As I wrote in my previous blog post and report on "The Data-Driven Design Revolution," the digitization of customer experiences — both online and in physical environments — has greatly expanded the depth and breadth of customer data available. This abundance of data has profoundly changed how experience design teams use and manage customer data. Its impact, however, doesn’t end there. This newfound abundance of customer data also fuels new business pressures and experiences. Chief among them being:

  • Organizational velocity is the new competitive differentiator, driving experiences to operate in real time, all the time. The speed with which companies can convert customer data into insights and insight into action is now a critical differentiator. Companies can no longer rely on linear approaches to data analysis — spending six months to gather data on a problem, many more months to analyze it, and even longer to act on it. Doing so will cause companies to bleed customers away to more nimble competitors. As Marc Andreessen recently tweeted, “Cycle time compression may be the most underestimated force in determining winners and losers in tech.”
  • Customer life cycles and segmentation models die, giving rise to individualized experiences. Customer life cycles, funnels, and segmentations models are rapidly becoming outdated relics from an era when we lacked the data and computational ability to understand complex customer attitudes, behaviors, and habits at an individual level. That’s no longer the case. Wells Fargo’s latest ATM interface uses customers' data such as their account information, preferences, and transaction history to generate customer-specific buttons and reprioritize ATM functions in real time.

Companies that fail to adapt to these new dynamics will soon find themselves falling behind. CX pros aspiring to embrace the changes data-driven experience design brings need to start by laying the groundwork for a data-driven revolution. I’ll be speaking more about how CX pros can do this at two of Forrester’s upcoming forums: Forrester's Forum For Customer Experience Professionals West in Anaheim, California, on November 6th and 7th and Forrester's Forum For Customer Experience Professionals EMEA in London on November 17th and 18th. I hope to see you there.