Gartner build theories and concepts, they create new words to describe digital trends and ways of working and have become a cultural movement to love or in some circles loathe, but love them or loathe the themes and trends they come up with they do have an impact on what we do as leaders in a digital world.
At this years European symposium they described a new trend that has been with us for a little while, we just didn’t have a name for it, the ‘Everything Customer’. The next generation of customer, not based on but based on attitude and aptitude to and for digital, a customer that expects the new to be effortless, expects to be connected but left alone and expects privacy to be maintained as a human right.
The opportunity to meet the needs of the Everything Customer is not simple, the pace of digital change leaves customers standing still and the new around them moving at a break neck speed. The Everything Customer takes the consumerisation of digital to the next level of expectation.
The theory around satisfying Everything Customer is that technology has to focus on bringing customers closer together and meet their needs in as convenient way as possible. The customer needs to be satisfied with immediate and rewarding experiences. The technology now needs to personalise the digital experience and the first steps is the digital Identity.
The Everything Customer requires access to many systems and solutions, they no longer expect to need multiple usernames and passwords and expect to be able to log on by sheer presence alone. This is the panacea for access to systems that clinical teams across the world have been seeking for so much time. The Everything Customer has expectations that identity can be managed seamlessly, and that they can be part of this management. Tim Berners-Lee is focusing on Project Solid, an attempt to democratise identity on the internet with a key focus on putting access control decisions in the hands of the everything customer. When Berners-Lee sees this as the last remaining hurdle of the internet to be solved you know its not ‘just’ a Gartner trend.
In the world of the Everything Customer scale and the meaning of scale changes to no longer be how to scale personalisation at a global level but to scale the local experiences so that personalisation feels local and does not become a generic reading of data. Removal of friction in processes is best done at a local level as friction is often there because of local processes. This is where the Everything Customers demands can be met swiftly through technology that is deployed locally but offers a scale beyond the local boundaries.
The Multi Experience Platform (which Gartner suggests by 2021 one third of organisations will have got to) becomes about the width of access capability. Domino’s Pizza offers 15 ways to order a Pizza, all linked to a single identity capability, your Phone, Web, Clothes, Watch, IoT – all devices that interact with you to grant you access to everything wherever you are.
If we and you are able to apply this then the Everything Customer will be your next frontier in loyalty and you can be the everything serving organisation…