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Customer interaction survey 2008
07/07/08
Companies
should prepare now for the technology-savvy customer of 2013,
advises a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Advances in
technology have profoundly changed how businesses operate over the
past two decades. Indeed, the transformation has been so dramatic
that corporate leaders could be forgiven for thinking that the next
few years will bring a respite.
But a new
Economist Intelligence Unit report suggests the opposite. Looking
five years ahead, corporate leaders expect technological innovation
to remain an enormous influence on their business. Operations, the
supply chain and sales and marketing will all benefit from
continuing technology advances. But the real story in the next five
years will be the impact on relationships with the customer. By
2013, technology will have increased the latter's influence to a
level hard to imagine today.
Within five
years, mobile, web-based and other information and communications
technologies will have empowered customers in their interaction with
companies in ways that are only just becoming evident. Business
leaders rightly see more opportunity than risk in this development.
Gains will accrue in the form of improved customer service and
better customer relationships, but it is arguably the innovation
process that will benefit most from the higher levels of customer
interaction that technology will make possible. In 2013 customers
will have supplanted in-house R&D as the primary source of
innovative new ideas for their companies.
Companies must
begin preparing today for this higher level of customer integration
in their business. “This poses a major challenge for IT, but the
challenge extends far beyond technology itself,” according to Robin
Bew, Editorial Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Firms
will need to prepare their entire organisations to manage a much
more responsive, customer-focused business.”
These are
among the major findings of a wide-ranging programme of research
undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The digital company
2013, which is sponsored by AT&T, Nokia, PricewaterhouseCoopers,
SAP, Concep, Habeas and WebEx. The goal of the programme is to
determine how technology will impact businesses five years from now.
The findings are based on a survey of over 600 senior executives
from around the globe, as well as in-depth interviews with business
leaders and independent technology experts.
This first
paper explores the changes to come in how companies interact with
their customers and how they innovate. A subsequent paper will
examine in more detail how workplace dynamics and knowledge
management will evolve, and what all these developments hold in
store for the respective roles of the IT function and the CIO.
Other key findings include:
§ Online
communities will proliferate. Web-based customer communities will
play a much greater role than today in gathering-from customers and
others-innovative ideas for products and services, and in assisting
with product support. Firms will need to be wary of according too
much influence to communities, however, lest the latter's
suggestions prove unprofitable to implement.
§
Maintaining the privacy of customers and the security of
intellectual property will be paramount. Firms will have access to
unprecedented information about their customers. The benefits to the
innovation process will need to be balanced against the need to
ensure the confidentiality of customers’ personal information. Firms
will need to be clear with online communities about the use being
made of privileged data. At the same time, business will need to
rethink its attitude to intellectual property protection in an era
of open collaboration.
§ Technology
will give wings to customisation. Fully 70% of surveyed executives
expect their main products or services to be fully or mostly
customisable in five years, compared with 40% who say this is the
case today. Such levels of customisation will be made possible by,
on the one hand, the more sophisticated analysis of customer
information, and on the other by the advance of applications and
processes that will make it easier to reconfigure and reprogramme
products.
§ Customer
interaction will take place far more frequently over mobile devices.
Advances in mobile technology will impact more heavily on customer
service than any other area of company operation. Mobile devices are
unlikely to be the primary channel of customer-supplier
communication in 2013, but companies will need to be able to
interact with customers much more widely over mobile channels, and
using more advanced applications, such as video.
The digital
company 2013: How technology will empower the customer is available
free of charge at:
www.eiu.com/sponsor/Digital2013/
Nick Gibson, editor
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