ACT 1: The changing customer landscape

The last best experience your customers had anywhere, becomes their expectation everywhere. As a result, B2B and B2C buyers are becoming ever more demanding about the type of customer service and experience they receive. Already at the start of 2020, three trends were clear, which have only been accelerated by the recent Covid-developments:

• Know me and what I want: in which companies aren’t just expected to know and predict the individual customer’ s needs, but to address them before they even emerge;

• Treat me like a human being: in which customers embrace any technology that makes their life easier, but only if it happens naturally/invisibly and doesn’t go at the expense of a human touch;

• Immerse me: in which customers become ever more selective about the way they spend their time, and will only do so if they feel immersed in a vendor’s retail stores, showroom, offices or digital experience.

ACT 2: This is too much to handle

Making this transition with a traditional (industry 3.0) mindset is not going to happen. The datasets are too large, sensing is insufficient and the technology just falls short. So to stay up to date with changing customer demand, companies need to level up (to Industry 4.0).

ACT 3; Action plan

So what should you do?

• As a business: Build your industry 4.0 capabilities. How do those trends manifest themselves among your customers, and assess the readiness of your business to deal with them. Then improve.

• As teams: Boldly experiment. Build extreme technology concept experiences and set up red teams to challenge your business to reinvent itself around tomorrow’s customer needs

• As individuals: Educate yourself by buying and trying different technologies in different environments. You don’t really know how something can work until you’ve tried it. So experiment, fail, learn and get smarter.