Research firm Altimeter has released a free 30 page report Customer Experience in the Internet of Things: Five Ways Brands Can Use Sensors to Build Better Customer Relationships to illustrate “how brands can use connected devices to enhance the customer experience and create a ‘win-win’ value exchange for all parties.”
It claims to give brands a framework for contextualising IoT in consumer-facing programs, including case studies across the five use cases: reward, information and decision-making; facilitation; service; innovation.
Altimeter says that With every consumer expected to own up to 20 or more connected devices by the year 2020, the IoT is a channel for engagement that brands can’t afford to ignore, but many companies are mystified by IoT, and how it fits in with their digital strategy.
According to Altimeter IoT helps those in consumer-facing functions (eg, marketing, support, sales, product) achieve their goals of brand awareness, insight, contextual relevance, satisfaction, efficiency, loyalty, innovation, and conversion in several ways. It lists these as
- Context By leveraging sensors and customer insight, IoT brings us closer than ever to the ultimate marketing objective: delivering the right content or experience in the right context. In other words, delivering the right information or service to the right person, at the right place and time via the right platform.
- Unprecedented insight into the customer journey. Creating and monitoring sensor-based touch points in the offline world provides brands empirical, often customer-driven, insights that bridge the historically mysterious gap between how consumers behave online and what they do in conjunction offline.
- The world’s largest focus group. IoT enables real-time insights on actual consumer behaviour, product performance, and consumer-product/service interaction, not just what people say they do and what they say the product and service do. As a result, product and service optimization can happen faster and with greater accuracy. It can also reduce friction in traditional consumer-driven communications with brands.
- Consumer-driven optimization. Marketers can leverage consumer interaction for ongoing optimisation thanks to real-time insight into how consumers interact with connected endpoints, the ability for end users to customize preferences, machine learning, and other predictive capabilities. This means more accuracy and less guessing.
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