Back in 1997, the late Steve Jobs provided a quote which is as illustrative today as it was 23 years ago:

"You've got to start with the Customer Experience and work back towards the technology - not the other way around".

Why is this so mind-shattering to some?  Don't all organisations ensure that they understand the business reasons for embarking upon technology programmes before they start?  In my experience, certainly not always...

Digital Transformation is still perceived as technology-led.  This tends to generate a 'me too' attitude to technology adoption by many, potentially out of a deep concern harboured about falling behind competitively.  In today's COVID-19 world Retail and Hospitality can ill-afford to countenance such a situation, such is the stark reality of their tenuous positioning against the myriad challenges laid bare by the pandemic.  And this is why it is - and indeed, always has been - imperative that companies align and conjoin technical and operational business strategies.

I spent a great deal of 2018-2019 helping to develop an in-store customer behaviour analysis technology using LiDAR.  Sensors utilising such technology use lasers to record time-of-flight measurement to track movement in real time and in three dimensions, enabling data acquisition and analytics platforms to create some very clever, deep insight into customer trends.  But as a Retail SME, it is always incumbent upon me to approach such an innovation not from the technology end, but from the business value it has the potential to deliver.  Not only is it vital to create a genuine business case backed by return on investment for the purchase and deployment of a solution but the immediate and future extrapolated value(s) of how Retail KPIs and metrics are impacted (both positively and negatively) must be understood and communicated across the entire organisation.

Our LiDAR efforts found huge interest within the Food-on-the-Go Hospitality sector in the UK, specifically coffee chains and Quick-Serve Restaurants (QSRs).  As sexy as the tech. is, it was the development of the business benefits and their specific business outcomes which held my personal attention.  In-store innovation such as LiDAR has the potential to monitor customer queues, counting not only the length of a peak-time line but also reporting upon the ways such queue length impacts upon customer experience.  A couple of examples:

In-store queue 'baulking' - the practice of being able to determine that a potential customer paused in preparation of joining a queue but decided against it due to length.

Queue 'reneging' - a customer joined the line but left it before completing a transaction.

Two simple actions.  But short of deploying staff specifically to monitor and count such occurrences, very difficult to quantify in practice.  Sensors, however, can do this - and, with the right data analysis, report on the business outcomes of such actions. Retailers and Hospitality providers gain genuine insight into what they need to do to enhance operational performance (e.g. reduce lost sales, improve customer service, enhance the customer experience, measure queue-based cross- and up-sell losses, etc.) whilst harnessing outcomes to build smarter store-based operational procedures.  An obvious example is more granular staff rostering to provide improved CX at peak times (maximising sales, margin and profitability) whilst also optimising staff levels across opening hours to minimise costs.  In today's challenging environment, it is the business outcomes organisations should be chasing, enabled by technology but not wedded to the technology itself for the sake of innovation.  That's not Digital Transformation - that's a disjointed recipe for business disaster...

The work in which I was involved around LiDAR encompassed Use Case definition, business case creation, technology solution pricing, data science analysis, data capture, ingestion, storage and presentation layer reporting and much, much more during the creation of a repeatable business-led proposition.  It is this holistic sense of ensuring that both business and technology strategies meld seamlessly which delivers true business outcomes and with them, true business value.  Always keep your eye on the prize - you've got to start with the Customer Experience and work back; it was true in 1997 and is equally true in the COVID-19 world of 2020 - only more so.