Amazon: What and 'Who' is next?

Disclaimer: My family is an Amazon family and I'm a shareholder. We have been prime members since the beginning, have an echo in every room, and have enough cardboard in our recycling bin every week to build an English Armada.

This week Amazon announced another business it is going after: Enterprise Networking.  Cisco, Juniper, etc..all took a 6-9% drop in stock price.  According to sources - AWS could price at 70-80% less expensive then Cisco and would have built-in connections to AWS cloud.  For those keeping track at home - it is yet another business threatened by Amazon: Bookstores (all but gone), Electronic retailers (Best Buy), consumables (batteries, razors, etc), Department stores (Macy's Nordstrom, Cabelas/Bass Pro), Food Delivery/Grocery stores, Healthcare (UHG, Cigna), Pharmacy (walgreens, CVS), Contact Centers (ACD vendors - Cisco, Genesys, etc), and package delivery (UPS, Fedex). 

Perusing the web on this beautiful Sunday and found this paid-for site in the WSJ...   Doesn't take much reading to recognize this is a whole new competitive threat to a new group of companies: IBM, ATT, Salesforce, ORCL, MSFT, and the company I am currently working: ServiceNow.   

What is the Amazon value proposition?  Your Enterprise services are already running on AWS - in the cloud.  With IOT - Enterprises can create, certify and activate “things” in their ecosystem, giving them an easy route to connecting these devices to the cloud. From there, it’s a matter of setting a few predefined rules to filter and act upon these new sources of data. Once in the cloud - AWS has machine learning, deep learning and other new artificial intelligence services that can easily be applied to a customer’s aggregated data and solve issues proactively instead of reactively.   

So easy right? Its a great message. Customers don't want problems. To solve customer's problems proactively is the holy grail of service.  Whether it is proactive health care (blood markers), auto service (oil changes/tires worn down), software bugs, network outages, etc - the ultimate service is no service.  This is Amazon's message.  Put data into the cloud - aggregate information - solve issues proactively with prediction.  Amazon is simply jumping to the back of the book.  

However, we all know Enterprises can't jump to the back of the book when it comes to service. Unfortunately,  not all issues can be handled proactively and yes - all issues need to be handled.

Enterprises need to find ways to deliver Effortless, Connected, and Proactive service to their customers.  What does that look like? Give your customers (internal or external) a means of self service (portal - community/knowledge).  It has the great combination of being the mode of service customers prefer and the most inexpensive to deliver for Enterprises.  If problems can't be solved via self service - Allow omni-channel capability for your customer to open up cases and/or incidents with your organization.  Once identified - use a connected software platform capability (Pegasystems, Zendesk, ServiceNow) - to move the case/incident around your organization (to include Field Service) with SLAs, tasks, and subtasks to solve the customer's problem in a disciplined, often times automated manner.   Only then - can you begin to use Performance Analytics and Machine learning to predict future issues to allow you to proactively solve customer, product, etc. issues before they become issues.  

As IOT evolves - interactions will move from customer initiated to machines talking to machines. However, IOT and machines talking to machines doesn't accomplish "work". This is the promise of Service Management. Service Management is not a jump to the back of the book. It is a disciplined process for delivering service and getting work done. It incorporates an understanding of your current service maturity and provides a phased approach to getting the most out of your customer experience journey while providing cost savings for your organization.

To learn more about Service Management and the various solutions available to business take a look at https://www.servicenow.com/solutions/service-management.html