In this video blog, Mitel’s General Manager for Contact Center Brian Spencer breaks down IoT (Internet of Things) and M2M (machine to machine), and explains the impact these technologies have on your business. Using examples from the healthcare and service industries, Brian highlights how leveraging IoT and M2M can provide loyalty-building proactive and preventative services for a sustainable competitive advantage.
Video transcript:
IoT. M2M. What do those acronyms mean? And do they have an impact on your business?
IoT is the Internet of Things. M2M: machine to machine communications. Now, you may think, “I don’t produce machines, what does that have to do with me?”, and you’ve seen the silly commercials years ago where the refrigerator was connected to the Internet and it was able to order milk when it ran out – “how does that impact my business? Is that even a real thing?”
The IoT and M2M – Internet of Things and machine to machine communications – they can have a valuable impact on your business. How to they relate to your customers and even your contact center? Let’s walk through a scenario. The proliferation of wearables and devices that exist in this world is exploding, and with the mobile cloud and the ability to have those things connected to the Internet always can create a massive amount of real-time data that can be used to drive preventative care services and predictive and proactive services. You may think, “proactive services? Are we talking about me calling my customers? Because that annoys them.” Well, let’s talk about a real world example of why that would be beneficial. If you’re a healthcare provider, imagine being able to provide someone who is diabetic with a glucose monitor and having that glucose monitor constantly sending information back into your facilities for analysis. Collecting all of that data and using data analytics to come up with trends and predict outcomes to determine that, in real time, “hey, you know what, Brian may be experiencing a health issue. Let’s automatically have a preventative care nurse call or text message Brian to see if he’s okay. Hey, Brian, your glucose is a little low – do you need to eat something?” “Yes, I do. Thanks for notifying me.” Or, no response – well, no response could be a disaster. Emergency response can be dispatched at the snap of a finger. Now that’s the sort of preventative care that in many parts of the world we’re looking at driving down healthcare costs, making services more efficient and trying to avoid the very costly emergency center and ICU issues by preventing healthcare disasters. Imagine how much cost reduction could come from using machine to machine communications, big data analytics and the power of the contact center technology to automatically generate those preventative care services.
The Internet of Things and machine to machine communications, they’re really about you creating brand new, never before available and highly valuable services. You can deliver services that reduce your cost infrastructure but, more profoundly, you can deliver services that give you an entirely new way to please your customers and extend loyalty through the customer lifecycle.
So, you can have a sustainable competitive advantage simply by how you’re engaging with your customers and you’re delivering them services that your competition cannot.
Let’s think about another example. I happen to live in Arizona – it gets hot there! We have a lot of air conditioners. Imagine an air conditioning company that is able to put diagnostic monitors on the systems in the field and, for a nominal monthly fee, keep them healthy. If there’s an issue, they’ll know about it before I do – maybe more importantly, they’ll know about it before my family does. They can reach out to me and say, “Mr. Spencer, we’ve noticed that you’ve got an issue. We can dispatch a technician, get there at your lunchtime today, take care of it and, by the time you get home tonight, your house will be completely comfortable and cool.” I’d love that – I’d pay a nominal monthly fee to have that real-time service and I would be with that company for life, because they’d make sure that my family’s always happy because my family’s always comfortable.
Those are the sorts of services that can be created by combining these new technologies that give us an entirely new reality of what we’re able to do on behalf of our customers so that we know their needs before they do.
I hope you come along with us on this journey as the information technology revolution continues to promote a more pervasive set of services between you and your customers, giving you long-time, healthy relationships that are profitable to you and pleasing to them.
