Alternative Channels for Engaging Customers of the Future

Published: 07 June 2017 ID: G00326391

Analyst(s):

 Jenny Sussin, Jessica Ekholm, Adnan Zijadic, Jim Hare, Bern Elliot, Pete Basiliere, Van L. Baker, Marty Resnick, Stephen E. Smith, Nadine LeBlanc,Michelle Duerst, Jim Robinson, Melissa Davis, Olive Huang, Anthony Mullen

Summary

There is no shortage of ways for organizations to interact with customers today and, moving forward, there will be even more. Application leaders supporting customer experience will need to identify and prioritize the next-best channels for engaging customers of today and of the future.

Overview

Key Findings

• Application leaders supporting the customer experience are bombarded with requests from their colleagues, across business units, asking for IT to support the latest emerging technologies as a means of engaging customers. If IT doesn't act fast, business unit leaders will often make independent purchasing decisions that don't complement existing investments.
• Existing customer engagement channels, such as phone and email, rarely go away, but the volume of customer engagement per channel will change over time in ways we can't always anticipate.

Recommendations

Application leaders supporting CRM and customer experience initiatives must:

• Pursue requests to support new customer engagement channels in order to move from a position of servitude to a position of leadership.
• Proactively suggest engagement channels that their organizations can use to improve customer engagement and retention, and increase business revenue.
• Prioritize emerging customer engagement channels that best align with their business model and its relevant customer use cases.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2020, augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality immersive solutions will be evaluated and adopted in 20% of large enterprises as part of their digital transformation strategy.

By 2019, requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through traditional social media.

Analysis

Introduction

Application leaders supporting the customer experience are bombarded with requests from their colleagues across business units asking for IT to support the latest emerging technologies as a means of engaging customers. This often brings IT into a position of servitude: they need to commit to delivering on something with a thinly developed business value proposition, or they risk being replaced with digital marketing agencies or business-managed, ad hoc cloud projects.

When we look to the future, organizations will still be taking phone calls, receiving emails, and even sending direct mail, as a way to engage their customer base. It is critical to application leaders' understanding of this research to recognize that existing customer engagement channels rarely go away, but the volume of customer engagement per channel changes. Consider the continued existence of fax machines, which is an example of this change in channel mix.

Each channel, known and new to come, will best-serve certain use cases, industries and geographies, so the channel mix will be unique from organization to organization.

Application leaders must anticipate requests to support underutilized existing and still-emerging customer engagement channels in order to move from a position of servitude to a position of leadership. They should use this research to not only prepare for incoming requests, but proactively suggest engagement channels that their organizations can use to improve customer engagement and retention, and increase business revenue (see "The Five CRM Customer Engagement Technologies to Focus On Through 2020" ).

In this research, we profile 15 ways that organizations can engage, and will be engaging, customers over the next 20 years. Some of these technologies and engagement channels may be familiar from the various Gartner Hype Cycles alluded to in the report, while others may be new. Most will be applicable to all readers, but some will not. In order to understand the urgency around each of the channels, we have provided a timeline of the popularized use of each technology for commercial purposes (see Figure 1). Additionally, we have provided a heat map based on the number of client calls Gartner has received on each topic during 2017 (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. A Preparation Timeline for Customer Engagement Channels

Source: Gartner (June 2017)

Figure 2. Heat Map for Alternative Technologies Based on 2017 Gartner Client Inquiries

Source: Gartner (June 2017)

Customers have many channel choices when it comes to engaging with organizations. Organizations often home in on one or two types of channels: traditional channels like phone and email, or hot emerging channels like the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain. In this research, we review 15 alternative channels for engaging customers that application leaders can suggest to their business counterparts as relevant by business case, not just hype.

As application leaders review this research, we suggest they consider the following as means for prioritizing the proposed alternative channels within their organizations:

• Is this channel applicable to my industry/region?
• Are my customers using this channel, today?
• Which specific use cases would we be able to address through this channel?
  • How will that be better than what we're doing today?
• Does my organization have an existing investment in this channel?
• How would this emerging channel fit within my overall customer engagement channel mix?

Augmented Reality

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2020

Analysis by Marty Resnick

Augmented reality, most commonly referred to as AR, is the ability to overlay digital information and assets over the physical world through a camera display (see "Immersive Technologies Offer Infinite Possibilities" ).

AR is being utilized in many areas, and both for consumer-facing and employee-facing use cases. For instance:

• Mobile Gaming
  • Niantic's Pokémon Go proved the ability of AR in mobile gaming, which can lead to successful adoption with a very large user base.
• Sales and Marketing
  • Organizations use AR technologies to provide potential clients with a realistic view of what their product would like in their homes or offices. Oftentimes, this also includes a visualization of what a particular accessory (that is, jewelry, clothing, kitchens or furniture) would look like physically on the person or in the home.
• Manufacturing
  • AR provides the ability for manufacturing engineers to view maintenance and work order information in a hands-free environment.
• Supply Chain
  • Shop floor workers use AR to pick and inventory items quickly without the need to carry tablets or other equipment, but just through the use of head-mounted displays (HMDs).
• Field Service
  • Field maintenance workers, out in the field, use AR to reach the home office, via video calls, and receive real-time instructions for repairing equipment.

Today, the use of AR is a very tactical and use-case-specific decision. Furthermore, the technologies and methodologies involved in AR implementations are still a bit immature, resulting in organizations taking more of a lessons-learned versus a best-practice approach, and the need to outsource for subject matter experts (see "Market Guide for Augmented Reality" ). We anticipate that, by 2020, AR, virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) immersive solutions will be evaluated and adopted in 20% of large enterprises as part of their digital transformation strategy, up from less than 5% today. Of these immersive technologies, we anticipate that AR will offer use cases that span many areas to benefit organizations specifically in the areas mentioned earlier, as well as in design visualization and prototyping, education and training, geospatial intelligence and planning, and sales and retail.

Blockchain

Critical mass of customer adoption between 2025 and 2030

Analysis by Stephen Smith

In "Hype Cycle for Blockchain Technologies and the Programmable Economy, 2016," Gartner defines a blockchain as:

"A type of distributed ledger in which value exchange transactions (in bitcoin or other token) are sequentially grouped into blocks. Each block is chained to the previous block and immutably recorded across a peer-to-peer network, using cryptographic trust and assurance mechanisms. Depending on the implementation, transactions can include programmable behavior."

For consumer-facing industries, the principles of blockchain represent the possibility to engage with customers in a very different fashion than has been historically possible. Putting aside the better-publicized use cases of currency substitution, the blockchain creates the mechanism for enterprises to more-easily attach/embed digital attributes in their products, which, in turn, could potentially create new markets and value streams (see "Blockchain Will Drive Digital Branding in Consumer Goods Manufacturing" ).

The greater transparency provided by blockchain would allow consumers to have more control over the value of their loyalty programs, and position them to trade, sell and otherwise curate their points. While at first this may seem antithetical to the notion of a loyalty program, companies that enable consumers in this fashion may achieve the loyalty and repeat purchase they are seeking anyway. Both the transparency and accessibility provided by the blockchain also give warrantees, service contracts and usage manuals more value. This value then becomes a more integral part of the mental equation that consumers use when they are choosing between products. Those enterprises that can successfully build a stickier engagement with consumers will win more business.

Garnering the benefit of these principles will not require a full-blown official blockchain to be in place, so we would project that, by 2022, more than 25% of consumer-facing companies would be piloting, or fully engaged in, delivering value by leveraging the concepts and technologies of blockchain.

Brain-Computer Interface

Critical mass of customer adoption after 2030

Analysis by Anthony Mullen

A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a type of user interface whereby the user's distinct brain patterns are interpreted by a computer (see "Hype Cycle for Human-Machine Interface, 2016" ). Data is either passively observed for research, or used as commands to control an application or device. There are three methods used:

1. Invasive, where electrodes directly connect to the brain.
2. Partially invasive, where the skull is penetrated but the brain is not.
3. Noninvasive, where commercially available caps or headbands are worn to detect the signals from outside the skull.

Noninvasive methods cannot use higher-frequency signals, because the skull blocks and disperses electromagnetic waves. Therefore, a major challenge for this approach is obtaining a sufficient number of distinctly different brain patterns to perform a range of commands. While control today is not very smooth or continuous, it is possible to control virtual objects in multiple dimensions, play interactive games and control hardware. Notably, the world's first mind-controlled drone race was held by the University of Florida in 2016, showing a potential path for consumer robotics.

Currently, the best neural interfaces are used for limb prosthetics, and use 100 channels to distill the neural signals of the brain. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is investing $60 million over four years to increase this to a million channels with Neural Engineering System Design (NESD), which would see a 1 cubic centimeter device implanted in the human brain to allows neurons to transfer data to electronics. 1 This would be a transformational step for this technology, with wide-reaching implications on not just more-nuanced interfacing, but in deeply understanding the brain from a physical and psychological dimension. Initiatives such as the Obama administration's decade-long Brain Activity Map project will also drive forward knowledge to benefit this field.

While invasive techniques provide better results, it is expected that noninvasive BCIs will grow at a quicker rate, as the method does not cause infection and discomfort, and can be more easily accommodated by institutions, patients and consumers. Noninvasive methods make up the majority of research; however, to date, there is no large corpus of data available or standards between providers and hardware. As a result, determining the accuracy of readings based on user characteristics (such as demographic traits and state of mind) and wider machine learning, has not flourished.

Brain-computer interfaces remain at an embryonic level of maturity, but major technology investors such as Elon Musk are trying their hand in the area as well. 2

Imagine a world where, rather than speaking to an Amazon Echo or a Google Home, all a person had to do was think. Imagine text messages being sent and received without ever touching your phone. Imagine transferring information between people in a room, with no one audibly speaking.

This is a far-out reality — but it is a future where people can communicate their product or service problems without needing to fill out any sort of form or speaking with anyone at all. It is a future where people can learn about promotional offers just by looking at merchandise. It is a future where currency is exchanged without bills or credit cards, and it's something application leaders can think about today, to prepare for the next 30 years.

Co-Browsing

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2020

Analysis by Nadine LeBlanc

Collaborative browsing, or co-browsing, lets an agent interact with a customer by using the customer's web browser to share the same web page. With co-browsing, customers and agents simultaneously browse a site in a synchronous fashion by URL(s) distribution. Co-browsing differentiates itself from screen or application sharing, as it does not involve viewing or controlling the presenter's screen that may contain other open web browser tabs or applications (see "The Gartner CRM Vendor Guide, 2016" and "Why You Need to Rethink Your Customer Self-Service Strategy" ).

The technology for co-browsing is fairly mature, having been around for at least a decade, and the business process and benefits for in-channel support are well-proven. Co-browsing is often complementary to internet-based interactions to answer questions, demonstrate best practices and resolve self-service issues (see "Best Practices for Making Live Chat a Must-Have Engagement Channel" ). As opposed to mobile interactions, co-browsing is better-suited for interactions needing more than a few minutes to walk through simple or complex information. For example, wealth management firms and healthcare payers enhance client or member experience by using co-browsing to display and explain complex information in an easy-to-understand format (see "Data Visualization Brings Wealth Management Out of the Dark" and "How Healthcare Payer CIOs Can Eliminate Administrative Friction to Increase Member Engagement and Retention" ).

Co-browsing is still a fairly underutilized technology, as it requires customers be in a place where they're able to share control of their browser while still having a conversation with an agent — which is unlikely to be via a mobile device. However, paired with live chat, co-browsing is increasing in popularity and is estimated to encompass 2% of overall chat interactions (as opposed to less than 1% today).

Application leaders are at crossroads regarding usage of co-browsing. On the one hand, there is the option to replace co-browsing by eliminating the need to use one's hands and eyes for browsing using audio-centric technologies (such as Amazon Echo). On the other hand, there is the opportunity to scale by incorporating co-browsing capabilities into chatbots or virtual customer assistants' repertoire, or by exploring co-browsing equivalents for immersive technologies such as AR. By 2020, organizations looking to use co-browsing will have, at a minimum, piloted the technology.

Consumer Messaging Apps

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2020

Analysis by Jessica Ekholm

Consumer messaging apps enable users to connect with each other on a one-to-one basis via text-based messaging. Messaging apps sometimes also offer voice, photo, video and location-sharing capabilities, bots, and third-party services. They have fast moved beyond being a communications channel in the Chinese market to becoming a de facto platform for users' entertainment and payment needs, particularly with WeChat.

The user base of the top four messaging apps combined has surpassed the user base of the top four social networks, as WhatsApp has more than a billion monthly active users, followed by Facebook Messenger with a billion users and WeChat with 899 million monthly active users (see "Competitive Landscape: Consumer Messaging App Providers, 2016" ). Still, organizations look at consumer messaging apps as experimental channels, and are unsure of how to operationally engage with customers over the channel.

Consumers, however, use these apps regularly due to the apps' intuitive user experiences, so innovative businesses and governments have had to make sure that they can be reached via these new channels for marketing, sales and customer services purposes (see "Top Use Cases and Benefits of Consumer Messaging Apps for CRM" ). For example:

• China Southern Airlines began engaging customers on WeChat in 2013, and has since allowed customers to reserve and buy airline tickets through the app.
• Music streaming service, Spotify, used Snapchat's ad service to promote the launch of its "Year in Music" campaign.
• UK train operator, Great Western Railway, uses Facebook Messenger to support thousands of customer support requests, with an average response time of between three and 20 minutes.

Today, messaging apps are primarily accessed via mobile devices, despite some being accessible via web browsers. Moving forward, we expect the medium will still exist, but will include additional means for customers to add input such as gesture or movement. Organizations using consumer messaging apps to support customers will continue using them for marketing, customer service and e-commerce, just as they do today, and individual B2B sellers and all recruiters will likely use these apps to connect with prospects or existing customers (see "How Consumer Messaging Apps Are Being Used for CRM" ). Gartner predicts that, by 2019, requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through traditional social media. Application leaders should, therefore, look into third-party applications for managing customer engagement over multiple messaging channels, such as Quiq, IMImobile, Salesforce LiveMessage and Zendesk Message.

Customer Content Creation Platforms

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2025

Analysis by Pete Basiliere

Many of today's customer engagement channels are "inside out" — that is, they push content out to the recipient. However, people no longer simply accept content as is, but want to manage what they see, and how, where and when they see it. Consumers create much of their own content at this point. They also want to synthesize content from a variety of sources into a single environment — similar to how Flipboard approaches the news industry.

Customer content creation platforms will surface to meet this need. They'll come in two waves: the first wave being curation and the second wave being true creation. The curation wave will see the introduction of "dashboards" like Flipboard, which allow people to pull content from the sources they want in order to inform themselves or make daily decisions. RSS feeds and public APIs are already making this possible, from social networks to businesses like Transport for London, which already enables third parties to pull its data into unique applications that, in turn, pull in information from other providers.

The creation wave will see customers creating environments that give them the combined content from the multiple sources of their own creating and/or choosing, and the ability to decide where and when they want it, and on which device. By 2025, more than 20% of customers will leverage algorithms developed by peer consumers to retrieve the elements of their hyperpersonalized content for display on the device of their choosing. Regardless of whether they are leveraging third-party algorithms or writing their own, in many cases the individual will broadcast the resulting content — directly for free or as a short-lived digital business for a fee — to friends, family, colleagues or neighbors who may be near, far, at home or at a concert.

Enterprises, particularly those in B2C developed markets, must enable on-demand, recipient-driven content via their own multisided platforms to allow customers, suppliers and other businesses to identify interrelated content that they can then push, pull, share and repurpose. The platform for customer content creation platforms will most likely be hosted by businesses — although there is an opportunity for governments and publicly funded organizations to offer some sort of access, as many already do with basic internet access at libraries.

Enterprise application leaders can pitch this idea within their organization through a focus on monetization:

• No charge — Host the customer content creation platforms and give the data away in order to drive certain behaviors (for instance, purchasing behavior by giving the data to consumers who are buying combination rail/dinner/theater tickets, or reducing air pollution by alerting truckers to avoid temporarily congested roadways, depending on the nature of their loads).
• Fee for access — Provide access to the customer content creation platforms through APIs that track usage and charge accordingly.
• Fee for use — Free or fee-based access while charging for data and content usage.
• Commission — Free or fee-based access with a commission on sales.

E-Labels

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2020

Analysis by Michelle Duerst

E-labels extend and expand the product content data available to consumers, thus meeting the growing demands for greater traceability and transparency. Consumers, team members or suppliers can access e-labels by clicking on a link or scanning a QR code. E-labels display the same compliant labeling data shown on traditional packaging, but include additional verified claims, such as:

• Social responsibility
• Allergen exclusions
• GMO-free
• Country of origin label

If a consumer visits a landing page, they have already shown willingness to engage more with the manufacturer. This can be fostered further to test new product concepts through virtual storefronts, provide feedback for current products, as well as suggest completely new products. Service providers can map data points and define workflow processes to ensure accurate e-labels, as well as funnel the customer feedback directly into a formalized ideation process in a digital product life cycle management (PLM) platform, specifically into a product portfolio management (PPM) application.

Each new idea can then be scored, tracked and eventually launched, with all of the customer feedback visible throughout every stage of the product development and introduction. Consumers can even be notified when their suggestions become products to ensure a complete cycle of engagement.

E-labels are already being used today, and application leaders can find more information on e-labeling in the following Gartner's research notes:

"Why Manufacturing CIOs Must Invest in E-Label Discipline"

"What CIOs in Manufacturing Need to Know About Product Portfolio Management"

"Roadmap for CIOs to Harmonize Applications for a Digital PLM Platform"

In the future, we suspect that e-labels will have the greater impact in areas including:

• Field service
• Supply chain
• Marketing
• Program management

Holograms

Critical mass of customer adoption between 2025 and 2030

Analysis by Jim Hare

Holograms are computer-generated visual technologies that are combined with avatars to interact with customers and gather valuable data from the physical world. We already see holograms being used in the form of "virtual presenters," which can deliver marketing messages, provide customer support, and conduct commerce anywhere, anytime and in any language.

While today we see holograms being used in kitschy ways at technology conferences or even at major music festivals to bring deceased musicians back to life, holograms could be useful for almost any business (B2C or B2B) to deliver a unique self-service engagement experience, thus freeing up human resources. 3 India's Bharatiya Janata Party even used a hologram of their party's candidate for prime minister at multiple campaign events leading up to a winning election in 2014 (see "The Role of Digital in Winning an Election for the Bharatiya Janata Party of India" ).

Imagine a virtual receptionist at the ground floor of an office building. The hologram could present visitors with a staff directory and notify employees of a visitor via text message. Imagine a virtual product specialist that could walk prospects through self-service applications, show demo videos, send follow-up information, and collect and run analytics on the meeting. Or imagine a virtual concierge at hotels, airports or museums that can check visitors in, provide directions and provide information about the surrounding area.

Internet of Things

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2020

Analysis by Jim Robinson

Gartner defines the Internet of Things (IoT) as:

"The network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment."

There are different approaches to building a channel of communication with "things," and dozens of components and technologies that comprise the infrastructure of IoT (see "Build Your Blueprint for the Internet of Things, Based on Five Architecture Styles" ). With some overlap, they generally fit into four layers:

1. IoT endpoints: The physical devices, equipment or automobiles, and the technologies they have onboard that capture data about their physical state, and connect, via Wi-Fi, cellular, beacon or other local connection, to local gateways.
2. On-the-edge computing: The components local to the device that ingest the large amounts of data that each device generates, and then transmit it to the middleware layer for processing.
3. Middleware/platform hub: The middle tier that contains analytics, machine learning and rule engines that make sense of the data and determine what is important to pass along.
4. Enterprise application integration: The layer that translates the information into a format that the APIs of enterprise applications (such as customer engagement center, field service management or enterprise asset management) can use to initiate workflows that will drive either human or autonomous actions.

The primary purpose of the vast ecosystems of technologies (see "Hype Cycle for the Internet of Things, 2016" for examples) is to convert raw data from a "thing" into information that drives an action that either the "thing," a related "thing" or a human performs proactively in order to optimize, repair or improve service. Common examples of autonomous actions include running the machine through a reboot and diagnostic cycle, turning off the heat through a smart thermostat and notifying the wearer of an activity tracker that they have achieved their exercise goal for the day.

Traditionally, organizations used a subset of these technologies for use cases such as alarm monitoring or to ensure that a bank of forklift battery chargers is online. Both the amount of data generated and the percentage of resolutions that could be accomplished remotely were at a much smaller scale. Today, companies that are testing IoT solutions integrated with their customer service and field service applications are seeing dramatic improvements in skills matching, deflected calls and repairs completed on the first visit (thanks to having more specific machine diagnostics prior to visiting the site). At the same time, they are also facing challenges, such as:

1. Increased "noise" (data that is analyzed only to find it is not actionable)
2. Compressed demand (when all devices "call in" at once after an issue affects multiple devices, as opposed to the trickle of calls that come in as humans discover issues)

As organizations overcome these challenges, application leaders will be able to enable service organizations to reverse the direction of initial customer service engagement more often. Instead of customers contacting engagement center agents when there is a problem, agents (human or nonhuman) will contact customers to either request permission to work on a problem or to notify them that an issue has already been addressed.

We expect the number of connected devices to exceed 21 billion by 2021 and more than a quarter of those to contain the onboard intelligence or capability to request support (see "Architect Your Business to Engage, Interact and Serve 'Things' as a New Customer Segment" ). We expect thing manufacturers and technology providers at each level to identify and standardize ways to manage the challenges mentioned above at an accelerated rate — driving a 25% reallocation of end-user spend from "procure and maintain" to "service" models (see "Predicts 2017: IT and OT Convergence Will Create New Challenges and Opportunities" ).

Gesture Control

Critical mass of customer adoption between 2025 and 2030

Analysis by Melissa Davis

Gesture control is the ability to recognize and interpret movements of the human body in order to interact with and control a computer system without direct physical contact. The term "natural user interface" is becoming commonly used to describe these interface systems, reflecting the general lack of any intermediate devices between the user and the system.

Gesture control devices are worn or held by the user in order to capture body movements, gestures and expressions. Gestures with specific semantic content can be interpreted by devices and software applications as a means to enhance the human-machine interface.

Today, the dexterity and natural means of human expression of the human hands and fingers suggest that rings and bracelets as the best form factors for gesture control. They are easy to put on and remove, and represent a logical extension of human expression. Examples include:

• For a number of years now, game controllers, such as the Nintendo Wii, track the gamer's body and arm movements to project the direction and velocity of a golf swing or a tennis racket.
• The Guitar Hero game mimics the basic shapes of popular guitar models, and captures body and gesture motion.
• Bird by MUV Interactive is also a finger-worn device used in gaming and public speaking to advance professional presentation slides.
• Oblong provides a wand that allows collaborators to pick and move objects (text documents, spreadsheets) in an immersive collaboration environment.

The primary use case of gesture control today is as an accessory to HMDs to enable VR. Prices for gesture control devices will need to be low (less than $100) in order to drive commoditization in support of VR, which is often expensive. The future of motion command and control spans B2C and B2B use cases from sports training, to selecting and moving objects in a collaboration environment. The product examples mentioned earlier are indicative of a nascent opportunity that will mature within two to five years.

Gartner has research on gesture control that application leaders can dig into as they look to plan for the customer of the future:

• "Strategic Considerations on Zero-Touch UI Design for a Superior Customer Experience"
• "Hype Cycle for Human-Machine Interface, 2016"

SMS

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2020

Analysis by Bern Elliot

SMS, which is also commonly referred to as "text messaging," is used to exchange short text messages of up to 160 characters. An intermediary service can enable the sending of SMS to landline numbers. SMS has an estimated 3.5 billion active users, or about 80% of all mobile subscribers. SMS is often employed for mobile or direct marketing. According to one market research report, as of 2014, the global SMS messaging business was estimated to be worth more than $100 billion. 4

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) extends the core SMS capabilities by enabling messages to include pictures, or video or audio content. However, not all smartphones support MMS, and even those that do must be properly configured. Additionally, some users incur additional data charges when using MMS. As a result, SMS remains the more common messaging service.

SMS is used for a very wide variety of use cases, and while many people use SMS for consumer-to-consumer (C2C) messaging, there are many B2C and machine-to-business (M2B; IoT) applications as well. Common B2C applications include notification and alerting services, which are used for accounts status changes, appointment reminders, order notifications or delivery reminders. SMS is also used by enterprises to enable two-factor authentication. In some cases, SMS text dialogues are processed by chatbots, which enables a degree of automation in the customer dialogue. SMS services are often obtained via a communications platform as a service (cPaaS) provider. Additional information on SMS is available in the document "Market Guide for Communication Platform as a Service." Example vendors offering SMS services include Infobip, Plivo, Twilio and Vonage (Nexmo).

In the future, SMS, along with consumer messaging apps, will be a primary way that organizations engage with their customers via written word — on par with email communication.

Spatial Hearing

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2025

Analysis by Olive Huang

Spatial hearing is the capacity of the auditory system to interpret or exploit different spatial paths by which sounds may reach the head. 5 In recent years, there has been a boom in the technology developments in the field of spatial hearing, which is associated with VR.

In a simulated VR environment, both visual and audio effects are required to deliver an immersive experience. Spatial hearing — as the name indicates — provides crucial sense for the person in the simulated environment on his/her own position in the space, and his/her distance from other objects in the same space.

Creating an immersive hearing experience in a VR simulation is challenging. Take the scenario that a museum provides its customers with the VR simulated environment for an exhibition. If the customer is walking in the virtual museum, and someone greets the customer from behind, the instinct of a human being is to turn the head around to see who is talking. So, the sound re-creation will have to be able to follow the position of the person in the space, and the movement of the person's head. This requires a strong processing capability of such spatial hearing technologies.

The process of creating spatial hearing includes capturing and recording the binaural audio (also called 3D audio), processing and rendering it based on the VR scenario design, and playing it back in the simulated environment. Leading vendors include Two Big Ears (specializing in real-time binaural/3D audio engine; now acquired by Facebook), VisiSonics (specializing in equipment capturing and recording 3D audio), Mint Muse (specializing in VR audio processing and rendering software), Waves Audio (bringing spatial hearing to earphones using a mobile app), Voxeet and BT MeetMe with Dolby Audio (both bringing spatial hearing to business conference calls), and Within (a VR production house that uses spatial hearing in film).

As the era of using VR to deliver new types of customer experience approaches, and spatial hearing becomes a technological cornerstone for an immersive experience, application leaders supporting customer experience in industries such as entertainment, media, tourism, advertising and retail should watch this space first and use the technology to their competitive advantage. Once the technology is more widely available, its impact will spread into many more industries that are considering VR adoption (see "Hype Cycle for Human-Machine Interface, 2016" ). 6

Virtual Personal Assistants

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2025

Analysis by Adnan Zijadic and Van Baker

A mixture of voice automation and artificial intelligence (AI), a virtual personal assistant (VPA) is a software application that works at human voice (or text) command to complete tasks, and provide information (pulled from the cloud) and assistance via a smartphone, tablet, computer or specific device.

Today, VPAs have minimal penetration in business. However, it will gain more traction as the degree of confidence in the technology improves and resulting trust grows. One notable use case of VPAs today is in the hospitality industry, where hotels are experimenting with adding Amazon's Alexa to rooms to serve as a personal concierge to customers (see Note 1). 7 Other VPAs, such as Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant, are usually seen on smartphone devices, but their use case in business is almost nonexistent due to the channels of engagement and what business are doing today. However, in government, the General Services Administration (GSA) is launching a pilot program that would enable federal agencies to build assistant VPA to answer questions on their behalf. 8 The VPA would answer some FAQs to avoid calls into the call center in the hope of freeing up agents to do more complex work.

The most common uses for this engagement channel will be to develop a link with the device owner or user and a business or government entity when a human interaction is not possible or not needed. VPAs acting on our behalf will need to be instilled with trust to carry out a myriad of transactions that best-define our personal profile or status — whether that personal profile is one of shopping habits or that status is financial, VPAs will need to be trusted to engage on our behalf by the parameters set forth by us (see "Maverick* Research: When Things Become 'People'" ).

As we see this era begin to emerge, the potential for interactions and transactions to take place between virtual assistants with no human involvement will increase. These automated exchanges may start with the virtual customer assistant (VCA) sending a highly personalized offer to a customer only to have the VPA reply that there is no interest because the VPA knows the balance in the bank account of the customer is probably too low for any purchase activity to take place. Similarly, the VPA may choose to complete the transaction for the customer because the product meets parameters that indicate it will be valued, and the purchase threshold is below the amount that the consumer needs to confirm.

Gartner has research on VPAs that application leaders can dig into as they look to plan for the customer of the future:

• "Competitive Landscape: Virtual Personal Assistants, 2016"
• "Hype Cycle for Personal Technologies, 2016"

Virtual Reality

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2025

Analysis by Marty Resnick

VR, is the use of computer-generated graphics to fully immerse a user in a virtual "world" (see "Immersive Technologies Offer Infinite Possibilities" ).

VR is being utilized in many areas, both for consumer-facing and employee-facing use cases. For instance:

• Training
  • By fully immersing trainees in an environment, the trainees could experience a potentially harsh environment (sights and sounds), therefore providing them with understanding and confidence before they enter the actual workplace environment.
• Tours
  • Through the use of 360-degree videography, organizations have the ability to provide prospective clients, suppliers and visitors with a "virtual tour" of the environment from the comfort of their own home or office.
• Product testing
  • Automotive manufacturers are able to use VR technologies to place a test user in a virtual version of a car concept for consumer testing prior to finalizing designs and going into production.
• Sales and marketing
  • Using the "wow factor" of VR, consumer packaged goods organizations are using VR to create marketing materials to promote their goods as part of a larger international marketing campaign.

VR has many devices and form factors that should be considered when choosing a VR platform. Each of these platforms offers a different level of immersion and various levels of abilities for displaying content. VR implementations are still a bit immature, especially in the enterprise, resulting in organizations taking more of a lessons-learned versus a best-practice approach and the need to outsource for subject matter experts. Specific skills that most organizations need to consider outsourcing are based around content development (3D) and management. We anticipate that, by 2020, AR, VR and MR immersive solutions will be evaluated and adopted in 20% of large enterprises as part of their digital transformation strategy, although for most it will still make up only a minor percentage of overall interactions. VR has been more successful in the entertainment and gaming industries, but offers use cases that span many areas to benefit organizations, specifically in the areas mentioned earlier, as well as in collaboration, product design and prototyping, presentations and productivity.

Voice Biometrics

Critical mass of customer adoption by 2025

Analysis by Bern Elliot

Voice biometrics, also referred to as voice verification, speaker verification or speaker authentication is a technology that supports the identification of a unique voice through any voice command channel (see "Using Voice Biometrics and Phone Printing to Secure Telephony and Authenticate Callers" ).

Today, voice biometrics are already being used by support organizations to cut down on the time it takes customers to verify themselves, which has historically been done by asking the customer a series of personal questions. This verification can be done actively or passively.

• Passive biometrics listen to the caller's speech in the background. Callers may not know they are being verified.
  • This does not require users' active participation and can be successful without the users even knowing that they have been analyzed.
  • It works better if an organization has a separate channel for audio input from the caller.
  • It requires a recording for enrollment (60 to 90 seconds, which is approximately a three- to four-minute conversation).
• Active biometrics provides a specific response to a prompt.
  • It requires an "enrollment process," whereby the user speaks in response to a system training session.
  • The user usually repeats a phrase or word several times during training to complete the enrollment.
  • It requires a person's cooperation.

We anticipate that voice biometrics will be a much more widely used technology in the area of customer support over the next decade as its accuracy is proven (see "Eight High-Value CRM Projects for Great Customer Service Right Now" ). Because voice biometrics can be, and are, applied to high-risk support use cases, including those related to banking and finance, the broad market will need assurance that the technology is near 100% accurate before further investing.

Summary

In this research, we reviewed fifteen emerging channels for engaging with customers now and in the future. As both the timeline (Figure 1) and heat map (Figure 2) indicate, each channel will mature at a different rate and pique clients' interests in different ways. As noted throughout the sections above, it is critical to recognize that, within each industry and each use case, the road to fruition will look a bit different.

Evidence

1 "Neural Engineering System Design (NESD)." Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

2 "Elon Musk Launches Neuralink, a Venture to Merge the Human Brain With AI." The Verge.

3 "Tupac Hologram Raps From Beyond the Grave." CNET.

4 "Mobile Messaging Futures 2014-2018." PortioResearch (archived).

5 "Spatial Hearing." Oxford Handbooks Online.

6 "The Secret of Hearing — Without It, VR Is Going to Be a Farce." DeeperBlue.

7 "Siri and Alexa Are Fighting to Be Your Hotel Butler." Bloomberg Technology.

8 "Alexa, Can You Tell Me About GSA's Virtual Assistant Pilot?" Nextgov.