Services Industry in the Age of the Internet of Things

• The Internet of Things is to be an age of innovations. Concomitant to new  innovations come new risks. The deluge of new customer related data will enlarge and analytics will  complicate data management for services firms. Services industry has also to reckon with cyber-security as a major challenge.
• A service cycle in the Age of IoT is purely a function of expectations and how they are met.

• The key word is: Expect. All customers have expectations of their service provider, be it a bank or a service industry or an airline or a hospital to be intensely technology based.

• The shift to IoT will increase expectations for faster, more efficient and zero defect services.

• The Age of IoT will thus re-define the internet driven expectations of services from customers of every organization.

• The expectations a customer carries are a function of the customer's brand perception. (customers expect more from Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Google, AT&T; students expect more from Harvard, Wharton or Stanford)

• Customer expectations may not be the same across all service seekers. It would vary with expectations high on the part of tech savvy customers, the advanced educated and the new entrants to technology and  to service.

• Expectations do not exist in isolation. The customer perspective is colored by everything the customer has seen, read , experienced and heard about the service industry for example: all the advertising, all the literature, all the impressions gathered talking to the sales folks, all the word of mouth from friends that the firm is IoT biased. It is a brand perception that the customer carries. This perception will  be influenced by the perceived technological superiority of the industry and positioning the firm in the industry to meet the IoT age.

• The IoT firm has to merge and align the various multiple policies into a single, integrated  IoT service strategy for the organization. 

• It has to break this IoT service strategy back into designing IoT supported service documents and deliverables for each stakeholder.

• The IoT service organization has to train and retrain across the organization and the extended organization as the case may be on IoT.

• Staff have to rethink-In the final analysis, customer service is not all about people, it is about M2M and M2m.

• Service quality through IoT has to be  internalized into every process and mindset.

• The very first step towards creating great customer experience in the service cycle is to understand and integrate this M2M and M2m thought into the service strategy.

• Service providers have to build a truly great service culture that demonstrably pays them back not just in terms of financial returns  but also in terms of leveraging on the IoT.

•  The starting point of customer service failure would remain the failure to align service strategy with brand promise on the IoT backing the brand has.

• In IoT, a customer experiences a brand in one of only two ways, through the use of machine to machine conversations (M2M products/offerings of the service from the customer's machine to the service provider or vice versa ) or through the interaction with the machine of the service provider by the customer or by the men at the service provider to the machine of the customer - Machine to men (M2m).

• All the key stakeholders who influence the customer experience of the service organization has to talk IoT language. The heads from marketing, advertising, and branding, the chief customer officer( if  there is one), the head of finance, the heads of service delivery, the head of quality, the contact centre head, the head of technology, everybody who has a role has to talk the IoT.

• The margin of depersonalization would go up as Machine 2 Machine (M2M) conversations take over.

Copyright vests with the author Jayaram Nayar ; he can be contacted at jaynayar@gmail.com