In the future, human capabilities will be enhanced by a mix of existing, emerging, and nano-technologies. As technology becomes widely used and also due to rapid digitization partly drived by the COVID pandemic more and more is being written and talked about “Augmented Humanity”. The need to add an augmentation layer to human skills or to humanise interactions between humans and machines is driving attention toward technologies such as exoskeletons, ingestibles, implantables, injectables, biometrics, brain-computer interfaces, affecting computing, wearables, augmented and virtual reality (ARVR), and smart devices.
The more specific question we try to answer today is how customer success will change as we adopt the idea of augmented humanity. Of all the technologies listed above the one that we are already seeing happen is technologies and investments in better understanding the human emotions as expressed in their voices, faces, text and other online behaviors to better understand their emotional state. This knowledge can be used to personalize ways to reach to customer, to sell to customer and to micro target actions and promotions to appeal to their most satisfying emotional triggers. Yes, it does appear to be a little bit of sci-fi at this time but we are already seeing real time technologies that can accurately predict if someone is sleepy based on their eye movements. This is particularly important to warn drivers who might have over estimated their physical capabilities at the wheel. And systems built on this capability can warn the driver and saves lives.
There are products out there that a CSM can use to analyze a QBR meeting or objectives review meeting today. The big difference is that today most systems can do this post-facto. But, in the coming years I expect real time analysis of customer emotional state will become more common place in the industry. This does raise some ethical questions but they are probably best answered on a case-by-case basis by the business and organizational leaders.
For those wondering most of these technologies discussed here are part of the - affecting computing category. Many startups are taking this technology to new levels and finding different use cases to apply this technology to.