Are You Riding the Third Wave of Enterprise Technology — or Being Drowned by It?

We can’t say it enough — you are now in the experience business whether you like it or not. Customers everywhere want experiences, and they will judge your brand by the quality of those experiences. If you do not excite them in the first few seconds of their online visits, you will most likely lose them — for good. Your digitally sophisticated customer is judging you most on the basis of the digital experience you offer. Is that fair? Doesn’t matter! That’s the way it is.

Experiences are now the prime considerations when consumers make their purchasing decisions — and that must be at the forefront of your company’s discussions. You must learn how customers are changing their behaviors when it comes to how they interact with brands.

The Third Wave of Enterprise Technology
We are on the brink of what may be the third wave of enterprise-technology shifts. The first wave — the back-office wave — was when businesses realized that technology could make their internal processes more efficient. The second wave — the front-office wave — was when we began to consider how our sales teams could better interact with customers, and customer-relationship management (CRM) systems came into their own. Today, however, the CRM system no longer delivers a competitive advantage.

Now, it’s time for the third wave, and this one is about putting the consumer at the center of everything we do. It’s about creating smiles and goosebumps from dynamic, relevant, personalized experiences — a shift of tectonic proportions.

A Single View of the Customer
Now, more than ever before, every business needs a single view of its customers. We must all change the way we think about every aspect of our businesses, put ourselves in the customers’ shoes, and understand every detail of the experiences they are having with our brands.

If we do it right, our customers will experience the Four Tenets of an Experienced Business:

1. Know and Respect Me: “Anticipate, predict, and deliver what I want before I ask for it, while respecting my privacy.”
2. Speak in One Voice, Always in Context: “The organizational structure — marketing, sales, support, and production — of the business is transparent and irrelevant to me.”
3. Technology Blends Into My Life: “Don’t make me download an app if I don’t need it, and let me set the terms of our interaction.”
4. Delight Me!: “My expectations change every day, so you must rapidly innovate and disrupt yourselves every day. What was exciting yesterday is ordinary today.”

Think we are being overly dramatic? At the Adobe Symposium in Los Angeles on June 2, 2016, we illustrated the dramatic change in shopping behavior using a real-world example of someone’s recent digital-shopping experience for a car.

Over a three-month period while this customer shopped — almost entirely online — she had over 900 digital touchpoints. Here’s how it mapped out:

• Seventy-one percent of the time she spent was on mobile devices;
• She did 139 Google searches;
• She watched 14 YouTube videos;
• She viewed 89 images (and saved many of them);
• She had 69 dealer interactions; and
• She had 186 manufacturer interactions.

The Importance of Creating the Right Experience
This example is typical of today’s shopping experience. In fact, 90 percent of consumers conduct their shopping without a brand in mind. They pick brands based on the experiences surrounding the products or services — not just the product or service itself. And, customers don’t care about your departments, don’t think about your business goals, and couldn’t care less about your budgets, politics, or silos.

What they care about is the story you tell through your experience and its relevance and immediacy.

So, how do you create the right experiences and reap the benefits of customer loyalty? Digital analyst, anthropologist, and futurist Brian Solis says it begins with a new definition of the customer experience. Solis defines the customer experience as the sum of all customer engagements in each touchpoint and every ‘moment of truth’ throughout the customer lifecycle.

He says we can only create these experiences by employing what he calls “human-centered experience architecture.” Experience architecture is the “art of engendering desired emotions, outcomes, and capabilities throughout the customer journey. It is the process of strategically designing and strengthening a customer’s entire spectrum of interactions with a product or company.”

Here are some principles behind this new way of looking at your business:

1. You can’t stuff new technology into old ways of thinking and expect it to work.
2. Find ways to understand how people are different, what they crave, what they value, and how to design for those in each moment-of-truth interaction with your brand.
3. If you are not considering micro-moments, you will not be considered!
4. It may not be “mobile first,” as some have said. The correct mantra may be “mobile only.”
5. Innovation begins with perspective — seeing things differently.
6. Think about the last great experience you had. What made it unforgettable? That’s what you are going for.

Bottom Line
The bottom line may be that, to design the right experiences, you have to have empathy. You must walk in the shoes of your customers and understand the experiences they are currently having with your brand and really relate to what they want — not what you think they want. Brad Rencher, EVP and GM of Adobe Digital Marketing, said “We are all of us in the Experience Business … We are now at the cusp of a tectonic Enterprise shift.” Is your organization ready to become an experience business? If not, the time to begin is now!

The post Are You Riding the Third Wave of Enterprise Technology — or Being Drowned by It? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/riding-third-wave-enterprise-technology-drowned/

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