The Fourth Industrial Revolution can be described as a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, and impacting all disciplines, economies and industries. Klaus Schwab has associated it with the “second machine age”[1] in terms of the effects of digitization and AI on the economy, but added a broader role for advances in biological technologies. Schwab sees as part of this revolution “emerging technology breakthroughs” in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, quantum computing and nanotechnology.[3]
B2C example: Alexa playing Spotify discovery daily combining deep learning and Natural language processing to bring consumers new music based on prior music played , using big data and using voice as the controller of devices connected and selecting from the cloud, giving the consumer a unique hyper personalised music selection that is as unique as your fingerprint .
Travel example : Price comparison airline ticket systems like Kayak and Skyscanner that can have predictive modelling applied to test out various future states , based on inputs using predictive analytics with data discovery capabilities that learn and get more accurate with more data from the cloud.
In the last two years more data has been created than in all of prior history, for example IOT signals from a jet engine on a new Airbus A350 are 250 GB per flight .
Companies now face a tsunami of personal and machine data in 2019 and companies have since the 25th May 2018 to deal privacy law called the General data protection regulation (GDPR) this expands the rights of individuals and places new obligations on all organisations that market, store, track or handle EU personal data .
Most companies have many data silos as per pace layering architecture they will have systems of record, systems of differentiation and systems of innovation .
For example, my email address could be in several marketing tool databases , a system of record ERP database a, CRM database and on some machine learning databases .
GDPR says you must report data breaches within 72 hours if my email address was hacked or if I requested the right to be forgotten and erasure of my data , I want my email address removed but what if I am stored on 20+ disparate databases ?
The fines involved are up to $20M or 4% of company turnover , two recent $100M+ fines have been awarded against travel and hospitality companies by the UK’s Information Commissioners office for data breaches, so securing customer data in one secure system is now a huge imperative for CEO’s and CXO’s .
Global Airline CEO’s and Senior Executives are attending the Aviation festival in London in September to find out what the future holds , the acceleration of innovation and the velocity of disrupters like Tesla, Uber, Spotify Airbnb etc have taken the travel, transport and hospitality industry by storm , and the technologies that underpin the 4IR are having major impacts , delivering hyper personalisation that consumers now expect from all companies .
The holy grail for most travel companies is a single customer view or a 360-degree view of their customers ,on a single database for real time communications on disruptions etc for the right message, right channel and right time in a proactive predictive manner.
The B2C and travel examples above are only as good as the data that they have access to and the new GDPR regulations bring company data procedures up to date with the needs of the fourth industrial revolution as well as allowing companies to take back control of their data , eliminate silos and have a holistic single customer view of online and offline interactions and update travellers before google does of travel delays, incidents etc.
An example of a salesforce customer with a single customer view live today is Eurostar who had 14 systems in the contact centre , they had an ambition to become Europe’s most loved travel experience first they deployed omni channel service and retired disparate tools and are now down to just four systems, this single customer view in the cloud has allowed them to make savings of over £5 Million per annum on compensation claims and reduce inbound calls 20% and simplify communicating in real time with disrupted travellers using marketing cloud over email, SMS and Push notifications.
Their single customer view project took just six weeks to build the data connections to a small number of cloud databases as they consolidated their technology stack and allows them to personalise their customers experience . Case study
This has resulted in Eurostar rising 142 places from 2015 to the 24th best
customer experience in 2016 and sales rising 15% in 2017 more
details here
An example of real time IOT and customer CRM data is a Spanish Ferry customer called Transmediterranea who use salesforce and IOT beacons on ferries , to let customers know of delays and issues on real time on an app and via text messages.
Salesforce is helping many travel and hospitality customers manage this data collation and apply Einstein machine learning and there are many more details on our website
