Chapter 3
New Realities Demand New Right-Time Experiences
In the Chapter 2, I discussed how many of today's Internet experiences and business processes are complex or generic or lack critical information that a person needs to make a decision. If existing business practices are becoming outdated—and many of them already are—what does a company need to be successful? Businesses need to leverage the new market forces to create right-time experiences.
These experiences are information and services that your customers, employees, and partners need to take the next logical action. That action could be making a purchase, reserving a flight, finding a purchase order, or submitting an expense report. Leading companies, regardless of the type of product or service, offer a winning brand experience. This experience permeates every aspect of how the customer interacts with that brand, from its ads to the packaging, the product, the customer service, and the sales processes. Today's great companies—from Coke to Apple to Salesforce—are doing this in various interesting ways.
There are countless ways that we can use information from mobile devices, social media, sensors, and transaction data to build better experiences. Smartphones, tablets, and other devices can be used to exploit the information conveniently, wherever a person may be.
The concept behind right-time experiences is to deliver the right information, to the right person, on their device of choice at the point of need or the point of desire. To do this, an organization needs to analyze the wealth of data that is now available and deliver something worthwhile to its customers, employees, and partners in a valuable format. I am not going to pretend for a moment this is simple. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
Instead of using generic processes that haven't changed significantly since the smartphone's introduction, we want to provide relevant services that adapt to the user and his or her current environment. If a person is driving, what does he need, and how does that compare to what a person needs while sitting in a meeting? How does gathering the right information change when I'm on a smartphone versus a tablet versus a PC? Companies will grow or get buried based on their ability to give users the right experience when they need it. This applies to a company's customers, employees, partners, or all three. Right-time experiences differ from what we generally have today because, unlike generic experiences, they are contextual, adaptive, and connected (see Figures 3.1a and 3.1b). I'll describe this in more detail in a moment, but first I'd like to provide several examples of right-time experiences.
Figure 3.1a RTEs Deliver the Right Info to the Right Person on Their Device of Choice
Source: Lopez Research LLC.
Figure 3.1b The Three Pillars of RTE
Source: Lopez Research LLC.
Let's take an example of Coca-Cola and how it delivers on its brand promise by offering right-time experiences to its customers and partners. I'm thirsty. I need a Coke now. I'm at a vending machine, but I have no money. Can I purchase through my phone? Yes! What happens next is unknown to me but important for the next customer and for Coca-Cola's bottle distribution partner: The vending machine can send a real-time message to the distribution center that it's low on Diet Coke.
A nearby driver with Diet Cokes in her truck will be alerted to this issue and sent to the vending machine to refill it. Instead of aimlessly sending the bottle distributor to every vending machine, the bottle distributor, Coca-Cola Enterprises, visits only the machines that need products. It doesn't waste fuel or employee resources. Coca-Cola, the beverage company, delights its customers by always having the right product where it is needed. The customer is happy because he could buy the right product without needing to use cash. These are three RTEs related to one transaction, and they create a great brand experience for Coca-Cola.
First Republic Bank offers an example of a right-time experience with a mobile application that is simple yet offers all of the necessary tasks a person needs. The interface is simple, with a few icons and a large font. The menu items are action oriented and easy to understand, such as “Transfer money,” “Pay bills,” and “Deposit checks.” The app doesn't clutter the screen with features you won't use. It focuses on the basics of what a person may need to do on the go. It doesn't assume you'll want mortgage information on the home page or access to the entire website. Many people want to use a mobile app to find a branch location, so this has its own field.
Everything that isn't absolutely necessary is accessible from a “More” tab. First Republic's brand proposition is that it is customer focused and willing to service you via the method that works for you. The company used the “More” tab to deliver on its brand proposition by offering three ways for the user to connect to First Republic: email, phone, and the website. While strikingly simple, this leverages most of the features that are available from a mobile device. It uses the GPS to help a consumer locate a branch. It provides a way for the consumer to call or email the company. It uses the camera to offer deposits on the go. And if you need more detail, you can touch a button to get to the main website.
A First Republic client with a smartphone can have access to the right information at the right time wherever he or she may be. Now that you have some sense of what a right-time experience might look like, I'll describe the three elements of the experience.
Contextual Computing Leads to Insight
Not everyone needs or wants the same thing when using an application or visiting a website. Because of that reality, context becomes both interesting and useful. Who is the person visiting the site or the application? What time is it? Where is he? When did he visit in the past? What is he viewing or doing at this moment, and how does it relate to what he's recently done? All this contextual information can help the organization deliver the most meaningful, rewarding, and worthwhile experience. Theoretically, websites are supposed to offer these contextual and personalized services today. If I go to a website I've visited before, it might come up with “Hello, Maribel,” but that's about the extent of the personalization one sees. For the most part, very little, if anything, changes as a result of the site knowing I visited it in the past or purchased certain items. The same is true with mobile apps.
Successful companies will deliver more compelling experiences by collecting and analyzing contextual data, including location, time of day, previous transactions, and device type. Sensors in the latest devices also furnish physical context, such as temperature, humidity, motion, and more. These data sources provide situational and environmental information about people, places, and things. By understanding an individual's current situation and previous history, a business can anticipate her immediate needs and offer experiences appropriate for the individual's situation. Most businesses have made limited use of context and customer records to date, but the collection and analysis of contextual data will supply the foundation for right-time experiences. This collection and analysis is where the new category of big data and analysis tools that I'll be discussing in Chapter 9 comes into play.
Mobility plays a key role in delivering right-time experiences. Mobile means more than just access to voice calls, email, and the Internet on the go. Sensors with these devices provide a foundation for contextual services, and connectivity provides a way to communicate data and delivery services. But while I find executives are much more familiar with the concept of context today than they were in the past, I don't believe many of them understand what that means for their business. And not everyone understands the definition of context or contextual service.
Marketing executives have discussed contextual services in the past, but these were usually focused on creating targeted advertising to consumers. Right-time experiences are contextual services that encompass far more than precisely tailored advertising messages. They expand to involve products and processes that meet the distinctive needs of different constituents:
- Business to consumer (B2C). The right information and services to live a richer, fuller life.
- Business to employee (B2E). The right information to perform efficiently and effectively at work.
- Business to partners (B2P). The right information and services to build a viable business ecosystem between companies.
- Things to things (T2T) and things to people (T2C). The right information sent from a connected device to a business system for automating tasks (for example, an alert from your basement to your smartphone saying you have a leak in the basement). Sensors in things can also communicate with individuals to provide information about how the device is functioning (for example, an alert from the HVAC system telling the building manager to order and install new air filters).
Context is one element of a right-time experience. However, many people think of context only as location: Where exactly is this employee, this customer, this package, this truck, or this container right now? Location is one of the most important contextual elements but not the only element. There are many other types of contextual elements, such as device type, transaction history, and time of day. Device type can be used to understand whether the device has a big or a small screen, and the application or web page can respond with the appropriate amount of text or imaging to fill the screen. Transaction history may mean an opportunity to cross-sell—or to demand payment on delivery. Time of day means marketers can send different types of messages at the times when they are most likely to be read and acted upon.
It's worth noting that smartphones and tablets are the most contextual devices that ever existed. Before we had these devices, we didn't have enough information to create contextual services. Today, even a low-end smartphone can capture multiples types of contextual information.
If we ask our customers, prospects, and employees to opt in, we have the opportunity to understand how people are using applications and services on a device. People will opt in for services that make their lives better and improve their everyday experiences. Social networks are an ideal example of how consumers are willing to exchange information, such as location and photos, for the value of communicating more efficiently with friends and loved ones.
There are at least nine types of contextual elements that organizations should consider incorporating into their business processes to deliver right-time experiences. These include, but are not limited to, location, time, and current process (see Figure 3.2). Let's investigate what each of these elements is and what type of right-time experiences they could possibly provide.
Figure 3.2 Types of Context
Source: Lopez Research LLC.
Location
Firms can use location to tailor the type and occasion of a right-time experience. Right-time experiences mean providing different services based on knowing if the user is at home, in the mall, at the office, or at a customer's site. Multiple types of location technologies—triangulation, Bluetooth, wireless location signatures (WLS), and GPS—may be combined to locate both people and things. As manufacturers outfit more devices with sensors and communications technology, everyday items will start communicating with people. We already live in a world in which, if you're driving to a meeting in downtown Los Angeles, your car can connect to a service that will identify available parking spots.
Google Now provides an example of a right-time experience that uses location, search history, and calendar services to create a smart interface with relevant data for consumers. It uses analytics to create both predictive and prescriptive experiences for the user. For example, it compiles information about what the user has searched for in the past and communicates suggestions and information based on a user's specific location. It might suggest a new Indian restaurant that is near the user's location based on previous search terms. Since it has access to the user's calendar and location, it can also offer prescriptive advice, such as when to leave for a meeting to avoid congestion and ensure the user reaches her appointment as scheduled.
A friend of mine told me how his iPhone knows that he teaches a class every Monday night (because it's in his calendar) and alerts him of the traffic conditions near the time he's supposed to depart. Since he's turned on location services, the phone is also aware of other places he goes regularly and can proactively alert him to the traffic conditions along that route. He said the first time this happened, it was strange, but he quickly grew to appreciate how his phone could now anticipate his needs. This is a perfect example of a right-time experience based on context. It's also an example of how right-time experiences can be predictive and prescriptive, which I'll discuss in a moment.
Companies can use location data to create a geofence, a sensor-based virtual boundary around physical spaces, such as a business, a mall, or a sporting venue. A business owner or manager has the opportunity to trigger communications and automate tasks based on a person entering or exiting the geofenced area. Retailers have been adding geofences for some time to track when customers are near their retail location or have entered the store. For those customers who have opted into the system, the retailer can use mobile SMS alerts or push messaging to promote upcoming in-store promotions or send an electronic coupon when the prospect is near its retail locations. Today, a majority of these push notifications are generic. In the future, as consumers become more comfortable with the technology, retailers will be able to build right-time experiences targeted to individuals.
Consumers can also use the concept of location to automate how they access their applications and services. Cover, acquired by Twitter in April 2014, offered a smartphone lock screen for Android that was contextually aware. The software learns when and where you use different apps and puts them on your phone's lock screen for easy access. It automatically recognizes when you're at home, at work, or in the car. If you're in the car, it brings the maps application front and center. At work, it might surface your calendar and document management app, such as Box.com. The user can also set a custom ring volume and wallpaper for each location. Cover markets itself as “the right apps at the right time.” This is an example of a right-time experience in which an overlay application can use location and time to make it easier to use existing apps and services.
Businesses can also use location to provide better business-to-employee experiences. Geofences are becoming popular in all types of locations and industries. Geofencing is a type of location-based service that sends messages to smartphone users who enter a defined geographic area. You may be familiar with this from your shopping experience. Some stores have created geofences that will send a message or promotion to your smartphone when you enter the store or when you've walked past a certain item. Lets look at how this might also be used in a business-to-employee example. If an employee enters the geofence, a workflow could be initiated or a message delivered. A construction firm, for example, can link a mobile device's location to a timekeeping system to automatically log when a worker enters or leaves the work site.
Location services can also provide “things to people” alerts. For example, Elgato's Smart Key is a small device that can be connected to your keys or any number of devices. An app on an iPhone can notify the user whenever he leaves his key behind, let him know where it was last seen, or help him find it by playing a sound. Since it can be attached to many things, people have gotten very creative with the use of this technology. They use it to find their cars, notify them when their luggage arrives at the airport carrousel, and protect their bags against theft while traveling. Alerting you that you've left your keys before you leave the house or immediately letting you know that your bag has been stolen is the essence of a right-time experience. It's pertinent information that's delivered in a timely fashion.
These connected devices can also communicate with business systems to automate and enhance operations. If a data center's temperature rises above a certain level, for example, the cooling system software could access the data in order to determine if there is a problem and automatically send a repair request to the maintenance company.
Time
Creating an optimal experience frequently requires understanding the time of day. An experience that is welcomed at breakfast (for example, a business news summary) is a distraction during a customer meeting. While right-time experiences benefit from real-time data, they do not have to be in real time but can happen at the moment of need or at a specific time of day. An individual may desire different services or communications based on the time of day. She may need traffic conditions and school closing information before breakfast. The exact same information can be useless by lunchtime. Vishi Gopalakrishnan, product manager for AT&T's Unified Collaboration group, says, “We don't want to send somebody an ad for Cheerios at ten o'clock at night, or an ad for gin at seven in the morning.”1 On the other hand, a friend noted that Ernest Hemingway might've loved that. So the dimension of the right time can vary based on a person's behavior. Someone who works the night shift will arguably engage with services at a different time than someone who works from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.
Companies can employ time data in conjunction with data about an individual's previous behaviors to understand the optimal type of communication and the optimal time to deliver it. A grocery store, for example, may send a text message at five o'clock to alert a commuting customer that the rotisserie chicken he's bought in the past is on sale.
Another dimension of time is based on providing the right information or service at the optimal moment. The optimal time for a communication or service relates to reacting to a change in situation. The director of sales, for example, wants to be alerted to a large customer win or loss before she enters a meeting with management. Truckers can use real-time traffic data in applications to reduce the time they spend in traffic, waiting for an open loading dock, and being on the road.
Current Process and Action
Process helps determine the flow of transaction and what information, product, or service may be most valuable in the context of completing that process or action. People frequently start and stop processes and workflows. Many processes aren't finished and are abandoned altogether because someone doesn't have enough information.
Right-time experiences will require businesses to link data across systems so the user has the right information at the point of need. For example, a procurement manager who is ordering a large quantity of a specific supply would want to know if the product is out of stock, whether the product's price will change before the order is approved, and what alternatives may be available. Before approving an employee's vacation request, a manager should know who's already on vacation and what job functions will need to be filled in the employee's absence.
Other times, a person may have started a process but doesn't want to go through the motions of completing the entire process over again from scratch. One thing the web world and e-commerce have taught us is the concept of maintaining persistence of a process across time. If you were interrupted during an online shopping process, many websites will save the items in your shopping cart in the hope that you will return. If you are signed in to a website, the site may send you an email reminder that you abandoned your cart and the items are still available.
One of the benefits of mobile is that you can accomplish a task when you are away from your home or office. However, a person may only have a few moments to complete a transaction. Delivering a right-time experience means that a person starts a transaction at one time and finishes at a later time when it's more convenient. For example, I might initiate a product refund request while I'm in line at Starbucks but I will need to stop the process while I order the coffee. In an ideal world, I'd be able to return to the app at a later time and pick up exactly where I left off.
Building a right-time experience will require a company to create this concept of persistence across a wide range of devices and processes. Netflix provides an early example of how to use persistence to create a right-time experience. You can start watching a program on your TV, stop the program, and return to it at exactly where you left off on another Netflix-connected device, such as a tablet. You could do this an hour later or days later. It's a seamless viewing (process) experience that is portable across devices and across time. It's the same case if you start an expense report or any work process. You'd like your data to be saved, and you'd like to return to exactly where you left off.
Speaking of devices, let's review some ways that device type and presence provide context to deliver right-time experiences.
Device Type, Device State, and Presence
Right-time experiences should recognize and adapt to the user's device and the quality of the network. The software should automatically adjust how it presents the information based on the screen size and what navigation methods (touch, voice, gesture) are available.
Given that people will be moving around with more than one connected device, device presence will highlight what a person is using at that moment. Presence will span across devices to include nontraditional devices such as cars, wearables, conference rooms, and videoconferencing equipment. A right-time experience can be as simple as using your smartphone to find out what conference rooms actually have people sitting in them versus what conference rooms have been reserved.
Right-time experiences will also make use of device-type capabilities (e.g., video, touch screen, accelerometers). For example, expense account software should sense the presence of a camera and prompt the user to photograph receipts. Today, the Plantronics Voyager Bluetooth headset knows if you've placed it on your ear and will automatically shift audio to the headset. If you take it off, the audio will switch back to your phone. Plantronics' Concept One headset can do head tracking and free-fall detection. This would be useful if, for example, a person fell; the headset could send a message to the phone to call a relative. If you're looking for a product in a store, the store's mobile app could pair with the device, gauge where you are looking based on your head's position, and guide you to a product with voice or image overlays. Another example of this is the new Amazon phone launched in June 2014. The Amazon phone screen has an interface called Dynamic Perspective to adjust the 3D image on the phone's screen to match users' head position.
A simple but powerful use of device context is understanding if a device's battery is charged and modifying the application functions to conserve battery life. New functions such as flexible screens, visual search, 3D imaging, holograms, and voice commands will change what types of experiences companies can offer on new smartphones, tablets, and other devices. These ways of interacting with each other and with computers were fictional a decade ago. Today, I can navigate web pages using eye tracking on a Samsung smartphone. The cinematic vision of the future has arrived, and it's available today on a smartphone near you.
Social and Behavioral
Behavioral context will help a business decide the next best action based on how the employee or customer has behaved in the past. One customer always responds to coupons for jeans, for example. One salesperson always opens her customer relationship software to the follow-up screen. Right-time experiences will learn how individuals routinely use their services and create preferences based on these behaviors and user-defined attributes.
In all of these communications, the company should be delivering on its brand proposition. Is the company a trusted partner, a low-cost provider, or an experience provider? For example, Virgin America is an airline that frequently offers low airfares, but it's actually selling a travel experience. One example of this is its interactive system, called RED. The airline uses the screens on the back of airline seats as ordering terminals for food, beverages, and entertainment. Instead of waiting for a flight attendant to arrive at their seat, passengers can order food and beverages when they want them. They can pay at their seat without providing the card to the flight attendant. If they desire, they can purchase and send a beverage to another person on board.
If you're a frequent flyer, the airline wants to use information from your previous transactions to customize your future experiences. If you purchased an animated movie or a cocktail on your last flight, Virgin America may decide to recommend other movies you may like and make it easy for you to order your favorite beverage. While air travel could be generic, Virgin America found a way to personalize it. With a customer's opt-in, the airline can build even more customized services based on contextual items, such as previous behaviors.
Environmental Conditions
Future devices will have embedded sensors that will provide environmental conditions to context-aware applications and services. Types of environmental context could include air quality, temperature, humidity, and weather forecast. For example, a transportation company can use sensors in trucks to ensure the delivery of fresh produce on time by monitoring temperature and humidity during the delivery process. Connected sensors will be used by many industries, with utility, oil, and gas industries leading the way. In the future, a utility technician could use a device's sensor to tell if there is a gas leak in the building before entering it, and airport security could scan for hazardous toxins.
The agriculture and transportation industries are already using weather data to decide when to plant or how to route trucks around snowstorms in the Midwest. Other, less obvious industries will also use weather information. Public utility companies need to monitor extremes in weather to ensure they are prepared to deliver sufficient electricity or gas to the population. Commodity traders make a number of decisions based on weather data. A freeze in Florida is likely to affect the price of citrus or crops, for example.
Construction workers carefully observe data, looking for periods to pour concrete or operate a crane. One construction company told me they use weather data to minimize fraudulent workmen's compensations claims. For example, if a construction worker said she slipped on a roof due to rain, the company uses historical weather data to confirm it actually rained that day.
In your home, your thermostat will connect to the local hourly weather forecast to decide when it should begin heating the house. Weather data will also integrate with your calendar to predict when you should leave the house to reach the office on time or if your flight is likely to be delayed.
Roles and Social Relationships
Individuals play different roles among a wide variety of relationships. By combining and analyzing data from social networks and documents or information a person has shared, companies can understand how people feel about their personal and work experiences.
In the consumer landscape, there is a wide range of data being shared in public social networks. Companies are mining sources such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to understand what topics people are interested in, how they feel about products, and how individuals are related to one another. New interest-based social networks, such as Pinterest and Houz, are visual discovery tools that you can use to find ideas for home projects or other interests such as fashion ideas. These interest-based social networks even provide methods for collecting both individual preferences (personal context) and market trends (group sentiment).
In the business world, the same concept of roles and relationships applies. Today, roles are defined by your job function. Within the organization, companies will use information from enterprise social business and collaboration tools, such as Yammer and Jive, to evaluate existing team structures, roles, and responsibilities. For example, a company could link its contact center solution to social software to discover hidden experts and content within the firm's collaboration systems.
A company can discover an employee's or customer's current needs and uncover latent desires. Understanding how an individual feels about an issue will help brands and organizations build services that are better suited to a customer's or employee's actual needs. Businesses have started to use sentiment analysis to improve business processes, customer care, and existing products. This trend will continue.
Motion
The presence or lack of motion can be used to define if and how an experience should proceed. A connected medicine bottle cap, such as those from Vitality, can sense when a patient last opened the bottle and will send reminders if the patient forgets to take the medication. For medications that lack caps, the company offers a connected pouch that has sensors in it. The pouch logs if it's been opened as a form of tracking whether the patient has taken his medication.
Sensors in the latest devices provide environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity as well as magnetometers and accelerometers for direction and orientation. Companies can use this data to monitor corporate asset health and improve service uptime. For example, motion sensors in machinery could transmit alerts to headquarters to schedule maintenance and prevent unplanned outages. GE is building these types of services today. It collects and analyzes high volumes of sensor data to predict product performance and maintenance needs and to avoid unplanned downtime in industrial equipment such as turbines, jet engines, and locomotives.
Brian Courtney from GE's Intelligent Data Platforms says, “When we sell a jet engine, in a way we sell up time. We don't actually sell the engine. We monitor the jet engine and we fix little issues before they become big issues. We've put systems in place to monitor tens of thousands of jet engines. This is what makes GE's jet engines better than anybody else's.”2
Context Matters
Within the contexts outlined above, a business can assess intent, which helps it anticipate a customer's or an employee's future behavior. Context provides the situational awareness that doesn't exist in today's transactions. Situational awareness moves us from transactional processes with limited insight to meaningful engagement. Contextual services will pull in a multitude of data points, analyze this flood, and present individuals with a set of options for how to act or react.
Many businesses are already adding a single element of context, such as location, into business processes. Companies should enhance these products with additional layers of context to create more valuable and unique experiences. Right-time experiences combine information from different sources, such as time, location, and schedule, to improve an interaction. Southwest Airlines Cargo provides an example of how adding one element of context can improve a service—and adding multiple types can make a service indispensable.
The airline adopted sensor-enabled asset tracking to provide its customers with visibility into the location of cargo shipments in the air and on the ground. The airline also created a better right-time experience by adding other contextual data, such as temperature alerts during transit and response capabilities in the event of a breakage.
Right-time experiences shouldn't require customers or employees to change their behavior to enjoy a better experience. Food chain Pret A Manger provides an example of this with its mobile website. The chain has optimized its website to respond to the time of day and the user's proximity to a Pret shop and to reformat the screen automatically to fit the type of device the consumer is using. GPS functionality displays the details of the closest shop, including the manager's name, walking directions, opening hours, and contact details. Pret A Manger illustrates how a business can create a rich contextual experience on the web without requiring a consumer to download a specialized application.
Adaptive Makes Interactions Personal
Understanding context alone isn't enough to build a right-time experience. Business processes and products must be designed to adapt to context, such as behaviors and device type. A right-time experience should also be learning, predictive, and prescriptive. Right-time experiences will automate workflows, streamline content discovery, and build knowledge iteratively over time as employees and customers use an application. Adaptive design will change a user's experience to accommodate the capabilities and limitations of the device or the user's role.
Today's applications and services were built for mass consumption and designed to work on a specific device. Right-time experiences will adapt as a person moves between devices such as from a laptop to a smartphone to a tablet. For example, while an entire product catalog could be displayed on a tablet, only the product name and price would be displayed on a smartphone. It will also change based on what the user is doing at that time. If a sales employee apparently tries to access a sensitive financial file at 3:00 A.M. from a tablet located in a hostile foreign nation, the security system should understand prior behavior and be smart enough to deny access permissions.
Or, the application could take another approach and tell me, “Hi, Maribel. In the past, you've eaten Italian food at our other properties. We have a great Italian restaurant here. Let me show you how to navigate to it.” This is the concept of taking the context, analyzing it—in this case, a real-time analysis—and then making a suggestion as a result of it, a suggestion I can either follow or ignore.
The hotel can communicate with me and send me a push notification that says, in effect, we know you're here; you're probably looking for lunch, and here are some suggestions. That is the concept of being adaptive; it means that over time, the application can learn how people react to different messages or different suggestions.
It is possible to write software in a way that it learns and adapts to a user's behavior. In time it can, for example, take a customer to the screen showing the one-pound Earl Grey loose tea because it has learned that every two or three months, this customer reorders that product from the several hundred varieties and package sizes the site offers. Or, I might want to go directly to my watch list on eBay; the eBay mobile app learns this and always takes me there first. A salesperson may always start his day looking at his prospects list in Salesforce.com.
If the user's context changes, the right-time experience should automatically adapt. Right-time experiences will analyze a person's transaction history, analyze data from her current condition, and respond with data that is relevant to the individual or to a specific occurrence. The best right-time experiences will make the technology seemingly disappear, leaving people free to do their job or perform a task without learning how to use an application or a service.
What could a learning and predictive right-time experience look like? MGM's Bellagio hotel provides an example of this today. If I am standing at the restaurant row in a casino for any length of time, the casino has the opportunity to improve my experience. The Cisco wireless network at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas could recognize that I am standing in restaurant row (location) and that I've been standing there for 10 minutes (dwell time). It could then alert the marketing software of this. The marketing software would analyze this data and infer that I may be trying to decide what restaurant to select.
The system knows that it's 12:30 P.M. and all of the restaurants are packed (time of day and asset utilization). It knows from my hotel reservation that I am traveling with my family. If it's connected into the hotel's restaurant reservations system, it knows I like Chinese food based on my previous stay (customer records and behavior). It can use the hotel's mobile app that I've downloaded to my phone to send me a message that is targeted to my behavior at that time. The message could say, “Maribel, Noodles has a 1-hour wait for a table for four, but Café Bellagio has only a 15-minute wait. Would you like to make a reservation?” It's an assistive experience that helps me easily accomplish my goals (eating) and helps the hotel make an additional sale.
What could this look like in a business-to-employee scenario? Similar to consumer services, today's rigid employee apps will also be replaced by adaptive and predictive applications and cloud-resident services. Kana's contact center desktop experience provides an example on the enterprise side. Rather than burden agents with all sorts of options, the desktop presents the exact information that applies to the task at hand. If the conversation with the customer shifts, the software offers continuously updated options as events unfold. The system learns and adapts over time. With the right information at their fingertips, agents solve problems faster, often on first contact.
This is the concept of learning how customers and employees use an application and working overtime to make the experience seamless. It's happening as enterprise software moves to the cloud and it will continue as we develop new mobile software. My next car will probably recognize me by my smartphone, unlock the driver-side door, automatically adjust the seats, and queue up my favorite music playlist. It will adapt to me. It will effectively “know” me.
Predictive and Prescriptive Experiences Anticipate Behavior
Eventually, the program and/or service will start to be predictive. Predictive has largely been discussed in an advertising context. While predictive advertising is valuable, it is overplayed as a concept. You can predict that Maribel needs to buy toothpaste because she bought toothpaste two months ago. However, many people have bought toothpaste or diapers or any number of basic goods recently.
Everyone thinks about that type of thing as a predictive example, which is fine. However, it isn't very innovative since it takes into account only one data point—in this example, that I've bought toothpaste in the past. Frequently the advertisements aren't even targeted, let alone predictive.
Predictive right-time experiences will discover an individual's patterns and modify the user experience to make these patterns more accessible or more easily accomplished. This prevents issues and presents opportunities to the user. It combines historical data with predictive algorithms to define the probability of future events. It also takes in data from more than one source, which could include things such as transaction history, visits, customer care calls, and social networking feeds. Mobile-enabled business processes combine data from previous transactions with current contextual data to understand what a user is doing at this moment and what information or services will be useful.
A predictive example is pharmaceutical salespeople getting the data they need pushed to them when they are about to walk into a certain customer's site. They want to know what the doctor has ordered in the past, if he's received it, and if he's had any issues. The right time to receive this information is before the rep walks into the office. A pharmaceutical rep could automatically receive updated content in her sales management app tailored to the doctor she is about to meet and providing details about the practice and what products the doctor has prescribed in the past. If the news is bad, the rep would like to know this information more than a few minutes before she walks through the door. She wants and needs time to fix the problem. A right-time experience will predict not only what information would be useful but also when it needs to be delivered.
The app could also automatically log the sales call based on when the rep enters and exits the hospital as well as provide directions to the next appointment. This is predicting and automating what needs to be done next.
A simple example of a predictive service that exists today is maintenance alerts in the auto industry. Newer cars can communicate information with their owners and the service center. It can tell you based on your tire usage when you actually need to balance or replace your tires or check the air pressure. Instead of basing your maintenance on the number of miles you've driven, the car can tell you when to replace items based on the actual wear-and-tear of the parts. You may be due for a brake pad replacement at 16,000 miles, but your car can tell you that, based on your driving, you won't need to change them for another two months. The car has collected and analyzed sensor data, learned your driving patterns, and predicted when you'll need service.
Smart businesses will use analytics to create predictions that also improve customer care and deliver the right information to an employee. For example, companies like GE and Bosch are also building predictive services in industrial automation to minimize equipment failures and improve asset utilization.
In the past, contextual data wasn't readily available. Today it is, and we should be using it. The principle is for an application or service to take the contextual information from the device and combine it with other types of context, such as social networking behavior and previous transactions. It must analyze it, learn from it, and use all the available data to make better and better predictions of what the user wants and offer right-time experiences.
Predictive Experiences Offer Advice and Action (Prescription)
A right-time experience will not only predict what will happen but also provide guidelines for what the company or individual should do as a result of these predictions. These right-time experiences help companies learn from previous decisions and plan for upcoming issues.
An example of prescriptive right-time experience might be software a company uses to avoid mobile roaming expenses. If an employee schedules a business trip abroad with the company's travel agent, the company's mobile management software could automatically check to see if the user has an international roaming plan. If not, the software could launch a purchase order for the plan and set a reminder to cancel it at the trip's end. The service will learn what type of calling behavior the employee has had in the past. For example, Visage Mobile is designing a service that can predict if an employee will receive roaming charges based on information about booking a trip from the travel department; it prescribes a course of action accordingly.
Customer care can also be improved by adding context to business processes. An automobile service center could create a right-time experience by linking a customer's car sensor to the client's service record and the center's scheduling system. When the car drives into the service center, the scheduling software could automatically check in the vehicle, alert the service staff to which services are required, and suggest additional services.
Connected Makes Interactions Actionable
The experiences a company's customers, employees, and partners have in far too many situations are broken because they are complicated, generic, and irrelevant. In many cases, the company provides limited or poor-quality data or, worse yet, the wrong data. For example, Comcast's provisioning system may say a prospect's home can't get cable TV service. The home is a new build, but the prospect can see that the actual cable facilities are within 100 feet of the new home. In this case, the customer is frustrated and Comcast may lose a sale because it's using outdated records. If Comcast had connected its systems with those of the town's building department, it would've known about the new construction and could've sent a team to investigate if it was serviceable.
Today's technology offers organizations the opportunity to move into right-time experiences, which take into account all the context now available, analyze that context, and make these experiences less generic, more engaging, and more relevant. These experiences are also less complicated, because they present the right information without the user hunting for it.
I've discussed contextual and the adaptive, but these experiences should also be connected. This means the data flows smoothly to every system that needs it. If an order goes to manufacturing, there may be many systems that need access to that information. The information from the order should automatically be connected to systems that manage the warehouse, shipping, and accounts receivable, as an example.
Right-time experiences will bridge and integrate internal data sources and silos. Most applications operate in information silos, while right-time experiences integrate data across internal company departments. They will also link to partner and third-party data sources that reside outside the company. Weather, traffic, flight data, and parking spot availability are just a few examples of third-party web-accessible data sources.
Right-time experiences will link to application programming interface (API)–accessible data and services, such as reviews, product comparisons, transaction clearinghouses, authentication services, and click-to-call services. Other new third-party data sources are also becoming web-enabled, such as Data.gov, health care data, directories, and mobile application utilization. It's not just consumer-oriented data that is being made available, however. Businesses are also providing API-accessible data to their partners, and IT managers will use this data to create right-time experiences that optimize workflow. For example, a beverage manufacturer could make its inventory data accessible to its bottle distributor's dispatch systems with APIs.
Hertz Drives RTEs
A real opportunity exists today. Businesses are collecting data and turning it into information, information that can be a valuable asset. The Hertz Corporation is an interesting case study of how a company can use mobile and IoT to enhance and transform a customer's experience.
Hertz is one of the world's largest general-use airport car rental brands, with approximately 10,900 rental locations in about 150 countries. One thing that makes it interesting is how it is approaching mobile. It's an established company that is choosing to lead, not follow, in contextual services. According to Rob Moore, senior vice president and chief technology officer, the corporation is looking at several types of context: location, time, inventory and availability of cars, and customer history.
Not all that long ago, a Hertz customer would land at an airport, find the counter, give the agent her license and credit card, sign all the paperwork, and find the car. This then progressed to a more seamless experience for Gold members with a kiosk. How does mobile change that?
When a customer lands and turns on her smartphone, the Hertz app knows her plane has landed and whether it is early or late based on the customer's reservation information. It knows what type of car she's selected and can match that choice to the cars available on the lot at that time. The app will be able to route the customer right to her car, using the context of mapping to help her get there. She does not have to look at the board or search for the car, thanks to the use of the context of location and the context of time.
If a company ensures its systems are connected, it can then take advantage of real-time inventory. When a customer opens the Hertz app, he will see what cars are available. The app gives a person the option of a free upgrade to certain cars. Or, it can ask if the renter wants to upgrade to another class car for an additional charge. This is a more agile business process because it lets customers make the change on the fly, and it lets them do so without any human intervention.
Upgrading to a bigger, hotter car was always an option, but relatively few customers wanted to go through the process of finding a clerk and redoing the paperwork. Moore says that the Hertz mobile “Carfirmation” is now live to allow customers to view inventory to change the car at no charge or choose an upgrade, including a special “deal of the day.” As one happy customer said, “I couldn't believe how awesome this was. I changed the car on my iPad while on the Hertz bus ride from the airport, and literally three minutes later I was at the Hertz lot and they'd already switched the car and had the correct slot on the board with my new rental.”
That, of course, is nice to hear, but more significantly, the program meant over $1.14 million in additional revenue in the 18 months after the December 2011 launch.3 Moore says that 26 percent of customers change the cars they reserved, at an average of $73.92 in revenue per transaction. Hertz is using mobility and context such as inventory availability and prior rental history to earn more from its existing assets.
On returning the car, customers can just park and go. Sensors in the car know when it has entered the Hertz lot. They can report what time the driver dropped it off and calculate the bill. Moore says a paperless eReceipt is zapped to customers' inboxes in less than 30 minutes. Paperless receipts are not new, but the savings in labor and improved accuracy quickly add up.
Another change: For some time, Hertz had its own GPS system, a small device of its own design called Neverlost. Today, many customers aren't purchasing this service because their smartphone already contains a navigation system. (That's a challenge for Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, and other GPS marketers as well.) So Hertz's challenge was to sell customers navigation for $10 a day when they have something very similar—and nearly free—in their smartphone.
Hertz has redesigned Neverlost to look more like an iPad and plans to put it in all its cars. If the customer's smartphone dies, or if the customer has only a basic cellphone, the Neverlost car tablet provides immediate access to on-demand GPS. It can put the driver in touch with a live agent for immediate help. It includes local restaurant guides, highlights of the area, and recommendations. Hertz can work with partners to sell advertising to local restaurants and other businesses. This creates a two-sided business model: The customer pays for the service, and the restaurants, hotels, and tour companies pay for the service to be available.
Here's where the Internet of Things comes into play in changing the business. The cars Hertz purchases have a wide variety of sensors. These sensors can enable functions such as vehicle tracking if the car is stolen. If the “check engine” light comes on while the customer has one of the Hertz cars, the renter can call Hertz and one of its employees can look at the data feed for the customer's car. The employee can then tell the customer whether she needs to return the car immediately or not. A fuel sensor can tell whether the gas tank is completely full when the customer returns the car. As a result, Hertz can automatically calculate to charge the customer for the gas she didn't replace. Hertz has gone from having higher fuel costs than it should have to charging customers for the fuel actually used. The savings on fuel pays for the cost of adding technology to manage the new sensor networks.
Moreover, the sensors give the corporation new and interesting information. For example, they give Hertz a sense of issues such as how the tires perform on their cars. If you have thousands of automobiles being driven all over the world and can capture the data, you can figure out how tire performance differs in, say, North America and Egypt. You can also figure out whether the tire companies are living up to product performance guarantees. Hertz can take that information, understand how its cars are being driven by various characteristics (e.g., country, climate), recognize differences in tire behavior, and predict what maintenance the cars might need in the future. That's valuable information.
Hertz may decide to share some aggregated IoT (not individual renters') information, such as tire wear-and-tear, with tire manufacturers. The corporation could sell it, barter for information it doesn't have, or use it productively some other way. It's the concept of linking to internal data, partner data, and third-party data sources outside the company to build a better product and service. This is the concept of connected data across business partners. If Hertz partners with the tire company, the tire company would have access to information it doesn't currently have access to. Each party can make better business decisions as a result of this new data.
This is an example of the fourth use case I listed at the beginning of this chapter, business-to-things and things-to-consumer. We've changed what types of things are communicating with each other. It's not just businesses talking to customers. It's businesses trying to change how they work with employees and partners. It is taking in data from sensors, devices, and equipment and turning it into actionable information. We need to think about the conversation, whether business-to-consumer, business-to-employee, or business-to-partner, in terms of how can we use mobile—and big data and cloud computing—to give better experiences to our customers and employees. In the Hertz example, it can be seen that the company has business-to-consumer experiences but also has the potential to deliver a richer business-to-partner conversation.
Right-Time Experiences Don't Happen Overnight
Organizations should take a phased approach to building new customer and employee experiences. Regardless of the type of experience they are building, these will evolve into right-time experiences in three phases: extend, enhance, and evolve.
The first phase of building a right-time experience—extend—is to speed up an existing process using mobile, big data, cloud computing, and other technology. It's basically getting your apps and processes to operate in a mobile and cloud computing world.
The second—enhance—is to make a process better with more information. This involves contextual information such as location, sensor data, image capture, and big data, all of which provide new information. Big data captures all the raw material about social media, previous transactions, context, and more, and it serves up a new piece of information—a right-time experience—as a result.
The third—evolve and transform—relates to the concept of predictive or adaptive services. The organization is able to do things with communications, customer care, and commerce that it could not do at all before or could not do economically (see Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3 Businesses Evolve to Right-Time Experiences in Three Phases
First, a business will extend its existing applications and services to mobile devices. Next, it will enhance these experiences using the different types of context I have mentioned in this chapter. In this second phase, the business will begin to use big data and analytics to turn context into insight that can enhance an experience. In the final phase, the company will create brand-new experiences that leverage context, mobility, and all the new tools that are available to it. I discuss this evolution in further detail in Chapter 7. But for now, I need to delve deeper into what right-time experiences look like and how we can create a framework for thinking about this transition.
The 3 Cs of Right-Time Experience
As you can see from these examples, there are many types of right-time experiences that a business might want to create. It's always a challenge to figure out where to begin because we face so many options, possibilities, and complexities. To help categorize right-time experiences, we should begin by considering what I would call communication, care, and commerce.
- Communication is about trying to create a more continual dialogue that can improve engagement and customer care. It could lead to commerce but isn't always about commerce.
- Care is improving customer satisfaction while reducing the cost of customer care. It's about improving the customer experience so customers and partners want to do business with you. However, it's not limited to customers, prospects, and partners. Companies can also create care experiences for their employees by, for example, making an employee's job easier to do.
- Commerce right-time experiences make the sales process more convenient and valuable for consumers and easier for the employees and partners.
And that's what the next three chapters are about.
Summary
In summary, businesses need to deliver right-time experiences that deliver the right information at the point of need or desire. These experiences aren't just for consumers but are also for your employees and partners. What makes right-time experiences different is that they are contextual and adaptable to user preference, and eventually they will become predictive. To build these experiences, businesses must connect internal data sources for a consistent experience. To enhance the experience, leaders will connect to external data sources. Companies should think of right-time experiences as supporting communication, commerce, and customer care.
Right-time experiences aren't just reactions to situations. They enable versatility by anticipating customer and employee needs. Customer and partner RTEs drive revenue and improve the customer experience. Employee RTEs are about increasing productivity and reducing costs.
Companies that want to successfully compete will reshape their business models, increase collaboration, and improve customer relationships with right-time experiences. With proper planning, any industry can create right-time experiences to change its customer experience and to help drive growth.