By Paul Taylor, Innovation Coach at Bromford

We’ve never been under so much pressure to transform, to innovate, to cut costs and create new customer value.

The pandemic has been an accelerant of most things. Any trend: social, business, or personal has been locked on fast-forward. Our organizations are feeling the pressure, the need to transform.

The important thing is not to panic, and remember the future is not a far-off point, it arrives daily bit by bit. We can respond to it by taking small tactical shifts rather than launching grand plans.

It’s helpful though to identify some key themes influencing transformation that we can coalesce around.

The desire for connected hybrid experiences

An increasing reliance on digital tools to perform previously complex tasks – accessing health records for example – has led to a new desire for simplicity. There’s a question we must relentlessly ask:  Is this hard for the customer to do? Because today, if it’s not easy-to-use,  it’s dead in the water.

As many companies have expanded their digital service options during the lockdowns, the difference between those who did it well and those who have delivered badly are there for all to see.

Customers now want contextualized interactions; seamless experience across channels; anytime, anywhere access to content and services and – guess what – the ability to speak to a human when they want to.

The key to this is designing solutions with customers and colleagues and not FOR them. Community-led business models are emerging as distinct from traditional B2C models. B2C is about having an audience; whereas a community is about participation and co-creation.

Traditional companies push products or services onto customers. Instead, community business models pull ideas and improve the product or company for everyone through active participation. This fundamentally changes the process of product and service creation, flipping the old model on its head.

Data security and trust

The rise of the internet and social media has enabled entirely new kinds of relationships and communities to form in which trust must be negotiated with others without ever meeting them.

Although billions of people use smartphones and the internet nearly half of those still do not use that connectivity for paying bills, banking and other important transactions.

The question for many housing association tenants will be whether they trust their landlord with handling such sensitive data. Data privacy has become so important that it is now directly tied to customer experience.

We often lack the capabilities needed to assess and address gaps in customer experience.  Also data is typically incomplete or sequestered in silos. Our organizations often lack a full, timely picture of the customer’s overall experience.

All of these factors work together to cultivate or diminish trust between the organization and the consumer. Part of building trust means empowering customers by putting the decision-making power back in their hands. Trust will be the defining factor for our organizations in the future, and this includes moving to a customer-centric approach to data.

Successful transformations will be the ones that go beyond being mere upgrades to technology and process. They will be the one that cultivate consumer trust, keep data secure, and solve genuine customer problems.