Reinvigorating Customer Experience: Cloud, AI and Data help Harley-Davidson develop the rider experience of tomorrow.

In March 2020, I was lucky enough to experience (touch and feel, not ride) Harley Davidsons, latest innovation the Livewire electric, connected and smart motorbike.

During a panel session where the focus of the discussion encompassed how Iconic brands (including the other panelist represented by tech vendor IBM, who partnered with Harley-Davidson on the tech side) can only remain iconic in their ability to attract new generations of customers, by re-invigorating the experience and in many ways the brand itself.

The Livewire electric smart motorcycle was developed to enhance the rider and riding experience by leveraging cloud, IoT and AI-based technologies working in unison to optimise the overall experience of the Harley Davidson customer.

“Being able to connect more closely with our riders and offering them never possible services that are yet to be discovered based on their needs and what’s important to them – that’s exciting.” Dan Lesnock - Lead technical service at Harley-Davidson Australia

ADAPT data shows that acquiring and retaining customers is the number one priority for Australian CIOs with CFOs ranking improving customer analytics and experience as a top-five business priority for 2020.

ADAPT believes today’s customer experience equation is about aligning customer expectations and experiences much more closely with your company’s vision and values, rather than a product or service.

ADAPT Research and Advisory clients can access a detailed overview of one of our 12 identified core competencies for Australian businesses here:

Core Competency: Enhance Customer Experience -

Three key tenents being: Build a trustworthy customer analytics strategy; Deliver connected and consistent customer experiences; Improve customer trust around data privacy and theft.

Australian organisations are looking for new technologies and approaches to enhance customer experiences.

Almost 60% of CIO respondents at our Feb 2020 CIO Edge event told ADAPT that they are investing in immersive customer experiences, with equally significant numbers in analytics, Machine Learning, and AI tools.

Whilst it is encouraging to see these investment priorities, organisations also need to look at many of these technologies as complementary rather than mutually exclusive investments, aligned to the goal of enhancing customer experiences.

There were a number of key development areas identified as critical components in the design and delivery phase of the Livewire:

1.      New experiences for today’s rider:

Safety was a key factor in the planning, design and ultimate delivery of the Livewire riding experience. Collecting, analysing and acting on data collected from multiple riders, bikes, and riding styles enabled the company to enhance capability’s in real-time

2.      New technology approaches for new experiences:

The existing environment was enhanced through virtualisation and containerisation while recognising the benefits and shortcomings of cloud as workloads migrated to the cloud.

3.      The importance of trust and security in a cloud-based environment:

A brand is only as good as the value it provides and trust it garners. When it comes to which cloud to build on and which vendor to work with trust is one of the key decision criteria. Do you trust your cloud provider with your customer’s data?

4.      The importance of skills:

It is critical to ensure we have the right skills in house to analyse and leverage the data effectively enough to deliver the right experiences for the rider

5.      The importance of open and manageable environments

By creating an open environment of workloads and leveraging technologies like Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, customers can move workloads and data through a multi-cloud environment as needed based on the requirements of the workload itself.