The Forrester Forum event was held in Washington DC earlier this week and Forrester Research Chairman and CEO George Colony delivered the opening presentation on “The Business Demands Of The Perpetually Connected”.
So what is the Forrester Point of View?
Mobile Mind Shift
Josh Bernoff is senior vice president, idea development at Forrester Research and is responsible for identifying, developing, and promoting some of the company’s most influential and forward-looking ideas. Josh is the coauthor of the Business Week best-selling book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies.
“adaptors, immersers and perpetuals form the top twenty two percent of consumers. These consumers typically young well-educated they have relatively high incomes and they spend the most money online”
Meet The Perpetually Connected Customer
How will the perpetually connected customer affect your competitive strategy?
What is the new role of technology is in our perpetually connected world?
“It is a change from looking for things to having those things made available to you whenever you want”
“it will accelerate every interaction and it will transform every relationship”
Serving The Perpetually Connected Customer
“Melissa Parris is a research director and principal analyst serving Marketing Leadership Professionals. As Forrester’s leading authority on mobile marketing, she has defined the stages of mobile marketing evolution, the best objectives for mobile marketing, and the always addressable customer”.
“what is interesting is that there are some specific circumstances where perpetually connected customers are willing to give you information about themselves so they tell us that they will reveal personal information to you in exchange for things like faster and better customer service
the perpetually connected customer really expect higher quality faster service they value experiences that save them time hassle and money
you really have no choice uh… this is your new mission you need to shorten the distance between what more perpetually connected customers want and what they get and you do this through utility based experiences”
PERPETUAL CONNECTIVITY WILL CHANGE
HOW WE EXPERIENCE THE WORLD
Melissa Parris
Devices are proliferating, and we’ve all seen the data to prove it: More than half of US consumers now own smartphones, and nearly 20% own a tablet. And it’s not just device ownership that’s increasing. As we’ve been talking about for the past year, people are now connected to each other, to places, to things, and to brands more often and from more locations than ever before.
Increasingly, going online isn’t something we do. It’s something we are. Instant access to information and services isn’t just convenient — it’s how we live our lives. And it’s changing our desires, our needs, our demands, and our expectations. It’s changing how we experience the world.
As more and more of us become perpetually connected and the level of our connectedness deepens, these changes will come more rapidly and be more transformational so that soon people will:
- Expect personal information of all kinds — financial accounts, health records, our kids’ school transcripts and extra-curricular activities, salon appointments, frequent-flier status, etc. — to be accessible from any device, in a specific device-friendly way, and in some cases to find us before we go looking for it.
- Want objects and products to cooperatively predict what we’ll need, learn our preferences, and make us an offer to fulfill that need as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
- Lose the ability to manage our own calendars and agendas as we’re reminded, notified, alerted, and otherwise kept on track with anything that has deadlines whether they’re self-imposed or set by others.
- Get lazy about keeping others up-to-date about our own changing circumstances as applications work together to anticipate and notice changes in our lives, schedules, and habits and spread the word and fix discrepancies without our having to ask or act.
- Become increasingly impatient with longer lines, wait times, and delays as instant digital delivery of products and services become the norm.
- Be constantly connected to those we care about through digital mechanisms that feel increasingly real, both emotionally and physically.
Make no mistake: This is not a shift that will affect a single budget, process, or department in your company. Failure to adapt to these new market conditions will result in a drop of profits at best and, at worst, will make your company irrelevant, erode your customer base, and ultimately force you to close your doors for good. Businesses that want to be successful in the world created by the perpetually connected will have to:
- Overhaul their technology — all of it. From consumer-facing digital products, services, and enhancement or support for existing products to the technology all employees are equipped with to in-store technology to the sales process and delivery chain, technology will be the way to keep the business humming at the speed expected in the perpetually-connected world.
- Hire people across the company who understand how digital interactivity affects their business role.
- Evolve internal processes to incorporate new talent and technology in the most effective and efficient ways possible.
- Restructure departments to implement these new processes in the smartest ways.
- Rethink how and what they forecast, measure, and budget for.
- Retrain their employees not just on these new processes and how to use the technology at their disposal but also on the speed and kind of service the new customer demands, whether that service is being delivered digitally, on the phone, or in person.
The requirements of the perpetually connected customers and their increasing service expectations reflect the new normal for any form of service provider who must deliver Service @ Speed
Leading IT Service Management thinkers have adopted terms like Outside In and itsmgoodness however Service @ Speed may become the new call to action for our industry.
Service providers will need to figure out how they become not optional in this new paradigm.
You can bet the bank that Service @ Speed will require more than just applying a go fast decal to your Ford.
Becoming Essential After the Mobile Mind Shift
thisiswhatgoodlookslike 