Being smart: how are you developing your core services to remain competitive?

Being smart means businesses need to review their core products and services, and the viability of traditional delivery models, to ensure they are still competitive in an interconnected and changing world.

The organisations that adapt most successfully to this new world will be those that seize the opportunities provided by the ability to access more data. This data is then used them to develop new and improved services for their customers.

The fact that all kinds of machines will increasingly be able to talk to each other means that these changes will affect organisations across all business sectors. All business leaders will need to find ways of changing their strategies to manage the implications of these smarter ways of doing things.

The automotive sector is a good example of an industry that is updating and refining its core product, the car, to provide a more sophisticated proposition to customers. This work started with the basic satellite navigation technologies, which can now provide an increasing amount of real-time data to drivers. Now vehicle manufacturers are looking to go beyond these services. They are working closely with IT and telecommunications companies to create in-car applications that allow vehicles to communicate with each other. The end result of this work could be much safer cars that can avoid most road traffic accidents. Those car companies that are able to move beyond their core product in this way will be the ones that gain a competitive edge.

Another example of a sector that is embracing the opportunities to develop its traditional business model can be found in healthcare. A number of healthcare providers are using mobile technology to improve and personalise services they provide. This can range from the simple use of mobile phones to provide a reminder when drugs need to be taken to sophisticated telehealth provision. This allows doctors to remotely monitor a patient’s blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and activity level and provide diagnosis and even treatment without the patient having to come into hospital. 

In more directly customer-facing businesses, there is the potential for developing location-based services to enhance core services. This might be a bank or a café providing customers with instant data on the availability of the nearest branch to their mobile phone.

For business-to-business transactions, the opportunities lie in products such as real-time parcel and vehicle tracking systems that allow providers to enhance their core delivery service. JCDecaux, the UK’s leading outdoor advertising firm, uses GPS timestamps to guarantee advert placement with a confirmation delivered to the client in less than a minute of the job being completed.

The key to maximising these opportunities is for organisations to look for ways of combining the opportunities of smart data into their business strategy and maximising the value of their existing infrastructure. No one element will deliver benefits but the combination offers real potential to generate additional revenue from enhancing core services and from using new ways to deliver those services to customers.

To understand how you can adopt your core services to take advantage of smart or to speak to a smart expert, please contact us now.