This week at the RightNow Summit, CEO Greg Gianforte showed a demo of the future of the customer experience. This video (my recording of it here) was fully in line with my vision of the mobile integrating with social and cloud to create contextual connections that deliver world-class customer experiences. It started with beyond channels, beyond devices, beyond agents and beyond personalization. I liked this. Technologies such as mobile and social have been on discrete technology curves but as they reach a base level of maturity, discrete services will give way to more integrated experiences. The video highlighted several key things:
1) People will use multiple devices/screens and services will flow seamlessly between these devices.
2) Devices will have multiple inputs – voice, touch, swipe and Xbox Kinect-style navigation
3) It seamlessly moves from assisting you with items in your personal life such as shopping and scheduling your car maintenance to aiding you in your business life by rerouting you on your business trip.
4) The companies that you are dealing with recognize you and also have immediate access to your history, which aids them in servicing you.
5) New contextual services will includes multiple types of authentication management, including methods as advanced as fingerprint recognition on mobile devices and automobiles.
6) It integrates your location and adapts based on what you are doing. For example, if you are in the car moving at 60 miles per hour, you’ll need a voice rather than a text interface. It blends data such as traffic data and location.
7) It blends chatting with live agents as well as virtual assistants.
The new customer experience ties together specific knowledge about your history, with context about what you are doing with data that is acceptable from the web. In short, it’s exactly what we need but the challenge will be integrating all of that.
