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SAP HYBRIS -Commerce, IOT, CRM Event 2016

SAP HYBRIS -Commerce, IOT, CRM Event 2016

After attending the SAP Hybris IOT/ CRM event, I was very impressed to see a vendor really connect the dots between commerce and customer service and customer experience. Commerce is really where the rubber meets the road. At the end of the day, if the customer experience is poor, customers will abandon shopping carts and revenue will suffer. But SAP Hybris is helping customers handle this. SAP Hybris is looking to become partners with brands in their digital transformation. They deliver  customer data management, context-driven marketing tools and unified commerce processes for all a brand’s channels.

  • SAP Hybris Commerce Solution: This solution helps brands to target and engage with your customers better, wherever they are. As the world of commerce continues to change, this can give customers a consistent and meaningful experience – across every channel, every time.  The core hybris solution ranks consistently among the top commerce software platforms worldwide. Their B2B and B2C commerce applications include an Omni-Channel Offering, Product Content Management (also known as Master Data Management or Product Information Management), Order Managementhybris Marketing Conversion, and powerful search and merchandising. And Hybris, at its core, is omni-channel. The commerce software helps integrate all digital and physical customer touchpoints onto a single platform – including online, mobile, point-of-sale, call center, social media and print. Regardless of your industry, SAP can help to create contextual, personalized and relevant customer experiences that boost loyalty and increase sales. Brands can kick-start their commerce project in just a few months through the hybris Commerce Accelerator. Omni-channel solutions are pre-configured for B2C and B2B, and for specific regions and industries.
  • SAP Hybris Marketing: This solution combines superior customer insight with a highly agile and scalable platform. Brands can reach their customers at all points of their journey, and boost loyalty by responding to real-time data to deliver the best possible customer experience. Note that traditional marketing campaigns can fall short at engaging the individual customer. They can lack the basic knowledge of customer’s wants and needs and blast indiscriminate messages to the masses. However, Hybris Marketing enables marketers to develop a deeper understanding of customers; i.e., to know what they have done, what they may do and most importantly what they are doing now. Brands can gain real-time insights into the context of each customer and leverage these insights to deliver highly individualized customer experiences across channels. Here are some of the benefits:
  1. Understand Real-Time Customer Intents. Dynamically capture and enrich customer profiles across all sources into a single view, leverage implicit customer signals to gain insights into customer’s real-time intents
  2. Deliver Unique Customer Experiences. Convert ‘in-the-moment’ opportunities to dynamically deliver contextually relevant customer experiences across channels. Create new engagements to increase online community participation and customer loyalty
  3. Market with Speed and Agility. Proactively react to customer opportunities with increased visibility and alignment of the marketing process, resources, and performance.
  • Products for Billing: SAP Hybris Billing helps brands to monetize their digital transformation and renovate their revenue management processes with a highly agile and scalable platform. SAP allows customers to build flexible pricing models to meet their B2C and B2B customer needs as well as share revenues with partners of their business network.

SAP /IOT: Devices of all types now communicate over the Internet, creating unprecedented potential for sales and service in the utilities industries. IoT items include smart home appliances, thermostats, meters and monitoring software, cars, alternate power devices, irrigation technology, fleet vehicles, store sensors, networked sensors, and software integrated with machinery. All of these support a new and diverse collection of customers and consumers: more aware, expecting individualized service, and a radically changing the supplier/customer relationship. The connectivity and communication abilities of devices of all sizes will vastly change every aspect of marketing, delivery, and support of utilities, as it has done with other industries. Countries, cities, and individual consumers are making significant changes in their consumption and usage of utility-related resources. Some of these include:

>> More reliable connectivity, increased data availability, and lower price points make virtually anything connectible

>> Every business must now consider itself a digital business, regardless what product or service is being sold

> Every business must own its data and make it available across the organization and to consumers

Businesses are preparing for a future where software becomes more important than hardware and data becomes more important than products. A new generation of consumer (the prosumer) is becoming an active partner in the production and distribution cycle. What are the benefits?

  • Better use of a utility’s products and services, making consumption and customer relations healthier
  • The opportunity to upsell and/or to offer upgrades for newer, better, and more effective products and services
  • Predictive service based on warnings, alarms, or analytics sent by the devices themselves
  • Tailored pricing – flexible entitlements based on usage, frequency or time, and metering
  • Wider range of services– extension into new service areas
  • Enables direct conversations between customer devices and business platforms
  • Analyzes large quantities of data in real-time against defined business KPIs
  • Lower regulatory risk and cost of compliance through increased visibility and response.

The event was a very important one in the history of SAP. These are key aspects to the digital transformation of any company and SAP’s ability to help their customers transform key aspects of their business are critical. This is certainly not your grandpas’ CRM.

@Drnatalie Petouhoff

Covering Customer Experience, Marketing, IOT and Digital Transformation.

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Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

Microsoft #Env16: Digital Transformation of Growing Underground Crops

Microsoft #Env16: Digital Transformation of Growing Underground Crops

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 Source: Microsoft

Digital transformation is growing an agricultural revolution 100 feet under the streets of London. British startup Growing Underground saw an abandoned air raid tunnel under the streets of London as an opportunity to experiment with ways to feed a growing population without increasing our carbon footprint. The tunnels were never built for the production of food, yet they are an ideal place for growing greens that are water and energy efficient, and pesticide free. Designed with insulation to keep people safe, the climate in the tunnels also enables the space to retain optimal heat. The urban farmers use a program from an environmental software company called Priva that runs on a Microsoft operating system and it controls everything: from the LEDs to the ventilation system to the humidity. Every element that’s needed to control the environment. They also use Surface Pros and OneNote to share information as well as everything from Excel for spreadsheets to PowerPoint for investor presentations.

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Source: Microsoft

“For a start-up like ours, Microsoft Office is the essence of how we communicate.” If you ever find yourself at a farmer’s market in London, grab some fresh peas and consider a future that no one could have imagined in 1941. And imagine the benefits of growing food anywhere: abandoned mines, under the desert, anywhere.

@Drnatalie petouhoff

Covering Digital Transformation, IOT and Customer Experience

 

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Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

Will Microsoft's Hololens transform the Future of Work?

Will Microsoft's Hololens transform the Future of Work?

Last week we had the opportunity to take a look at the latest release of Microsoft's last version of the Hololens, the same device the vendor is now releasing to developers to build applications for the platform.
 
My Constellation Research Colleague Alan Lepofsky and me recorded a video earlier, take a look:
 
 
No time to read, here are my key takeaways and views in two slides:
 
MyPOV
It's the first time Microsoft has completely built and designed a enterprise platform, contrary before where it partnered, provided know how etc. And probably such a radical 'wearable' - I like to call it 'headable' requires close ownership. And all the tools are there to build Hololens apps, as Microsoft was able to show developers present at the Build conference. 
 
On the concern side it looks like Microsoft isn't fully sure what can be done with it. At points our interactions were like that of an adventure racer who made it to stage two and now needs to figure out what to do in stage two. Fair enough, as it was far from clear if Microsoft could pull this off 15 months ago. The device was fidgy, needed a portable 'life support unit' and was tough to use. 12 months made a big difference, it can now be used as a platform. 
 
On the positive side Microsoft has garnered large interest from enterprises. Now it comes back to get the business case right and get developers going on building the applications for the platform. There is more game development in these applications than traditional enterprise software development so it will be interesting to watch in the coming quarters where the protypical Hololens developer will come from. 
 
But for now definitively a platform that is relevant for the enterprise space, High end productivity situations, education, engineering come to mind first. We will be watching. 
Future of Work Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Tech Optimization Microsoft Chief People Officer Chief Experience Officer

#Env16 Microsoft: Empowering People Sight Loss to Experience City Life

#Env16 Microsoft: Empowering People Sight Loss to Experience City Life

What is Microsoft up to now? Empowering people with sight loss the opportunity to experience city life.

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 Source: Microsoft

Everyone has a right to independence, but not everyone has the capacity. Cities Unlocked aims to set people with sight loss free to experience city life like never before. The pilot program is a unique collaboration between Microsoft, the U.K. charity Guide Dogs, and urban innovator Future Cities Catapult as well as other partners from business and academia. Even local travel is difficult and daunting with vision loss, which could be part of why of the two million people in the U.K. who have registered their visual impairment, 180,000 rarely if ever go outside, according to Guide Dogs. In the U.S., about 65 percent of people with vision loss are unemployed.

The partners worked together to create a prototype headset and mobile app that works with Bluetooth beacons placed along a given route to provide audio turn-by-turn directions, nearby points of interest (“Chiropractor, about 10 meters”), transportation updates (“No. 9 bus is approaching”) and even polite warnings (“Be aware: This is a main road”).

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Source: Microsoft
@drnatalie petouhoff
Covering IOT, Customer Experience and Digital Transformation

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Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

Card Not Present Fraud up another 25% YOY

Card Not Present Fraud up another 25% YOY

The Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) releases card fraud statistics every six months for the preceding 12m period. For a decade now, Lockstep has been monitoring these figures, plotting the trend data and analysing what the industry is doing - and not doing - about Card Not Present fraud. Here is our summary for the financial year 2015 stats.

CNP trends pic to FY 2015

Card Not Present (CNP) fraud has grown over 25 percent year-on-year from FY2014, and now represents 84 percent of all fraud on Australian cards.

APCA evidently has an uneasy relationship with any of the industry's technological responses to CNP fraud, like the controversial 3D Secure, and tokenization. Neither get a mention in the latest payment fraud media release (PDF). Instead APCA puts the stress on shopper behaviour, describing the continuing worsening in fraud as "a timely reminder to Australians to remain vigilant when shopping online". Sadly, this ignores that fact that card data used for organised criminal CNP fraud comes from mass breaches of databases, not from websites. There is nothing that shoppers can do when using their cards online to stop them being stolen, because they're much more likely to get stolen from backend systems over which the shoppers have no control.

You can be as careful as you like online - you can even avoid Internet shopping entirely - and still have your card data stolen from a regular store and used in CNP attacks online.

APCA says in its media release: "Financial institutions and law enforcement have been working together to target skimming at ATMs and in taxis and this, together with the industry’s progressive roll-out of chip-reading at ATMs, is starting to reflect in the fraud data".  That's true. Fraud by skimming and carding was halved by the smartcard rollout, and has remained low and steady in absolute terms for three years. But APCA errs when it goes on with "Cardholders can help these efforts by always protecting their PINs and treating their cards like cash".  Safeguarding your physical card and PIN does nothing to prevent the mass breaches of card data held in backend databases.

A proper fix to replay attack is easily within reach, which would re-use the same cryptography that solves skimming and carding, and would restore a seamless payment experience for card holders. Apple for one has grasped the nettle, and is using its Secure Element-based Apple Pay method (established now for card present NFC payments) for Card Not Present transactions, in the app.

See also my 2012 paper Calling for a Uniform Approach to Card Fraud Offline and On" (PDF).

Abstract

The credit card payments system is a paragon of standardisation. No other industry has such a strong history of driving and adopting uniform technologies, infrastructure and business processes. No matter where you keep a bank account, you can use a globally branded credit card to go shopping in almost every corner of the world. The universal Four Party settlement model, and a long-standing card standard that works the same with ATMs and merchant terminals everywhere underpin seamless convenience. So with this determination to facilitate trustworthy and supremely convenient spending in every corner of the earth, it's astonishing that the industry is still yet to standardise Internet payments. We settled on the EMV standard for in-store transactions, but online we use a wide range of confusing and largely ineffective security measures. As a result, Card Not Present (CNP) fraud is growing unchecked.

This article argues that all card payments should be properly secured using standardised hardware. In particular, CNP transactions should use the very same EMV chip and cryptography as do card present payments.

With all the innovation in payments leveraging cryptographic Secure Elements in mobile phones, perhaps at last we will see CNP payments modernise for web and mobile shopping.

Matrix Commerce Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Security Zero Trust Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer

Microsoft Build 2016 - Event Report

Microsoft Build 2016 - Event Report

A platform vision and plenty of tools for next generation applications

We had the opportunity to attend Microsoft's developer conference Build in San Francisco, held (where else) at Moscone. Attended by other 5000 participants, it was a different Microsoft Build, with crystal clear focus on developers, tools to increase their productivity and most importantly - build for the new platform CEO Nadella unveiled, Conversations as a Platform.

My colleague Alan Lepofsky earlier recorded this video on our key Day #2 keynote and overall event takeaways - so have a look (if you haven't seen it - Day #1 can be found here):

 
 
Our video went already way too long, I did not get to the IoT announcements that Microsoft shared - the Azure IoT Hub Device Management (in preview) and Azure IoT Gateway SDK (also in preview). In combination with the Azure IoT starter kits both offerings make it easier for enterprises to build their IoT applications, so a good move.
 
Event Report - Microsoft Build 2016 - All about building next generation applications from Holger Mueller
 

MyPOV

A clear focus on what Microsoft thinks is the emerging, next platform, Conversations as a Platform. Microsoft shared the vision and importantly, had the tools available already to build the applications for the new platform. A welcome difference to vendors putting out a vision only at first, and then a road map to when things will be delivered. 
 
Hololens has made great progress in the last 12 months (see my First take from Build 2015 here), and for the first time Microsoft has created a new platform in the market, for a new type of applications. And it's no surprise - it is a PC - an it is a headable (if you didn't get it combination of header and wearable, I made this up). 
 
In the past Microsoft has often been behind the market innovators on platform changes, so its a welcome difference to see Microsoft laying out an innovative vision for a software application platform (Conversations as a Platform), and creating a new hardware platform with Hololens. Now it needs to execute on both, we will be watching. 
 
 
Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity New C-Suite Microsoft ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI AI Analytics Automation business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Healthcare Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Experience Officer

CEN Member Chat: Shifting Sands of Retail

CEN Member Chat: Shifting Sands of Retail

Constellation's Managing Editor, Chris Kanaracus, offers tips on hot upcoming research coverage. Constellation Research VP & Principal Analyst, Guy Courtin, provides his take on what's essential about the dynamic retail sector and provides plenty of ideas related to popular brands and the business outcomes enabled by technology. 

Matrix Commerce Chief Supply Chain Officer On <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/161120577" width="500" height="313" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>
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Microsoft Build 2016 - Day 1 Keynote Takeaways

Microsoft Build 2016 - Day 1 Keynote Takeaways

We have the opportunity to attend Microsoft's developer conference Build in San Francisco. The attend is well attended with over 5000 participants.

 
 
 
My colleague, Alan Lepofsky, and my own takeaways from Day #1, take a look:
 
 
No time to watch - we have summarized our findings in one slide:
 
 
Want to learn more - check out the Storify collection of my tweets below.
 

MyPOV

A good start for Microsoft at Build. Microsoft has been often behind the latest trends and then had to catch up - this time with Conversation as a Platform the vendor maybe ahead of the curve. Good to see and good to see that all of the Day #1 keynote was - apart from the general availability of Hololens - all centered on Conversation as a Platform. 
 
There is no surprise why Microsoft has a focus on this, CEO Nadella at one point called the new offering 'Computation as a Platform' - which is clear all along, as a lot of compute is required to power the artificial intelligence, machine learning and bots behind Conversation as a Platform. And Microsoft needs to find more load for Azure - once the current wave of Office conversions runs out. 
 
For customers overall it is good news that Microsoft has aligned on a vision for product that is more specific and measurable than the 30k+ feet 'mobile first / cloud first' moniker. Making workers more productive is something that matters to enterprises, and with a lot of innovation happening in email (!) right now we maybe up to the next generation of applications, or as Nadella puts it - up to a new platform.
 
For developers the good news is that Microsoft has shipped SDKs and frameworks that make the daunting task of building these applications easy. And Microsoft has to make it easy for the developer community, as it is proficient in the general aspects of the Microsoft stack, but not on the more advanced BigData, MachineLearning, Language processing etc. skills that are needed to built these next generation conversational platforms. 
 
A good start for Build - looking forward to Day #2, stay tuned. 


More about Microsoft:
  • Event Preview - Microsoft Build 2016 - Top 3 Things to watch for developers, managers and execs...  read here
  • News Analysis - Microsoft - New Hybrid Offerings Deliver Bottomless Capacity for Today's Data Explosion - read here
  • News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
  • News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps 
  • News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
  • News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
  • News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
  • Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
  • First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
  • Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
  • First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
  • Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
  • Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
  • Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
  • Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
  • Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
  • How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
  • How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
  • How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here
 
 
 
 
 
Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity New C-Suite Microsoft ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI AI Analytics Automation business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Healthcare Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Information Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief AI Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Experience Officer

Too much on IoT, not enough on connected business value

Too much on IoT, not enough on connected business value

Five or six years ago, the hype wasn’t IoT, it was Cloud, but the messages about its impact as an industry game change were similar. Again, as with IoT, few people could really claim to understand the true nature of the changes that the Cloud would bring. The usual trait when we encounter something we don’t really understand is to position it aligned to something we do understand, so Cloud came to be seen as a cost reduction alternative to the data center. Few realized the significance of browser driven Services in transforming business capabilities. In 2016 it seems IoT is at the same stage;

IoT, as previously happened with the impact of Cloud, Mobility, and Social Tools, is a technology function not a Business benefit; It’s business value does not lie in IT technology improvement, but in Business led innovation to make use of ‘real time’ connected business opportunities.

There is too much talking about IoT Technology, and not enough focus on deployed business value and competitive impacts being led by Business management.

That’s a bold remark; when asked why the Farmers moved so quickly to adopt connected sensing technology on agricultural equipment, now called Precision Farming, an Agri-Business executive had a possible answer. ‘I guess they didn’t have an IT department’, out of context this is an unfair statement as it really was meant to indicate that Farmers were not tied to extensive in-house IT investments that needed to be considered. Farmers were able to see the link to transforming their profitability and moved quickly and easily to adopt ‘Services’.

Take the time to read an excellent business article on using sensing technology to control costs of inputs to maximize operational outputs, that should make any business manager think again about connected real-time operational business benefits. Okay its in Farming Equipment Canada in respect of Precision Farming, but the terminology is readily referenced to any business being financial and operational.

Quoting directly from the article; “Precision Farming means … optimizing returns on inputs. What does that mean? I see the path for optimizing your returns most effectively by applying the correct inputs, in the correct place and in the correct amount. Precision farming is your way to accurately plant, populate, apply inputs and then provide data, of what was completed on your farm.

The quote makes clear that it isn’t about the technology of IoT sensing applied to Farm Equipment working the land, but that there is a business impact in real-time operational management on direct profitability. Though the article might be about the business of farming, the point is directly applicable to many business sectors. Today the impact has moved beyond individual farms moving to become an Agri-Business sector transformation. See the previous blog A Strategy for Market Leaders based on IoT Platform collaboration for more background information on how John Deere has adapted to ensure ongoing leadership in this transformation.

Whilst it may be a truism that by not having huge IT investments Farmers where able to move quickly to adopt new practices there are several factors under lying the rapid adoption of Precision Farming.  Four major reasons are;

  1. The ‘Consumer’ technology revolution around Smart Phones and ‘App Shops’ has removed many former barriers to using Technology, and speeded adoption rates.
  2. Charging by use removes the need to justify Capital investment by defining clear cost based returns, encouraging just ‘try it’ adoption to establish new ideas and develop new best practices.
  3. Social Tools with focused communities ensure that new practices that work are rapidly communicated, with the additional befit of peer-to-peer support from early adopter fellow users.
  4. Market leading suppliers, such as John Deere and Monsanto, involvement in Social Tools allowed them to spot the trend and rapidly move to support Precision Farming making their products more competitively valuable.

Putting these factors together illustrates the real point behind the ‘I guess they didn’t have an IT department’ statement. The rapid adoption of Precision Farming was made possible by using Apps and Services on a pay by use basis, rather than substantial investment in traditional IT Applications with the need to amortize the investment before making further changes.

The opening paragraph pointed out the lack of appreciation of Cloud Technology for its business transformation impact, six years latter the Business impact is becoming increasingly clear. The pay on demand use of Apps and Services, (running on Clouds), that can be deployed with minimal difficulty has revolutionized many Business capabilities.

IoT is a generic term covering too many possible functions to be a meaningful term, as even the word idIoT contains IoT!  Cloud had, and still has, the same challenge when considered as a Technology, but focusing on Business use quickly defines the value of Cloud.

Today Cloud Technology is taken as underlying the whole Internet; as more and more devices are connected the Internet of Things becomes a similar fact of life. The Business value lies in the manner that these two radical shifts in capability are intertwined!

Cloud based Business Services support ‘back end’ processing by pushing their data towards Devices. IoT adds new business value by collecting and sending new data streams from the ‘front end’ devices. The ability to ‘Read’ events as they are happening by sending new data streams to Cloud based Services creates a new generation of optimized ‘Reactions’.

Much of this will occur in near ‘real-time’ that makes outcomes genuinely able to positively influence the events as they develop. Using IoT supplied data makes existing Cloud based Services interactive, or ‘smart’, in their capabilities.  The linkage between the elements can be expressed simply in the following manner.

IoT Data Read  +  Optimized React      =     Smart Service

          Real Time                                                Cloud 

We have stopped discussing the ‘technology’ of the Internet, and the Web, in abstraction from the business valuable capabilities this provides. The first generation of Cloud based technology is now accepted for its infrastructure replacement value, with attention being focused on using capabilities to support Business valuable competitive Services.

IoT should be part of the same Business discussion as Cloud based Apps and Services as the critical input capability supporting fully interactive high value Smart Services.

New C-Suite

Lufthansa Takes You on a Virtual Journey

Lufthansa Takes You on a Virtual Journey

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One of the key marketing challenges that we face in the customer journey is moving from awareness to trial. That is, we want potential customers to “try out” our products or services.

This can be particularly challenging when your product or service has a substantial price tag attached.

Think of travel.

There are a whole series of steps that we go through when we are on a travel journey:

  • Ideas and inspiration: We seek out amazing stories, pictures and reviews of places, people and experiences so that we can plan our own adventures
  • Planning and projection: We start to actively curate our activities, destinations and journeys, connecting the dots and figuring out our itineraries and (gasp, horror) budget. In this stage we are not just planning our activities – but actively imagining what it will be like to BE there
  • Lock and load: When we’ve checked, double and triple checked, confirmed our budget and dates, now we wade neck deep into the process of locking dates to a loaded credit card. Yes, it’s commitment time and the pressure is on (so many websites, so many things that can go wrong)
  • See ya, see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya: Wave goodbye to your friends and family and take the leap into the unknown
  • Wish you were here: Well, we say this to be kind, but if the planning and projection phase was well done, you’ll be taking hundreds of selfies all around the world and using them to induce raging envy across your social graph
  • Reflection and longing: Planes aren’t the only things that land with a BUMP. So too does our travel ego. Coming back to “reality” can be a confronting experience. To cope, we return to our #RunningWithTheBulls selfies to remind ourselves just what the travel rush was all about and how we really are #travelheroes.

In amongst each of these steps, there are hardly any that an airline can directly impact. They can inspire us with their media activities, advertising and profile. And they may even help us to plan – albeit in a small way. A good airline will make locking and loading a breeze and but it’s really when you are in the plane that they can make a huge impact.

But experiencing airline travel is expensive, right? And price alone is a barrier.

This virtual travel experience from Lufthansa by 3Spin is a very interesting innovation that I expect will see plenty of others follow.

Lufthansa have touched on many aspects of the travel journey – turning a largely imaginative process into something that is more tangible. More experiential. In fact, it’s not just the destination that is inspirational, it’s the experience of the virtual reality itself. And with a clever mix of digital, analog and old fashioned customer service, they’ve created something far more than just a 360 degree virtual experience. They have created an EVENT – a point in time and space that will create memories. Stories. And hopefully for Lufthansa, bookings.

It makes me think there may be something to this VR lark after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPRcbFrp9Y4

Next-Generation Customer Experience B2C CX Chief Marketing Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer