I am delighted to see so many industries digitizing their operations. For example, as the International New York Times reported yesterday, the Starwood Hotels are starting to test keyless entry via smartphones for their guests. That is a great example of digitization utilizing smartphones. We will be seeing many more such examples of automation moving forward. Kudos to Starwood for kicking things off.

However, this is not personalization. As we advance, it is key that we be able to personalize as well as digitize/automate. In the case of hotels, we need to move from static web pages & smartphone app-enabled preferences, to having our preferences DRIVE services and incentives! And, once the provider, in this case a hotel, is aware of our preferences , not only will the hotel be able to:

1) Provide a higher level of service (delight customers),

2) Offer relevant financial incentives, and

3) Over time, predict customer needs to greatly enhance the delighted factor,

4) Create a true win-win scenario for the customer and the hotel,

5) And we need to start doing all of this in real-time, vs postmortem activities.

This is true personalization. We have begun the journey. To succeed, we need to be disruptive and willing to change existing business models and processes. Else, we will only be automating today’s processes, rather than innovating new personalization possibilities. Risky? Yes. There will be a trial & error period for sure. And unlike traditional systems, we will need to be disruptive, willing to go outside of our comfort zone and adopt agile methodologies to introduce and evolve offerings rapidly and effectively.

Only then can we achieve the goals of 1-4 above and not only data-mine, automate and digitize, but bring meaningful change and enable true personalization. What big data was always meant to do, but we did not want to take the risk!

Let’s Disrupt | Innovate | Lead