“From phones to cars to medicine, technology touches every part of our lives. If you can create technology, you can change the world.”
— Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube
The world is indeed changing. We’ve gone from mailing love letters to text messaging, from emails to instant messaging, from face-to-face interactions to FaceTime, from taxis to Uber to driverless cars.
Technology is no doubt behind it. Accelerating. And there’s no stopping it. Those who were caught unprepared surely felt the brunt of it.
A Driver of Change
As tech evolves, so do customers’ choices and the manner with which they engage with brands and businesses. With technology changing the rules of the game, what drew people to one brand before might not work anymore.
Technology has changed the way customers deal with businesses. Technological advancements have made it possible for customers to easily reach us and tell us how they’ve experienced our services and products. Because of this, measuring customer satisfaction has never been this easier and complicated at the same time.
It’s changed the way businesses deal with customers. The opportunities to stay top of mind are endless. Technology has paved the way for businesses to be more personalised and relevant to individuals, which makes customers loyal to their brand.
It’s changed the way we live. The Internet of Things (IoT) is here. IoT is the interconnection of seemingly ordinary things through the internet. Imagine walking into your room and as if on cue, the lights go on and your favorite jazz music starts playing in the background; and when you head to the kitchen, your refrigerator informs you that you only have three eggs left. You go for a run, and checking your wristwatch, it tells you your heart rate. This is the Internet of Things. While the IoT is still in its birthing stages, we are already seeing businesses who are easing into it.
An Enabler of Disruption
The BlackBerry Priv. Photo credit: Gizmodo Australia
BlackBerry was doing well selling phones until around 2011. But when Apple reinvented the phone through a revolutionary user interface — QWERTY soft keyboard that corrects spelling errors, multitouch display, no longer the hardware keypad — Blackberry did not adapt to the change, killing its phone-manufacturing business.
Making a business out of transporting people in private cars isn’t new. But innovation happened when apps like Uber made use of a few technologies — the use of GPS to locate both passengers and drivers and a cashless payment system. The use of these innovative techs enabled the disruption.
Photo credit: BBC News
Looking Forward
As business leaders, our vision for our businesses extends to the future. While we can never fully know what the future is, what we do know for sure is that technology is beginning to surpass our own capacity. So it only makes sense that we prepare for what we think is coming — our careers and our lives depend on it.
So in the next few weeks, I will be sharing ideas on how technology is changing the future of different industries.
Stay tuned.
Written by Adam Long, Executive General Manager at Step Change
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