Brand Evolution: Designing and Automating Real-Time Customer Experience Through Data Analytics

As the speed of information and level of global connectivity accelerates, brands are exploring new ways to profile, predict, and even influence user behavior. U+, in partnership with Forbes writers David Howitt and Piper Carr, is excited to bring you this report on the technological trends powering this revolution in customer understanding.

This year, mobile researcher Chetan Sharma referred to the current era as “The Future of Connected Intelligence.”

We often remind clients about the power of connectivity. When everything is connected to everything else, across an insanely fast global network, with mobile, web, and IoT connectivity all converging, well-designed companies are likely to experience corollary growth in both brand awareness and their services business.

In this accelerated space, technology challenges the boundaries of a huge range of social norms that, in some cases, have existed for millennia, including the fundamentals of personal privacy.

As a result, we’re now seeing an emerging trend in how businesses of all sizes are going to identify and manage their customers in the future. This technology’s initial growth is likely to start out slow but accelerate very quickly into nothing short of a revolution in how we communicate, market to, and manage our customers.

If this hypothesis is true, how do we plan for the future as brand or product owners, and how do we respond to this change as an increasingly global society?

Advanced Facial Recognition tied to user profile and other meta-data is likely to revolutionize “anytime, anywhere” brand marketing

In addition to the interconnectedness of everything, our ability to analyze, predict, and even inform behavior through user profiles and other forms of data is now a reality.

As both the speed of information and the amount of customer engagement opportunities accelerate, analysts are able to understand data almost as soon as it’s generated, instead of the months or years it may have taken previously.

Even 100 years ago, people worked and lived in highly decentralized societies and economies. In today’s climate we have social, political and economic norms from a decentralized age co-existing with a completely connected technological backdrop.

Age of the Asymptotic

A concept we routinely explore with clients and in workshops is what author, technologist, and Singularity proponent Ray Kurzweil likes to call the “Age of the Asymptotic.”

Kurzweil frequently cites exponentially rising asymptotic curves—in which sudden growth takes the shape of a hockey stick—as paragons of this hyper-connected era.

Such curves invite us to consider that technology may be growing faster than we can process socially and may be a major driver for the evolution of politics, economy, and social norms.

We have all seen the astronomical growth of Internet giants like Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook. The math behind these growth curves reveals that a new mechanism is at play in product and brand development. This mechanism demonstrates how quickly growth can happen and how much impact it can exert on social awareness and behavior.

For businesses of any size seeking to engage in strategic planning, this curve is a critical tool for understanding the astonishing rate at which they can build, launch, and iterate on products.

Data + Network Technology + Social Promotion can drive brand attach at record speed and value

In real terms, companies such as Tinder have gone from zero to tens of millions of users in around two years, and are stating $3.5 billion in enterprise value without having a physical product, retail space, or any brand marketing whatsoever. This is pure value being spun out of a network, user interface, and millions of users driving viral adoption.

As nearly all businesses move from basic websites and mobile applications to advanced areas of IoT and “Connected Intelligence,” the next tipping point is certainly going to involve real-time customer understanding, as well as new ways of thinking about privacy and security norms.

Organizations that can easily solve for this service will become the next high-growth platform and service providers, while businesses that can effectively adopt these trends without tipping over some of the existing residual concerns about data privacy and “Big Brother” invasiveness will be especially well-positioned to become early adopters.

The fact that such a high percentage of consumers are already sharing fairly personal data on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and other sites—and in some cases EXTREMELY personal data on dating sites such as Match, Bumble, and Tinder—suggests that technology is redefining legacy boundaries around the use of personal data in favor of more social leniency.

This is especially true if the incentives to provide such data, and allow it to be accessible, are desirable enough for the end user.

That is to say, if a provider can make an experience efficient, cost-effective, and differentiated enough to forsake some areas of privacy, users will likely concede to it because they are already socially acclimated.

A next-gen service that is likely to be introduced as part of brand marketing and “big data analysis” is the ability to identify an end user when they enter, or are near, a storefront.

Using hardware, as well as facial and other biometric recognition software, data analysts can access users’ social, mobile, and real-time data to provide powerful predictive analytics around each profile.

Will growth in these services become the next “asymptotic business curve” and result in the next suite of billion-dollar valuations?

Emerging trends in real-time customer analytics underscore the fact that many technological advances, once considered futuristic, are now being adopted by current business applications. In addition to raising issues of privacy and security, the businesses that have started to apply these technologies face the problem of how to best engage with the end user both physically and digitally.

These new applications will enable brands to understand customers before they even walk in the door, tailoring ideal experiences based on who they are, their historical behavior, and even how they are feeling in the moment. While the technology may become accessible to any brand, the winners will be those who curate the experience with a balance of sensitivity and execution, so customers gain the benefits without feeling their privacy has been violated.

As consultants, we are increasingly being asked to make use of technology mashups such as military-grade facial recognition, access to users’ social media, web, and mobile profiles, and ever cheaper network and high-definition video cameras. Many innovators in product, marketing, and data intelligence are combining these tools to help traditionally data-poor verticals such as retail and live events gather highly nuanced and comprehensive customer insights.

Biometric authentication and haptic computing is likely to grow as fast as any social network and change how brands marketers and services companies connect to users

Given this backdrop, the worst possible outcome is to have customers’ personal information used in service of an intrusive video ad or high-pressure sales pitch from a smarmy clerk.

These examples are no longer the stuff of Minority Report or Blade Runner futurism—they are actual use cases with a high chance of implementation. It is completely within the realm of possibility that a firm like 23andMe might give clients the option of sharing private real-time DNA data in return for receiving high-incentive offers.

The prospect of achieving a highly connected, technologically driven understanding of your customers might be daunting for businesses that are still getting their arms around multichannel retail, e-commerce platforms, and mobile applications. However, the idea of subscribing to a service that allowed you to host your customer information probably seemed altogether futuristic not too long ago.

Real-time analysis of an individual’s profile data using various different types of authentication (including biometric) might seem futuristic, but it’s happening right now and will factor into how all brands market, sell, and promote their services in the near future

As innovations emerge, brands can anticipate the development of third-party solutions that will enable them to harness and leverage the opportunities of new technologies.

Even for platforms like Salesforce.com, achieving wide-scale adoption required building momentum, socialization, and understanding their value proposition, as well as finding and engaging early adopters. Over time, these tools that enable a highly nuanced understanding of consumers will become a significant part of the landscape of consumer engagement.

Tools such as Salesforce also provide an ERP backdrop whereby real-time customer analytics can be brought to life. In other words, cloud services that are already network enabled, reasonably well-understood, and are currently capturing unfathomable amounts of data serve as a bit of a technical midwife in the transition to real-time customer management.

Salesforce growth since their formation in 1999 is yet another “asymptotic” growth curve. What will the next evolution of this company be? Will Salesforce become the leader in Customer Data brokerage?

As we begin this next stage of digital collision, evolution, and transformation, the biggest question for strategists and leadership teams is, “What do we do now? How do we bridge the gap between the way we run businesses today and the point in the future where everyone ‘gets it’? What do we do while we’re waiting for the evolution of tools that tell us everything we need to know about the customer and what to do about it in real time?”

While the engine will be technology, the ultimate answer to the question is very much human. The firms that are successfully leading the way in Net Promoter Scores and J.D. Power and Associate awards are simply using better customer intelligence to guide them — they don’t confuse the data with the work itself.

The real work begins with better sales and customer service training, brand management, communications, and business space.

In the end, the brands that are already working on the fundamentals of consumer engagement will be the ultimate beneficiaries of this kind of technologically powered customer understanding. Building on existing knowledge, they will be well-positioned to incorporate these new data-driven insights into a highly sophisticated strategy that makes use of both digital and real-time data applications.

The above insight has been a major theme in the work we do, both in the media and the literature we have produced. In the future, the big winners will be the organizations and business leaders who find the balance between implementing the technology that drives growth and making the very human decisions required to effectively wield these changes as they emerge.

The U+ Method can efficiently and effectively lead the development, implementation, and improvement of innovations in any sector. To date, we have used this method to bring 100+ products to market, creating over $1 billion in value for Fortune 1000 companies. Check out U+ success stories here.

David Howitt is the CEO of Meriwether Group and author of Heed Your Call, a book that celebrates entrepreneurs and the journeys they embark upon.

Piper Carr is the Co-Founder of Citizen, a recognized leader in digital product innovation; EY acquired Citizen in 2018.