When customers outsource their shopping to smart agents, organizations must create a new kind of customer experience.
Gartner’s Hung LeHong discusses why customers will not be buyers, and manufacturers won’t be producers at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.
Attracting smart machines
For the most part, people remain the customer while digital entities purchase on their behalf. For sellers, the question becomes, how do you get a smart agent to buy a movie ticket from you?
“You have to market to a machine,” Mr. LeHong said. “It’s all about customer experience, and now the smart machine is the customer. Is it possible to create a bad experience for Siri?”
To create good experiences for smart machines so that they will purchase from an entity again, organizations can:
- Develop channel and marketing strategies that are aimed at “attracting” smart machines or things. For example, lock in an exclusive channel for Siri or another smart agent. Or make bids to optimize search engine ranking to help the smart agents purchase from you.
- Redefine what makes a good experience for a nonhuman purchaser (aka a thing). Touchy feely customer services won’t work here. Rather, make sure you use the right APIs that are easily discoverable, with built in dispute resolution (e.g. how the bitcoin block chain protocol eliminates double dipping).
- Participate in marketplaces/ecosystems that have ethical, standards-based and regulatory compliance environments. Take a lesson from modern stock markets which have developed controls for ethical operations.
View the full session on Gartner Events on Demand or watch the IoT Scenario webinar.
For more article on Customer Experience and visit Smarter With Gartner website.
