For the first time product companies have unprecedented access to data that can be sifted to extract information about its consumers, their likes and dislikes. They have the opportunity to fine tune their products and services to delight their customers like never before in the history. But can this access to information alone lead to better customer experience and sales?

The book brings examples of real world to show how innovative leaders from different sectors like medicine and entertainment have built a strategy that gives people experiences truly beyond their expectations.

After explaining the need for a seamless strategy that moves from one part of the cycle to another, the authors coach the readers on how to build a connected strategy. Workshops at the end of each sections provide additional challenges to implement what you learn from the chapters and helps cement the concept that the authors put forward.

If you are beginning your career in marketing and customer experience, the book brings information about what is the latest and best in the field. If you are at a level where you need to shape and define how to use the abundant access to data and leverage its power to enhance your product and services, the book has enough practical information that you can implement in creating a new strategy that will help you make your product and services more efficient.

CONNECTED STRATEGY

Almost a decade ago, journalist Nick Bilton cleverly described the potential for digital technologies to make the consumption of content feel like magic with three numbers: “1, 2, 10.” “These simple numbers,” he wrote,

“represent the distance a screen is from your eyes. Cell phones and e-books are approximately one foot away when you hold them in your hands. Computer screens are about two feet away. The average television in the room is, you guessed it, 10 feet away. Content will eventually follow you from screen to screen and place to place.”

Bilton was essentially writing about the connected ecosystem, and the way that digital products allowed users to experience content seamlessly and pick up right where they left off, wherever and on whatever device they use, just like magic. Of course, this “magic” was really powered by wireless communications technologies, algorithms, and the internet.

Fast forward to today, and that vision of the future is already old hat for those who consume digital content on Netflix, iTunes, or Amazon’s Kindle. What’s more, it’s also become the frontier of innovation with respect to how some brick and mortar businesses are engaging with their customers. At their theme parks, for instance, Disney has begun experimenting with smart wristbands that increasingly enable the company to customize park visitors’ experiences at their properties. Amazon came up with the Dash button (since discontinued) to allow people to effortlessly and instantaneously order household commodities like soap whenever needed. And of course, any number of stores now use loyalty programs, recommendation engines, and order-taking channels in some shape and form that add value to the customer experience and take the pain out of using their product or service.

How to create such ecosystems is the subject of the book Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage from authors Nicholaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch.

“We are living in a world where new forms of connectivity are transforming the way companies do business,” Siggelkow and Terwiesch correctly observe, mindful of the innovative ways that businesses have built ecosystems around their products and services to create increasingly immersive and seamless experiences. Thus, it falls to businesses to develop what they call connected strategies as a way to differentiate in the marketplace. ”The potential of connected strategies,” they argue, “is to create customer experiences that feel like magic while improving operational efficiency to enhance financial success.”

Thus, Connected Strategy provides readers with both a framework and playbook for using communication technologies to develop customer experiences that add value by extending and expanding upon the enjoyment of a product, service, or brand. The framework presented by Siggelkow and Terwiesch revolves around understanding that a connected customer relationship has four elements: the ability to recognize customer needs, the mechanism by which customers are empowered to request how they would like that need fulfilled, channels by which the business can respond to those requests, and perhaps most importantly the ability to repeat the entire process in a sustainable and scaleable way.

Successfully executing this recognize-request-respond-repeat loop entails defining the kind of customer experience that a business hopes to impart. For instance, a connected strategy means that businesses go a step further than waiting for customers to come to them (“buy-what-we-have”); they may try to find out more about what their customers want (“respond-to-desire”), or make recommendations based on what they glean about customer preferences (the “curated offer”), or take steps to influence their customers’ actions (by taking on “coach behavior”), or even proactively provide additional products or services when they anticipate customers require it (“automatic execution”). Each of these things will depend on the extent to which the business collects data about its customers, which is precisely why technology and connectivity play a large part in any connected strategy.

The playbook component of Connected Strategy is where Siggelkow and Terwiesch walk readers through the many considerations in developing what they call a business’ “connected delivery model”: the connection architecture, revenue model, and technology infrastructure that breathes life into any connected ecosystem. They explain various considerations in designing these, and rightly point out the critical role that data play throughout. Indeed, the authors make the obvious point that it is possible for connected strategies to come across as “creepy,” especially where they are able to successfully model consumer behavior, and thereby make the important point not to lose one’s perspective on such matters in the pursuit of an ecosystems approach to engaging customers.

Because of its emphasis on customer preferences and data collection, it should be obvious that connected strategies apply more intuitively in retail or business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts than in business-to-business (B2B) ones. Unfortunately, while Siggelkow and Terwiesch opine that the same principles apply in a B2B setting, even they struggle to present a comprehensive case in this regard. Be that as it may, Connected Strategy is a valuable manual for anyone and every business keen to explore new ways to deliver more value in an increasingly connected world.

Many of us are aware that our world is increasingly getting more connected. Thanks to the power of the internet the global reach of many companies has increased exponentially over the last decade. However, it is not just the global presence of these companies are becoming more evident these days. More personally, we also sense the increasing reach of these institution towards our private lives.

This book does an amazing job of helping executives on how to develop connected strategies in their respective organizations. If you are someone looking to redefine your business model by taking advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, this book will guide you through the thinking process on how to start planting the seeds of connected strategy. Moreover, this book also addresses the privacy concerns of the customers involved.

One of the things I really like about this book is how they infuse their explanations with real life examples on how companies such as Uber, Disney, Amazon, etc used the ideas to take their respective businesses to success. The authors illustrated it really well that this book would appeal not only to business leaders but to every day consumers. I find the examples of latest technological as well as business model innovation really entertaining as much as educational.

Another useful aspect of this book are the workshops. This is a business book anyway so this is written to help business executives to start putting the ideas in these book into proper perspectives. I like that the authors provided sample tables on how executive teams can do actual workshops. This book also has a website where you can get tons of resources like worksheets and podcasts. (www.connected-strategy.com). Simply put, as Reid Hoffman says, read this book if you want to build a business model of the future.

Good strategy overview and interesting business cases. High quality approach to the analysis of new technologies and trends in the times of emerging trends that shape new businesses and business models. Still customer focus is very important and the book uncovers the topic. I think it is indeed very useful to shape a strategy of continuous customer interaction and this is what the future of any business is about. Recommend this book as a thoughtful reading with a lot of interesting examples of big corporations.