Here’s a new one. A report by global management consulting and tech company Accenture has said the world will soon see an era of “Living Services”. Organisations will be creating a new wave of transformative digital services driven by the convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and shifting consumer expectations.
The report, titled, ‘The Era of Living Services,’ predicted a new period of highly sophisticated “living services” that could learn and tailor themselves in real time to meet the changing needs of consumers, workers, patients and citizens.
Their emergence would usher in a change in almost every industry, claimed the report, while presenting brands with “tremendous opportunities for growth and differentiation”, and also marking a radical departure from today’s dominant approach of companies creating generic and static services designed for mass consumption. The report was drawn up by Fjord, which was the design and innovation group within Accenture Interactive.
“We call them ‘Living Services’ for three reasons,” explained Brian Whipple, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Interactive. “They will change consumer experiences such as travel booking and shopping in real time around us. They will be driven by things that are very proximate to us such as wearables and nearables. At the human level, living services will affect our lives in a much deeper and more positive way than mobile and web services have. In effect, living services breathe life into what is rapidly becoming a vast network of connected machines and objects, enabling branded services to flow through and utilise this connected environment.”
“The emergence of living services is being driven not only by the digitization of everything but also by ‘liquid expectations,’” said Mark Curtis, Chief Client Officer at Fjord, Design and Innovation from Accenture Interactive. “When consumers engage with a brand today, such as an airline or a bank, they compare their experience not only with other airlines or banks but also with any service company, such as ride-sharing providers. Take the seamless and largely invisible payment systems these providers offer. Now consumers want payment experiences like this in every industry, consciously or subconsciously. We call these expectations that bleed from one industry to another ‘liquid expectations.’ In effect, expectations will rise across every industry as innovation increases in any industry.”
The impact of living services on brands and the enterprise
Living services, said Fjord, would “profoundly affect” design and brands and unleash new competitive forces in business and the public sector, requiring all organisations to rethink their business structures and practices in the same way they did at the introduction of desktop web and mobile services.
According to the report, enterprises and their marketing leaders would need to strengthen their understanding of customers through data and analytics; maintain a services platform and technology that is flexible enough to recombine products, services and information in many different contexts, experiences and situations. They would need to concentrate on one or two aspects of user experience delivery and make these as “living” as possible.
The impact of living services on consumers
According to the report, living services will affect people in almost all areas of their lives, including their health, home, shopping, travel and money. Here’s how:
Health: Living services will help prevent health issues. For example, given the high correlation between diabetes and depression, the app Ginger IO can predict signs of depression up to two days before outward symptoms manifest. It taps into data from a patient’s smartphone to record everyday behavior and can provide early warning signs.
Home: The home will become a hub for a range of automated adaptive services that take over time-consuming and reoccurring tasks. Most services today were related to energy consumption and security. Nest and Ecobee identified that consumers needed a thermostat that can learn and adapt to preferred temperatures. Wallflowr is a fire-prevention system that constantly monitors the status of electricity and gas supplies to a home. The next stage was for these disparate elements to connect and communicate with each other.
Shopping: Living services will allow retailers to offer less intrusive experiences and move away from the industry’s standard scenario of bombarding shoppers with offers on arrival at a location.
Travel: The broader sphere of travel and hospitality will be transformed in the next five years, driven by the reinvention of cars, initially connected and then autonomous. If drivers were no longer required, and cars could become places where you slept or were entertained during long journeys.
Finances: A bold vision for living services in the financial arena was a service that linked peoples’ financial status directly to other areas of their life. For a traveling customer, the bank could proactively negotiate better currency rates from ATM providers and seek and negotiate the best fuel prices as a customer is driving and prepay the bill.
Image Credit: Accenture Interactive
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