Yesterday I read an interesting qoute from Nokia CEO
The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don't have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail.
And true enough, we live today in an era of disruption, a world where several underlying transformations are forcing new ways of thinking, re-inventing markets and providing exciting new solutions to old problems.
Uber, AirBNB and even lending club are only few examples I can think of.
For Uber, it was about redefining the basic elements of drivers and passengers, and using technology to find new ways of connecting them in a smarter, more effective way.
For Airbnb, it was about the basic elements of travelers and lodging owners, using technology to connect them in new ways, bypassing the entire traditional hospitality network and for LendingClub, it was about redefining borrowers and investors, and how to connect them through a sophisticated social financial network.
What's common to all these reinventions is the simple idea behind them: It's about getting-down-to-basics, stripping down each of the relevant domains to its most basic elemental components, and then introducing a novel way to use these basic elements in a new configuration, providing better results.
The time is NOW
Why are these re-inventions are happening now?
Our world is currently undergoing several transformations, all converging at once and occurring simultaneously, forcing disruption and change.
First, we're seeing a digital transformation process under way, a general term that encompasses a profound and accelerated transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way.
The digital transformation is powered by an unprecedented data transformation , the way that organizations and individuals mine, process, understand and take action on data, using the growing power of Analytics and Artificial Intelligence machine learning capabilities, that are becoming more and more powerful, user-friendly and ubiquitous.
These transformations are contributing to another change in landscape, that is already happening, workforce transformation. We're seeing big changes in the demographics that make up our sales force, the changes in expectations that this new sales force brings and the transformations that are required to maintain our workforce engaged and motivated.
Finally, we are seeing a major infrastructure transformation that is also a major business paradigm shift, with the move to the cloud. We're seeing this transition across industries and more importantly we're seeing this as an inevitable change on how services and applications are consumed, paid for, and maintained.
A new transformation is right around the corner
I believe that a new transformation is underway - the experience transformation.
This transformation is going to have a major impact on customer service and will eventually, re-invent customer service.
So what does re-inventing customer service really mean?
First New ways of creating omnichannel interactions that deliver smart, highly personalized, connections between customers and employees, across all touchpoints…
Second, it means new ways of understanding customers and their journeys, acting on and predicting their next action…
Third, it means new ways of engaging employees and optimizing our workforce, driving motivation and adapting to our workforce needs, both customer-facing and in our back office…using advanced Analytics to generate insight, take action and predict intent.
And last, doing all this both on-premises and in the Cloud.
To learn more about how NICE is reinventing customer service checkout our website www.nice.com