioning whether or not these immediate gratification apps are contributing to a “shut in” economy.

Tech CEOs Fight Against Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act

WTF Indiana!? Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff led the charge of tech CEOs and eventually other prominent influencers to challenge Indiana on its controversial passing of the Religious Freedom Act. Oh and that pizzeria we talk about in this episode? Seems like the number of $upporters of this bill remind us that no matter what year it is and how far we’ve come, we still have a long way to go until we really are a human race.

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The Future of Business is About Experience Architecture

Digital Darwinism is forcing businesses to #AdaptorDie. Many realize that customers are different. At the same time, leaders understand that how employees want to work is also changing. Yet, they’re frozen in the past, undermining the future simply because they do not know what to do and how. After all that is known, it is the unknown and the fear of venturing into the unfamiliar that becomes paralyzing.

I spend a substantial amount of time inside businesses researching digital transformation and also what prevents and accelerates it.  Among the greatest catalysts for change is that customer behavior and values are so radically different from current norms and models that simply solving for “what digital customers would do” reveals your priorities and next steps.

This video was shot while I was on tour in Paris and London promoting What’s the Future of Business (WTF): Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences. In it, I share the value of experiences and how to design them to be meaningful and shareable.

I hope this helps you…

You can view pictures from the event via Benjamin Ellis at Flickr.

Thank you to Martin Soler of wihp (World Independent Hotels Promotion), Phil Butler of Pamil Visions and Gabriel Laine-Peters for their help in organizing this event. Also thank you to Andrew Ellis of Like Minds for producing this video.

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Experience Begins Here

Experience is becoming more important than the product itself.

What is experience?

It’s not a thing, it’s everything. It’s an embrace and an emotional ecosystem that requires purpose, thoughtfulness and mastery. More so, experience requires architecture and a supporting ecosystem to deliver more than features, utility or capability. And, it starts here:

We must flip our everyday approach from brand-centricity to customer-centricity. Think beyond budgets, approvals and technology and creativity for the sake of technology and creativity. That’s what everybody else does.

Unlock empathy.

Feel.

Innovate.

Give a shit.

As a leader or as someone fighting for change, either way, you have to break the shackles of fear, process and politics to inspire creativity and reward risk.

Think.Like.The.Customer.

What can I do that I couldn’t do before?

How do you make me feel? What do you want me to feel?

How do you become an extension of me…an expression of what I do or what I want to do?

What brings us together and keeps me coming back to you? What’s our center of gravity?

What can we do together that I can’t do without you?

More to come…

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Pardon My Bluntness, The Future of Marketing is Screwed…But It Doesn’t Have To Be

The Adobe Summit in London is a pretty special event to me. A big part of it of course has to do with its location. I adore London and all of my friends, and those I’ve yet to meet, make the trip special each time. The other reason is that Adobe’s platform reaches EMEA and thus helps marketers who are pushing for change on a global scale.

To prepare for the event, the team at CMO.com asked me to share my thoughts on the state and future of marketing. Maybe it was because the call took place at 6 a.m. my time or maybe I was just in the mood to share the truth, warts and all. Either way, here is the full interview. I hope it helps you…

Solis: Pardon my bluntness, but the future of marketing is screwed. The innovation in technology and the socialisation of media is becoming pervasive, but it’s making it easy to do all of the things wrong that have been part of the problem of marketing for years; scale and mass broadcasting and the dumbing down of strategies.

Marketers are putting all their resources against what were traditionally the big things: big commercials, big campaigns, celebrity endorsements. We’re still taking legacy thinking and outdated value systems and applying them to this new world of innovation.

The real future of marketing starts with putting your hands up and walking away for a minute. With understanding how technology has affected behaviour and how that behaviour has affected expectations and values and decision-making.

And when you understand what is different today – all this amazing technology, all the data you can leverage – you recognise the future of marketing starts with an entirely new philosophy about what marketing should or could be. Marketing becomes a true reflection of an always-on society by recognising that it’s not a department. Marketing is now a way of business.

And when I use the word marketing, I’m talking about engagement, understanding who the customer is, how they’re different than customers before, what the context of their engagement is. Then building a digital infrastructure, and a complementary real-world infrastructure, to deliver an entirely new and meaningful experience.

CMO.com: How do you start?

Solis: The biggest challenge is not in the understanding or expertise associated with new technology. We can learn that. The biggest problem is our inability to recognise that the experience we have today is not the experience we need going forward.

We have to swallow our pride and recognise that, in order to compete for the future, we’ve got to become a student again. That’s the place I consistently see where no one wants to start. It’s Tolstoy’s quote about how we all talk of change but none of us talk about changing ourselves.

An easier way to answer your question is that you start by understanding the digital customer experience. What does it look like? What are the touch points? What are the screens that people use? What are the frustrations they have? Where did they find success? Immersing yourself – in a social science way – in a digital customer experience is a great start.

I have a statistic that shows 88 percent of companies are going through a digital transformation to better understand the digital customer experience and better meet the needs of the digital customer. That’s almost every company.

Then I learned only 25 percent actually studied the digital customer experience and only 12 percent actually immersed themselves in it. So 88 percent of companies are spending all this money to change digitally but only 25 percent could tell you why.

CMO.com: Does that mean the others are bound to fail?

Solis: I refer to this as digital Darwinism; as technology and society evolve, so must we. Trying to change may or may not be good enough, but digital Darwinism seems to favour those companies that at least try. It might buy them some time. But this is where innovation comes in, because companies have a lot of threats today that they’re not acknowledging.

For example, we view our competition as the competitors we’ve always had; we look at what they do and we try to up the ante. But disruption is happening just as a result of innovation. The taxi industry felt very comfortable in providing mediocre, sub-standard services until Uber came out. They never saw disruption as a competitive threat; they saw competitive taxi companies or black car services or limousines as a threat. Uber better understood the digital customer and what they wanted, and created a product around that. And it was a success because people could inherently embrace it.

Then there’s millennials. They’re different as customers but they’re also different as employees. Companies typically have horrible cultures, built on models from the 1950s and 1960s. There’s no intrepreneurial or entrepreneurial spirit to really motivate younger people, to create places they can relate to and where they’re appreciated. This is creating potential disruption.

Then you have soaring scholastic debts due to the university system. You have the dramatic rise of prices in homes. You have the rise of the sharing economy. All of these things are contributing to create different consumer value systems: “Do I need to own this?” “Do I need to spend the extra money for a luxury good?” “Does that really reflect who am I to who I’m trying to be?”

All of these dynamics are crashing in on organisations, and so just trying to change might be enough in some areas but it’s sorely lacking elsewhere. At some point you’re just consumed by the crashing waves.

What we need right now is a leader, and marketing is a great place to start. But just turning on these new machines doesn’t help us, being more creative or louder doesn’t help us. What helps is understanding how to be more human. Using technology to scale humanity is exactly where the future of marketing begins.

CMO.com: A number of big organisations are investing in funds or setting up incubators to work with emerging businesses.

Solis: That’s a fantastic place to begin. Many companies are opening up incubators to facilitate new technology as a way of fostering disruption. They’re trying intentionally to put themselves out of business. Others are investing in outside accelerators, incubators or in VC funds as a way of nurturing these opportunities.

The challenge happens when they identify new technology and bring it into the existing machine, whether or not that technology is strong enough to be supported by the existing broken models.

Culturally, this is a big challenge. When you find people or technology, how can they be scaled successfully without becoming part of the problem? Entrepreneurs don’t start companies because they dream of being inside a big company. They want to change the world, and that doesn’t go away because they’ve finished one product. Serial entrepreneurialism is something else big businesses can learn from as they’re competing for relevance.

That’s a long way of saying that innovating in your own disruption is counter-intuitive but incredibly productive. But you also need to invest in your culture to be innovative and adaptive, to form new decision-making processes for a real-time world, processes that are less political and less tied to self-preservation but are about becoming a start-up inside a big company.

CMO.com: I’m fascinated by your ideas of the human algorithm and the human API. Can you expand on them for me?

Solis: We hear marketers speaking about big data as if it’s a gold mine. They’re plugging in big data and hiring data scientists as if this was the solution to everybody’s problem.

The human algorithm was this idea that data has to tell a story, and that story has to be meaningful and compelling to different audiences within the organisation. That takes someone not just to understand the data, but to humanise it so that you can see challenges and opportunities.

Today organisations are sluggish in the way they absorb data and act on it. The human algorithm to me was an infrastructure that could be built within the marketing organisation to drive specific change, to iterate and innovate at the same time.

The human API was a much more sophisticated understanding of the human being as a platform. On the business side of things, the signals being produced by big data aren’t necessarily becoming humanised. Instead we get caught up in the technology so we create more products, more wearables, more internet of things. Everyone of these is controlled by its own app, so things become incredibly complicated.

The human API was a different philosophy, saying take the technology out for a moment. What if the person was the platform? How would you design an experience based on what you’re learning from them? How could you make a much more intuitive experience, whether it’s the relationship between them and a product or between them and an ecosystem?

The Apple Watch is taking this approach. It’s not saying you need a watch or you need yet another wearable device. It’s thinking about why you would wear a wearable device. What are you trying to do, and what do you not know you can do? And at the same time we’re going to plug you in to the Apple ecosystem. That’s the idea of the human API.

CMO.com: Another emerging theme is that because marketing is the most customer-facing bit of the organisation, it’s perfectly placed to relay customer wants and needs back to the organisation in a better way. Marketing becomes central to the company’s operation.

Solis: It’s positioned appropriately. It’s not staffed appropriately, nor is it recognised or funded appropriately today. But it is well-positioned and it will become much more significant within the organisation, with greater responsibilities and accountabilities. It starts to drive product road maps. It starts to drive employee engagement. It starts to drive culture. It starts to drive the customer experience including customer service and loyalty.

To me, the marketing organisation could become the most powerful form of the organisation, a new model which everything else could branch from.

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Ellen Pao Loses Against Kleiner Perkins and Twitter Partners with Foursquare – ContextMatters #7

Ellen Pao Loses Suit; Wins Awareness for Gender Discrimination

The news is everywhere; Ellen Pao lost her discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the same time, she’s being credited for disrupting how Silicon Valley does business. USAToday’s Ellen Weise joined the conversation to share her experience in the courtroom and her thoughts on the case.

Twitter Partners with Foursquare

Did you know that Foursquare is still alive and kicking? Did you also know that Foursquare is also a data company? We talk about the new Twitter and Foursquare deal and why Twitter invested in attaching specific locations to Tweets.

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Digital Transformation Starts with Reimagining the Customer Experience

All customers are not created equal. This is also true for relationships. No business has the same relationship with their customers as you intend to have with yours. The thing is though, you must first define what a relationship with your customer looks and feels like and in turn, how they would describe it to their friends and colleagues. This is where the future of customer experience begins.

At a time when technology is affecting how people go through life, one thing is becoming clear, everything is changing and that also affects the business of business. At the same time, technology is introducing new opportunities to improve customer relationships and ultimately the experiences we want them to have and share. In fact, I’d say that as crazy as all this new stuff is (social media, mobile apps, smart watches, smart phones, smart cars, smart appliances, wearable computers, virtual reality, etc.), companies now have the opportunity to become more human and more relevant than ever before.

Every one of these new technologies provides us with greater insights into customer behaviors and aspirations. We can better know our customers, appreciate their expectations and in turn, deliver more personal and valuable customer experiences.  The challenge is that we have to want to and we need to do things differently in order to do so.

The good news is that consumer technology isn’t the only sector undergoing great innovation and disruption. Innovation is also underway in the world of enterprise software. Now well-intended businesses have the technology that facilitates improved customer relationships and experiences. Again, businesses will have want to make investments in innovation to do so.

Transform Digital Customer Experience for the Connected Customer

I recently partnered with Genesys to explore the state and future of customer experience (CX). Through research, we aligned evolving customer expectations with the best practices of those companies that get it (see the video below). The result is a new thought leadership study available today, How to Transform Digital Customer Experiences for the Connected Customer. You can get it here!

How you invest in your CX is the difference between a compelling competitive advantage and mediocrity and irrelevance.

It’s a bold leap forward to trust something as fickle as a customer relationship. But what if it wasn’t so fickle? What if the customer relationship were inherently trustworthy because of the effort you invested in its promise?

That’s the importance of CX. Customer relationships are a byproduct of the experience you design, support and reinforce.

Everything starts with a vision for what the customer experience could be compared to what it is today. Naturally, you’ll find a gap. Closing this gap immediately is your CX imperative. Investing in the CX to bring your vision to life is your competitive advantage.

CX matters.

Every touch matters.

It just takes a common vision to take everything to an entirely different level.

I hope this thought leadership study will serve as your guide to digital transformation and more so, consumer relevance and improved customer experiences and relationships.

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