The Enterprise Identity Crisis
The cover feature of the May-June Harvard Business Review (HBR) issue titled The Age of Continuous Connection posits that tech has enabled round-the-clock connection capabilities between companies and their customers, and their argument is that the business models must change or risk obsolescence.
How companies deliver services to their customers depends as much on operational efficiencies as it does on meeting customer expectations. A company’s perceived value is no longer simply offering a good to a market that demands it, but also based on how that good is delivered. Hence, the holistic business model is a cornerstone of corporate brand identity. As customer expectations change, incumbent brands must reconfigure their own identities to maintain market share. But how? Change is notoriously hard, especially at enterprise scale. This is the foundation of what I call the enterprise identity crisis.
To build a realistic strategic change plan that future-proofs your brand against new and novel entrants, companies must first establish their baseline (i.e. how are you delivering value to customers today; where are the inefficiencies/breakdowns/gaps) and then assess where the market is going (i.e. how have customers’ expectations shifted; what are they trending towards). I’ll let you brainstorm your own baseline and focus on how customer expectations are evolving instead.
Without invoking daydreams of Idiocracy memes, it’s safe to say the hyper-connected, near-omniscient reality we share has lead to diminishing some human qualities and bolstering others. For instance, when it comes to the buying process, we have less patience. Transactional speed matters just as much as product quality. In some cases, speed comprises most of the product (think: Amazon’s dash buttons and same-day delivery). We have drastically less tolerance for friction as we move about; we have the same emotional reaction to physically waiting in traffic as we do when our favorite online forum or retailer won’t load in less than a perceived second. The HBR article addresses this: “what matters most to customers is the amount of energy they have to expend — the less, the better.” Convenience sells.
But the tech tools we use to meet the markets’ insatiable appetite for convenience offer double- edged swords since in order to offer the fastest, most perfectly curated product or service to your customers, you need to know a lot about them on a continual basis.
And [insert Mark Zuckerberg drinking water in front of Congress earlier this year] existing enterprises don’t have a great reputation for holding up their end of the bargain. This is the second part of the enterprise identity crisis: customers’ identities are perceived to be at perpetual risk in their hands, and those risks have increasingly become reality. After every publicized breach, customer trust is lost not only for the company that was breached, but for any company that collects and stores customers’ sensitive information.
HBR does a diplomatic job of mapping the implications of society’s awareness about dark business model practices that cannibalize users under the impression they are the customers, pointing out that, “If companies want customers to make a lot of personal data available on an automated and continuous basis, they will…need to show customers that they’ll safeguard the privacy and security of personal information and that they’ll only recommend products and services in good faith.” The crisis here is that the tools do not yet exist to adequately provide these safeguards.
Check out the full article as they breakdown the four primary connected strategies for navigating your own company’s identity crisis in the wake of these new customer expectations. Likewise, stay tuned for my next post which explores solving the enterprise identity crisis with decentralized identity infrastructure.
