#10 – Seconds and milliseconds will be deal-breakers

At heart, delivering a great customer experience has always centred around helping customers achieve what they want in the fastest and most convenient manner. While this will not change in a hyper-connected world, what will change  is the demands placed on experiences in order to be seamless, fast and convenient.

Driving the change is technology and customer expectations that carry over freely between industries. For a nurse used to ultra-smooth check-out experiences when shopping online, having to wait three seconds for an IT-ticket to file at work will be enormously frustrating. For a logistics manager used to granular real-time location updates when ordering a taxi,  having to wait five minutes for a parcel location to update will feel like ages.

To stay competitive in a digital economy where tolerance for friction approaches zero and competing services never more than a click or swipe away; tomorrow’s digital enterprises - whether consumer-facing or business-facing - will make it a priority to match the convenience and seamlessness of leading global CX-obsessed companies at every touchpoint of the customer journey. 

From AI-recommendations, and delivery times to real-time inventory-updates  and page-loading times, that arms race will increasingly come to revolve around responsiveness measured in seconds and milliseconds.

3 Tips to be prepared

1. Make seamlessness and convenience a top priority

To stay competitive in a world where all daily experiences will be mediated through technology; tomorrow’s successful connected enterprises will have to become experts in removing user friction.  To guide the work, enterprises will constantly be asking themselves two critical questions when it comes to customer experience. Is the current solution we’re offering the easiest one for our customers, and is it the fastest? Because if there’s one thing that tomorrow’s customers won’t accept, it is having their time and attention held hostage due to poor design or lagging technology.

2. Decide what to automate and what to elevate 

As data, connectivity and artificial intelligence become indispensable enablers of almost every product or service; tomorrow’s successful connected enterprises should form a clear idea of which parts of the customer journeys that users enjoy and see an intrinsic value in, and which parts they feel could ideally just go away. The former should be treated as a potential source of competitive advantage and lavished with resources, attention and design; the latter should, enabled by technology, be a prioritized area for smart automation

3. Use the best as benchmark

Once upon a time, booking a doctor's appointment and watching a movie were two vastly different experiences. Today, the only thing separating them are a few pixels on a smartphone screen. To meet customer expectations moving forward, successful enterprises should make it a habit to always benchmark (digital) customer experiences against leading global consumer apps, whether in terms of features, convenience or ease of use. Because as users stop caring about industry boundaries, so should enterprise CX strategies.

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This article is part of our report: 12 predictions for Tomorrow's Connected Enterprise read the rest of the predictions here:

Tomorrow's Connected Enterprise