Customer experience gathers steam with IoT analytics

The internet things has brought massive efficiency to a variety business processes that reduce costs and speed operations. But the ultimate impact is improved customer experience.

With the IoT, sensors that are placed in a variety of products and devices can transmit valuable data over the web about a variety of events. With this data, companies can gather real-time information in the form of IoT analytics about customer use of products, product status and more. This data can allow companies to identify that customers need refills on a certain subscription product or that a product needs maintenance before it breaks down.

"When a vehicle is aggregating information, all that information on some performance, we have a better-performing vehicle," Scott Robinson, a business intelligence and SharePoint expert, says. "We can do maintenance more effectively. We can know ahead of time when something is going to fail. From the standpoint of fleet operations, having floods of good data from every individual vehicle, it helps coordinate the fleet more efficiently."

Experts have been watching the impact of IoT analytics on business processes like supply chain management and how better information at the ready can make deliveries more efficient -- with fewer stops and faster routes -- and also improve operations on the shop floor. As companies turn to customer and product data, they can address inefficiencies in their processes.

By making processes like supply chain operations, fleet management and manufacturing operations more efficient, customers can benefit through faster delivery, faster service and more proactive service -- all important elements of seamless customer experience.

"Adding IoT to the supply chain analytics mix drives costs down and is by far the single biggest benefit to the customer," Robinson says. "IoT can provide analytical input to understanding the customer better."

But Robinson says that using IoT analytics to enhance customer experience is a next frontier that companies have only begun to exploit.

"We take a sort of human pride in knowing the customer," Robinson says. "But the truth is we only know a little bit about the customer. When we can gather and analyze information and understand what drives customers into certain buying patterns, we can anticipate and be ready to deliver more shrewdly than our competitors."

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