Are your customer relationships a critical success factor in your business?  If so, read on… 

Customers are evolving and their comfort with the web is changing daily.  Right now they expect added value functionality online, to be empowered to publish content, and to communicate with other like-minded individuals through online communities.  They demand personalisation and networking which in turn unleashes the amazing power of ‘collective intelligence’ whereby groups of users share, learn, and improve their capabilities together.

The web should be an essential part of your ‘customer engagement’ strategy.  Properly embraced, it will allow you to create a fantastic brand experience for all customer segments.  It will become an integral role in operations and strategy, in particular: customer service, marketing, market research and product development. 

Where are things going in the next few years?

Let’s look at the history of the web so far:

• ‘Web 1.0’ is now understood much as The Document Web. 
• ‘Web 2.0’ was agreed to have brought us richer functionality and user driven control of their experiences. 
• ‘Web 3.0’ is the DATA web – and it’s time to mash it up!

Web 3.0 carries the vision that all data will be consumable and open for use across numerous applications in mash-up’s.  The term ‘mash-up’ describes the merger of various data sources and web functionality scavenged from various sites to create ultimately powerful tools and useful experiences for users. 

Consider that you have a range of data available to you right now: financial transactions, investments, personal calendar, travel details, etc.  Plus you have access to various news media such as current events and natural disasters, weather, ASX announcements and currency market shifts.  Your health records are with your doctor but what if you could source them electronically.  You may even be on Facebook and have access to information about your friend’s … the list goes on. 

Imagine all these data sources being open and able to be reused in multiple ways in your own and other applications; mashed-up.

Imagine pivoting around a point of data such as a day or a bank transaction and observing what you were doing on that day… or where you might have been when you wrote a cheque.  You might see photographs of that location – they might be tagged to say who’s in them… or you might want to use Google Street View to have a look around…  You might see info about the companies nearby, their logos, and summaries of their services or their contact details.  Maybe this is useful in disputing a fraudulent transaction.

Imagine contributing your health data to doctors so they could track the emergence and movement of viruses and compare these to weather patterns, air travel patterns and demographics of the population.

The future of the web holds many possibilities and is very exciting.  In a Web 3.0 world your company’s services and data streams need to be available for customer consumption.

The challenge now of putting data on the web is that it needs to be available for all kinds of things – to all kinds of applications…  Users will come to expect this of you and your competitors.

Have you worked out how to improve customer stickiness and customer acquisition through the web?