Kevin Ashton once remarked -“The internet of things has the potential to change the world, just as the internet did. Maybe even more so.” This quote talk volumes about the benefits Internet of Things (IoT) can bring to this world in this digital age.
Interconnected devices with millions of end points have created a space where customers, clients, and business partners can interact more efficiently. The convergence of these interconnected devices, wireless technologies, and micro-systems, has led to the emergence of Internet of Things.
IoT holds the potential to completely transform the company-customer relationship, leading to a dramatic improvement in business productivity and enabling businesses to make informed decisions. It gives an opportunity for businesses to analyze unstructured data and improve its operations. Analyzing unstructured data reveals the information and data that can be used to create new product lines and services in interest of the customers.
With IoT growing as the largest device market in the world, it has become easier for businesses to realize the potential of connected devices and simplify the business life of their clients, and business partners.
There are various ways IoT contributes to enhanced business performance. In this blog, we are going to talk about 3 of them that foster customer experience.
- Creating Improved Customer Experience
IoT has the capability to provide real-time diagnostics and has the potential to provide better customer experience, and enable companies to build a better brand name. Internet connected devices bring data pipelines and offer a platform to perform advanced analytics over this data.
Just-in-time delivery is the need of every customer and the information revealed by sensors, connected devices serves this purpose. Additionally, use of RFID-based tracking helps to build a track of out of stock items, and monitor unattended inventory that helps to serve customers’ need and concerns appropriately. Data generated by sensors, cameras, and Bluetooth signals holds tremendous value that can help to improve business productivity. Real-time data censors helps businesses to reduce energy costs and make smarter decisions. Smarter business decisions leads to adding up new revenue streams to companies.
IoT ecosystem builds a data-driven approach that helps companies to develop complete understanding of the products reach, customer reviews, preferences according to which product features can be quickly updated. This enables organizations to develop better product designs, and adjust customer issues as per customers’ preference.
- Strategizing Marketing Efforts
Connected devices gives companies the opportunity take a 360-degree view of customer preferences and create campaigns that actually helps to drive revenue from the targeted audience. Rather than framing a one-size fits all marketing scheme, marketers and advertisers can segment their customer base and release personalized offers for improving customer satisfaction rate and create a better engaging customer experience.
IoT data streams in combinations with complex event processing and streaming analytics software, as well as machine learning systems that can add significant value to businesses. Real-time stream analytics gives businesses the option to ingest, process, analyze, respond, and visualize huge volume of data strategically. For instance – customer service prompts can be used to trigger poor user experience alerts. With the help of these alerts, on the consumer end, difficulties associated with putting new product to work, can be recognized easily. Over the social media, negative reviews can be avoided on expensive product returns that can be circumvented by simply offering real-time chat support or sending “how-to” video link to customers’ smart phone.
VoIP service providers can be immensely benefited by integrating CRM tool with smart devices to collect and organize client data and analyze that data for designing better marketing efforts. Using this direct means for gathering customer information prevents the need for implementing long chain commands required for processing data, and helps to recognize at which stage the prospect is in the purchasing cycle.
- Facilitates Omnichannel Service Options
Customers have already started expecting omnichannel customer experience via web, email, phone, and social media. By 2018, it is predicted by Gartner that five percent of customer service cases will be initiated by web-enabled devices via the Internet of Things (IoT). Customer service agents need to have extraordinary skills beyond reading from a script, and must be prepared to perform heavy troubleshooting across various channels.
For instance, with sensors integration on things such as home appliances connected to internet, enables service organizations and manufacturers to monitor service levels, operations and status remotely.
Final Thoughts
Undoubtedly, IoT can benefit companies by improving customer experience however, security and privacy of the data is still a main concern for IoT inhabitants. IoT houses smart connected devices that allow companies to create smarter, higher performing valuable products that helps to drive smarter business decisions and develop long lasting relationships with the customers.
Shraddha Tewari is skilled and accomplished editor, who writes for various tech platforms. Her strong interest in cloud technology and software developments has enabled her to associate with TheRealPBX, that offers services such as business toll free numbers, to streamline its operations.
