Prasad Rai: Four reasons why you need an IoT-enabled customer experience | HT Brand Leadership Series

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Four reasons why you need an IoT-enabled customer experience

  • Prasad Rai
  • 25th Sept

Internet of Things (IoT) promises to bring about a world wherein all objects are interconnected, helping bridge the gap between technology and comfort. According to a study conducted by Gartner, an approximate 20.4 billion1 connected “things” would exist by 2020. While IoT applications have predominantly been adopted by the consumer sector, businesses are geared to employ 3.1 billion connected things in 20172. Several sectors, such as manufacturing, healthcare and utilities, are adopting IoT to remodel their customer experience.

As IoT forays into enabling better experiences for the customer, we discuss why you need an IoT enabled Customer Experience (CX) program:

1. Enable Faster Insights
Today, the average number of connected devices per consumer is 3.643. The access to multiple devices by consumers has enabled businesses to collate data via smarter applications, improve data management for latency reduction and empower organizations with better decision making insights. Industries on the other hand, create a plethora of connected devices that produce a vast quantity of data. Analysis of the data can enable new business models, increase automation and transform the manufacturing sector.

2. Enhanced Products and Services
Product-as-a-Service (PaaS) has evolved since the introduction of IoT. Businesses are focusing more on selling the value of a product rather than just selling the product. PaaS is an emerging business model that is a game-changer in the industrial sector. By seeing how customers interact with their products, businesses can understand these interactions in real-time and make any change necessary to future versions of the product. Oracle’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for IoT data enriched applications and processes. What IoT essentially leads to is better Research and Development (R&D) and product design in the industrial sector. Understanding consumer behavior, the way they interact with products, for how long etc., enables organizations to work with data that directly impacts their decisions; in turn, leading to better customer service. Using this data and insights businesses can set up support centres that can immediately address customer grievances.

3. Improving Marketing Process
While PaaS is growing in the industrial sector, at the consumer level IoT is gearing up towards targeted customer interactions. A multitude of connected devices plus the usage of sensors, diagnostic and user interaction data from devices will give greater visibility of customer behavior and predict their preferences. Organizations can use the data to direct personalized marketing solutions – improving customer experience and reducing marketing costs.

4. Ensuring Customer Privacy
With billions of devices gathering data, organizations will need to protect the user data from unauthorized access and potential breaches. Organizations will need to set best practices for IoT gateway integration and device software development. Additionally, organizations can also set-up software bounty programs to highlight any software vulnerabilities in the solutions from the open developer community. Enterprises will need to create a compelling value proposition for data collected and used. They will have to provide complete transparency on the data that is being used and ensure that it is adequately protected.

A recent McKinsey report pegs the potential economic impact of IoT to be between $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year in 20254 – translating to 11% of the world economy. Operations managements, predictive maintenance and smart cities lead the value chain of digitization. The complete benefits of IoT are yet to be understood as newer technologies are added every day. While data privacy is a concern, integrating IoT into the existing organizational infrastructure poses a bigger challenge. Organizations have to capture and analyze data from a multitude of devices. Companies like Oracle, have designed platforms to IoT-enable an organization at lower risks and higher business value.

References:

prasad
Prasad Rai
Vice President Applications,
Oracle

Prasad Rai is the Vice President of Applications at Oracle. He believes that strategy, culture, execution and motivation are key for the success of any organization. Apart from Oracle, he has been with other tech giants such as Microsoft and IBM.

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