Creating the digitised customer

In part 1, Lisa Gingell, Director and Founder of 3-Eight Communications discussed the role of Communications Consultants and how they can aid digital strategy design.  

Here, Lisa discusses the role of IoT, Big Data and how a digital strategy creates the digitised customer.
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According to the predictions from IDC FutureScape, 2019 is the year all digitally transformed organisations will generate at least 45% of their revenue from "Future of Commerce" business models.

IDC defines The Future of Commerce as “The application of 3rd Platform technologies and AI (artificial intelligence) to fundamentally change the way commerce is done between individuals, organisations and things; and deliver outcome-based products and/or services through business model innovation.”

This is where IoT and big data rise to the challenge, 2019 is the YEAR.
But it really comes as no surprise, that big data and the Internet of things is in the limelight because creating fantastic opportunities for businesses to be more digitised and offer new customer experiences is at the forefront of business expectations.

The opportunity lies in how businesses store, use, interpret and display the data.  And also what solutions are provided that solve customer problems and increase efficiency, this will decide how successful the new digitised business or product/solution offering will be. As every business activity creates a digital trace (consumption patterns, cost fluctuations etc) the analysis and interpretation of this digital trace can deliver information to create solutions for an effective new world energy management and utilities procurement. This is where the data translator (and the communications consultant) can make a tangible difference in the new age of IoT and Big Data.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is how communications experts can support the big data and IoT dream, here’s how:

• They bridge the technical expertise of data scientists with the operational expertise of PR, marketing, supply chain, manufacturing, risk, and other frontline managers.  
• They draw on their knowledge of their business or their customer’s business needs. For example, to help identify the problems and then use their working knowledge of AI and analytics to convey these business goals to the data scientists who in turn create the algorithms and solutions.​
• They facilitate the ability to articulate the customer and business needs that in turn create the digitised services and solutions the business will work to develop.
•  They ensure that the solution produces insights that the business/customer can interpret and execute on, and, ultimately, communicate the benefits of these insights to business users to drive adoption.

What does the future hold? 
Whilst data scientists are seeing a phenomenal increase in demand to process big data sets, create algorithms and reveal trends as well as develop machine learning and AI applications, it is likely that the data translator, the communications consultant, will emerge as the one that can help make the new digitised business model a reality.