Conclusion

Take the Next and Continuing
Steps of the Real-Time Revolution

Time is a scarce resource that customers cannot replace once it is spent. Therefore, customers are motivated to spend their time wisely. They are drawn to products or services from organizations that best allow them to meet this need. This need will only increase as more is expected of individuals in their already busy days. With speed as the measure of effectiveness for many products or services, the product that is the fastest will have a competitive advantage. The product’s ease of use demands less training time. The product that has high quality requires less product support. The product that is easy to discover, order, and receive makes the customer even more efficient. Companies that do not live up to the competitive pressure on these fronts will be forced to discount their offerings to offset the advantage of the competitors. And, as time becomes even more valuable, these discounts must be increased.

Best-in-class products and services set the customer’s real-time standard. As new products appear in the market, they are immediately compared with a wide range of direct and indirect offerings in an effort to determine whether the new product makes the customer more effective. Organizations whose products demonstrate that the company values customer time by meeting or beating an established real-time standard will have a significant competitive advantage.

Customers’ real-time experiences go beyond their use of a company’s products and services. Their experiences include every interaction with the company, throughout all steps in the life of those products and services. As potential customers are browsing a company’s website, they begin to develop an opinion of the company. When they read content published on the internet, they consider whether they would like to work with the company. When customers decide to purchase a product and initiate the ordering process, they are looking for an experience that is relevant, efficient, and clear. When customers upgrade the product or seek answers to support questions, they are deciding whether this is a company they wish to continue to support. Just as customers desire to optimize the time spent using many products and services, they also want their other interactions with the company to demonstrate an equal level of attention to the value of their time. In the ideal real-time experience, customers want interactions that are instantaneously effective. A real-time organization aspires to provide ideal real-time experiences, knowing that it may not succeed. If it can beat its competitors, though, it will set the standard for customer real-time experiences and have a clear competitive advantage.

Customers develop their time expectations from the experiences they have with other organizations, both direct and indirect competitors. For example, if a customer finds an online retailer to have a particularly useful and efficient browsing and ordering process, that customer will expect other online companies to be equally efficient. This does not mean the online travel site must mirror the online retailer, but it should strive to be as customer efficient. If a competing online travel store launches with a more streamlined user interface that equals the online retailer’s efficiency, it stands to gain significant market share over time. Those organizations that meet or beat customers’ real-time expectations will attract more customers.

Quality is a key component to understanding customers’ time value. Customers want their experiences to be of sufficient quality that they do not need to spend their personal time overcoming a problematic product or interacting with the company to solve a problem. For example, customers expect the maps in a navigation application to be accurate or they could be sent to the wrong destination and then forced to find an alternate route.

For some products and services, customers desire experiences that focus more on the quality of time spent rather than the duration. For example, pleasurable dining and entertainment experiences are often designed to be savored. For these types of experiences, the customers expect the company to maximize their enjoyment over time. However, when the customer is seeking a quick dining or entertainment experience, they have different expectations that are constrained by time. A fast-food restaurant experience is very different from a fine dining experience. Similarly, a full-length feature film is different from a television program, and the experience is again different for a short video that one might watch while standing in line at the DMV.

Customers develop relationships with the companies they patronize. A company wants the journey a customer takes with it to be a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Within the journey, the time the customer spends with the company can be broken into segments. Organizations that meet better time expectations associated with a specific time segment are often positively remembered. These experiences, such as the time to make reservations, make payments, and travel to and from the experiences, provide the company with a competitive advantage as long as the quality of the time spent meets or beats expectations. When these time segments are assembled together, only then does the totality of the journey become visible. If a company fails to meet the customer’s expectation in one segment of the journey, the deficit can be offset by exceeding the customer’s expectations during other aspects of the journey. However, it is important to understand that the priority customers place on specific time segments may vary by industry, segment, and customer.

Given that time is the currency that customers spend wisely, the implication for organizational leaders is that they must transform their organizations to value customer time more effectively than competitors do. Those leaders who do not do so are in danger of losing customers to organizations that provide experiences that meet or beat customer real-time expectations.

Leaders of organizations that join the real-time revolution constantly monitor how effective their company is at valuing customer time compared to the competition. To accomplish this, the company establishes a monitoring process to track where customers spend time. For example, before and during the ordering process, the time a customer spends on the company’s website is tracked. Products use IoT-sourced data to self-detect product issues and time until there is a correction. When customers call for support, time is tracked from initial contact and, perhaps, other checkpoints until the customer confirms resolution of the issue. Requests for new products as well as product enhancements are tracked from the time the request is made until the request is satisfied.

All these time measurements are tracked in an RTMR (real-time monitoring and response) system. This repository allows a company to analyze its ability to respond and support customer interactions. This analysis permits the company to target transformational innovations to specific projects that increase customer appreciation. Customers appreciate companies that respect them, and since time is increasingly the most precious resource a customer has, this translates to efforts that improve the customer’s effective use of time.

In a competitive world where the competition always seeks to displace the market leader, a real-time market leader must constantly improve its ability to perform. Companies that are not the market leader know that they and the market leader are in a perpetual race to better themselves. This means that the non-leader companies that want to remain competitive must target their efforts to surpass the market leader. Identifying and matching the known best practice is not enough. Companies must pursue a path that positions them to become the new market leader.

Organizations that are participating in the real-time revolution are in a constant cycle of transforming; they innovate, monitor, analyze, and then innovate some more. The perpetual goal is to demonstrate a more refined and effective means of valuing customer time more than the competition.

To survive and thrive in the real-time revolution, organizational leaders must transform their organizations to value customer time more effectively than competitors do.

  The real-time organization must engage customers from end to end, i.e., throughout the steps in the life of its products and services. The purpose is to have customers view the organization as valuing their time and, thus, meeting their real-time expectations better than competitors do.

  The real-time organization must be agile enough to detect and respond to changing customer real-time expectations more rapidly than competitors.

  The core organizational levers for transformation are products and services, processes, data, and people driven by a focus on valuing customer time.

  Beyond the core levers are broader levers for transformation, including technology, culture, strategy, and relationships with suppliers, customers, and other partners.

Organizational leaders should ask, “What are my next and continuing steps?” Those who are inspired by this book’s message should develop a plan to transform their organizations to value customer time more effectively than competitors do. A road map for the next and continuing steps in the real-time revolution is to follow these incremental steps:

  Ensure that a core set of leaders and other organizational members appreciate the need for the company to become a real-time company; ensure they understand that success in a real-time environment is based on the customer’s perception of time.

  Work with these leaders and members to create an RTMR system. Collect monitoring data to identify when and how customers invest and value their time with your organization and the competition.

  Work with leaders and members to begin and follow through on the following steps in a transformational cycle:

  Analyze the collected data to identify levers that can drive improvement. Focus on areas where the organization can apply one or more levers to maximize the real-time benefit for the customer.

  Specify the innovation to be implemented using the highpotential levers.

  Implement that innovation. Be prepared to use additional levers as the need becomes apparent. For example, deploy/acquire any needed prerequisite enabling technologies to apply the highpotential levers.

  Initiate any needed training or evangelization programs.

  Expand the RTMR system to monitor the new customer real-time experience data. Innovations often create opportunities to collect incremental process usage data from customers.

  Collect, update, and analyze the monitoring data in the RTMR system to ensure the transformation improves the end-to-end customer experience.

  Adjust the transformational process as needed.

  Begin the next transformational cycle.

The first cycle set forth above will take time; companies must develop an appreciation for the fact that using their own internal view of time is not a measure of customer value. Over time, this perspective will become second nature, a matter of the company’s culture. Over time, real-time transformational programs can be expanded and multiple programs can be simultaneously run.

For a company, cultural changes are difficult. Whenever possible:

  Work with the transformational program leaders to broadcast to a larger group of employees the need to transform the company to a real-time organization. Build in them an understanding and acceptance of this need so that these employees become the company’s real-time warriors.

  Adopt an end-to-end view of the time investment customers make with the company. Empower the organization’s real-time warriors by being transparent and sharing information about customers’ interactions with the organization.

  Share customer time consumption associated with your company and the competition.

  Provide stories of success to demonstrate how customer time value can be increased.

  Assess customers’ real-time experiences with your company and how that compares with the competition.

  Encourage innovation that makes the company more of a real-time company.

Time is a scarce currency for companies and their customers. Customers wish to spend their time wisely, and this drives their appreciation for the real-time company. Companies also must treat their time as a scarce resource. The intent of the RTMR system data is to ensure that a company targets its transformational programs to create a difference that customers appreciate.

Targeted innovations focus on valuing customers’ time by providing them with experiences that meet or beat their real-time expectations. These targeted transformations are what give a company a competitive advantage. In the real-time revolution, where competitors are continually innovating to have customers spend time with them, the purpose of continually transforming to a more competitive real-time organization is to survive and thrive. We wish you well in taking the next and continuing steps of the real-time revolution!