IoT Silhouette

It is an exciting period for UX (User Experience) with more and more IoT (Internet of Things) getting launched each day. Last month, Netherlands and South Korea become the firsts' two countries to have launched dedicated IoT networks in the world. More than 4 million IoT devices are likely to be connected by 2017 in South Korea alone.

The highlight of this low powered wide area network (LPWAN) is in its ability to transmit data between battery operated devices over many miles while using little power.

These IoT gadgets from consumer perspective can range from home devices, wearable's,  medical/wellness fitness devices, Connected cars with gadgets and Urban systems  like Parking meters, air quality sensors devices etc.

A user friendly UX design and functional capabilities to a large extent can differentiate a competitors products from each others. This is not to be confused with our IT terms as UI but much wider a term providing a holistic perspective of different design principles in creating a better product(useful, usable, aesthetically pleasurable). Experts estimate that by 2020 there will be almost 50 devices.

Most IoT are embedded devices which either have sensors that convert physical world (e.g. motion, light, air quality, contact, location, proximity, humidity, orientation etc) into digital or/and actuators which convert digital instructions into mechanical actions (e.g. start a motor or turn/off a device) besides services provision for smarter communication.

How does manufacturers IoT differentiates one with the other. We can view it from 3 basic parameters a) Acquiring connectivity, b) Sensing abilities and c) Computing power and all these rolled in with better UX design.

A connected IoT device is one which is connected to a network (cloud) whose behavior is controlled by the host programs to deliver a User experience.Today's IoT instruments are asynchronous just to preserve the battery power and does the sync with bit of latency with the host called system model.

This may be one area that could change with advances in power storage technologies. The other main beauty about IoT is in its ability to control, monitor and configure remotely using mobile and web applications.

IoT is a great product to integrate Customer experience (see my earlier blog on Customer Experience Alignment) because IoT Service is not necessarily like purchasing one-off the shelf product but rather it requires an ongoing service with a minimum of Internet to keep things running and customer support. So a delightful CX experience would make all the difference between you and the competitor.

A simple IoT service might serve only one or two devices like single or couple of connected light bulbs) but with a hub/gateway you could add many more edge devices and complex gadgetry's like . a security system using motion sensors, cameras, lights, alarm system and so forth.

This feature of mixing and matching of different products from IoT vendors throws up challenges as well opportunities. In this nascent stage of IoT development,  there are still no common standards between  different platforms to communicate with each other.

There is an ongoing effort by major companies to bring in some semblance and to bring some level of standards in the IoT ecosystem as they collaborate with each other. Secondly the potential market size of a trillion dollar plus perhaps could also force them to think collectively to build some open standards.

In fact there are some enterprises who are building a smaller footprint ecosystem that can talk to each other like Nest (Thermostat, Smoke detectors, Lights), GE & Honeywell (lighting and power sockets), Sonos (home audio), Schlage and Kwikset (door locks), Philips, Hue,Belkin, Withings (home connect products).

IoT network connectivity is bit more complex than our digital PC's or smartphones. IoT connected devices use different types of networks and patterns of connection and more over these devices are not constantly connected to provide an instant response thus resulting in being out of synch and with latency issues in the ecosystem.

In the basic System Architecture of IoT,  there are two different types of devices. There are IP based devices that are connected to Internet and they typically translate IP based communications. On the far end there are local Non IP based devices connected to a gateway also called edge devices.

The big advantage with these gateways is that they can work with different communication protocols of IoT devices and have built-in rules that can run even when the Internet is down. The major fault with Gateways is the single point of failure besides lack of technical standards and the need to customize with different products in the ecosystem.

The advent of low powered wide area networks (LPWAN) and technologies like LoRA (a proprietary of South Korea Service) or LTE-M a machine-to-machine communication technology to transmit data between battery operated devices over miles with little power could provide the required boost to overcome some of the challenges with gateways.

There is another major challenge of limitation in providing addresses to all the IP based gadgets in the IPv4 with its 32 bit addressing system and max addressable space of 4 billion devices.

This issue is addressed with incoming standards IPv6 which has a size of 128 bits. These new address format overrides all the limitations of Unicast identification networking addressing issues, Anycast address issues for group interfaces as well Multicast addresses for multiple hosts issues. This new addressing system number is so large that it is said that it would take 38 billion years to scan all the possible addresses at million addresses per second speed.

Going by today's adoption rate and acceptance in the market for IoT products in general it appears to be attracting more the early adopters market and for some good niche products appealing to the mass markets too.

The common thread among these successful products line appears to be great value proposition that these IoT products are able to provide to the customers. Experts believe that there are 3 key ingredients for any successful IoT products. RELEVANCE, SPECIFIC BENEFITS AND EASE OF USE.

To expand the market from early adopters to mass market,  the product needs to meet the requirements of different people and has good affordability price point for the expected value proposition. I am sure there are many more discussion points and topics across different types of products and different markets that can be penned. I will pause the discussion here and opt writing on those areas in my future blogs.

In today's market, there are some cool products out there which I would like to broach here briefly.

Belkin makes WeMo Home product series and many of them can be controlled, configured and monitored remotely using your smartphones such as electrical lights, sprinklers, blinds, crock-pot and other electronic DC devices.

Amazons Echo product provides hands free voice activation to several compatile WeMo, Philips Hue, Samsung Smarthings, Wink and other Smartdevices besides reading news, weather & traffic and playing music on its Alexa voice service.

Mimo smart baby products embedded in baby's kimono can allow parents to track baby's sleep, movements, temperatures and provides relief and feel secured and connected albeit remotely even in day care centers with their smartphones.

Nest  thermostat is another product line that I like which stands out among other such products both in terms of design, usability and intelligence and above all user experience. There are also several geeky gadgets like Ambient Umbrella which has light integrated into its handle that glows different lights when rain, snow or thunderstorm is forecasted.

The trend of interoperability and above all the collective synergies where the sum of value of each IoT product being greater than its individual values for a customer is encouraging buyers to adopt IoT devices with enthusiasm and building fan followings.

Some major manufacturers like Belkins (WeMo), Samsung (SmartThings), Philips (Hue), Qualcomm (AllJoyn)  have built  Open platforms and hubs that work with many of their own products and cross company products. There are others who have built Home Automation network protocols like ZigBee, ZWave, Insteaon, Lutron Clear Connect that plug with products with their Hubs for edge products. Amazon's Echo, Lowes Iris, Staples Connect are good examples of IoT product that works with majority of the platforms and hubs/gateways.

There are many companies seeking to become the de facto gateway/cloud integration platforms for different IoT ecosystem

Xively Connected Product Management is one such enabling platform for Enterprises. Xively provides a rich set of API's, Libraries, SDK, Services to Connect, Manage and Engage IoT products.

Here is a listing of 15 other major companies in today's perspective showing greater investment and product, services and technology maturity offerings in IoT arena.

Amazon, Bosch, Cisco, GE, Google,  IBM, Hitachi, Huawei, Microsoft, Oracle, Philips, PTC, Samsung, Siemens and Qualcomm in this game provide products and solutions in areas such as Network Connectivity, IOx and Fog Applications, Data Analytics, Security, Management and Automation and Application platform for IoT.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is still nascent, but growing quickly. Research firm IDC predicts it will become a $1.46 trillion international market by 2020, up from $700 billion last year 2015.

The potential big market is obviously the replacement market to swap the legacy house hold products from these niche manufacturers. Second there could  be new services enabled by IoT devices that are not available today like  diagnostic devices that could monitor before your gadgets fail (example Water boilers/heaters).

The most important IoT product category for me is the bio and wearables one that has the potential to change the quality of health care of human being from being reactive to being proactive and importantly being aware and in command with knowledge.

Customer Experience Alignment

Why do we as Customers prefer to buy branded products or obtain services from already known places. The answer seems very simple that these products or services could meet our perceived expectations. On the flip side of this question to Producer ask them what makes them tick with their customer, the answer is definitely not so simple.

Today most companies are trying to answer this question and also stay ahead of it by trying to understand their Customers with emphasis on 4C's paradigm besides their age old 4P's approach.

The 4C's approach keeps the Consumer at the center of the sphere with "Outside in" approach rather than  the "Inside out" which was more evident in 4P's approach. In fact even 6 decades ago, Peter Drucker the Management Guru in his "The Practice of Management(1954)" has said "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: To create a Customer."

The Customer centric approach emphasizes that Value creation is a bidirectional and enterprises have to create a mindset to listen to their Customers from as many touch-points as possible and to collect their interactions of experiences expressed by them across many of their channels.

The Social media and Enterprise multi-channels needs to be tapped into 360 Customer view to enable and see a holistic picture as well at a granular level of their Customer with different lens/views created with # of Customer profiles for their different functional business departments.

The task of building a Customer 360 Experiences Engagement hub is not an easy project. The major challenges for any enterprise needs to be addressed not from a technology perspective but rather first clearly understand what is the objective, goal of building one.

In a siloed state of many Business functional units of an Enterprise, the first and foremost act is to undertake an assessment exercise to identify the state of  Customer Journey identifying concerns, issues and processes in play across their multi-channels. Second align the assessment findings with Corporate's objective which could be either Cost containment, Improve Revenue or Improve Satisfaction or even meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Customers in any large organization come in various hues and colors of their expectations and requirements. Identifying the personas of these customer with proper segmentation to bring the granularity level of understanding to individual customer level would enable enterprises to align with Customer expectations.

Involving, engaging, training and motivating employees who man the front office of these multi-channels is also crucial in building and improving customer experience.  Forrester Research in their 2011 has indicated that  CXPi (Customer Experience Index)  in some large global brands companies who have moved their needle up from below average to above average CXPi have seen an increase of $1.3 billions, I mean billions in their revenue bucket.

From a technology side, depending upon their level of maturity and IT support, there are some good options. One could embrace CRM + Social media suite of Products or engage Consulting vendor who have already  built similar hub on a Big Data platform.

However the former may not provide a Complete and True Customer 360 Engagement hub for the following reasons. It may not be able create data piping from all your traditional multi-channel sources and second, it may not able to beef up with 3rd party data with appropriate connectors and build different hierarchical views required by different functional business units. One of the other significant drawback also appears to be in their analytical platform offerings with embedded engines to process Unstructured & Semi structured of Text & Speech data sources and contextualize them. This option may not also meet your demanding and individual specific requirements for comprehensive Predictive Analytics in Real-time to monitor and provide better experience.

Nevertheless it does provide a good first step to move in the right direction for companies who currently don't have common Customer Center platform to bring in Customer interactions to club with transactional data overlaid with common denominator analytics.

The Vendor option does not go without its own challenges and problems. The major challenges appears to be articulating clearly what is to be delivered or what will be delivered that meets your requirements in a phased manner with a clear Road-map.

One needs to understand that you are actually building a System of Systems as Gartner calls it for building Customer Engagement hub. In the paper on "The Top 10 Strategic Technologies for Customer Experience" Gartner indicates that there are more than 50 Technologies that can be used to build a good orchestrated Customer Engagement platform.

Here is the conceptual view of a Customer 360 Engagement

Objective of the Blog:
The objective of this blog is to emphasize the importance of alignment of Customer Experience. Enterprises could build an expensive and real-time platform in-house or in cloud, but if the Customer's experiences are not aligned, then we are trying to knock at doors which may open and pave way to a myopic solution.

Identifying and laying out the efforts for a greater benefits for Customer and Business needs to be the ultimate goal. There are Strategic and Operational steps that needs to be undertaken to convert a Discrete Customer into a Trust based relationship Customer.

Building a Customer relationship should be the utmost important one and this need to build as continuous process. Here is how we can visualize it in converting a Discrete Transaction to Relational one with relationship maturing from Symmetry to Trust relationship

Second, building a Value-Centered design by taking all Customer interactions in the Organization and trying to realize the benefits out of them. These mapping can be built either by using Service Blueprints, Customer Journey Maps, Experience Maps, Mental Model and Spatial Map diagrams.

These maps irrespective of the choices provide Chronological, Hierarchical, Spatial story line with their interactions to show case actions of individuals and appropriate process involvement of the Organization. Care must be taken that these visual diagrams are not meant as colorful wall posters but important diagrams to bring in right conversation about creating values.

Thirdly, bringing in Employees into the center stage by training, engaging them for insights and keeping them motivated because they represent the front office folks in the Customer Engagement in building progressive and positive relationship.

Fourthly, frequently, enterprises should be able to unearth Voice of the Customer (VoC) using Surveys, Feedback or employing 3rd parties to gather such information.

Lastly,  building appropriate analytical models and utilizing them their Analytical engines to contextualize the interactions to view as connected pieces rather than as isolated measures.

But here is a common approach followed and advised by all: Start Small, but aim Big or Sweat the Small Stuff