New 'Customer Experience Lab' to bring R&D to C-suite
IBM unveiled a new Customer Experience Lab dedicated to helping C-level business leaders transform the way customers experience their products, services and brands through the use of mobile, social, cloud and advanced analytics technologies.
The idea is to blend technical innovation with business consulting to address priorities of C-suite executives in the era of Big Data, says Peter J. Korsten, Vice President and Partner and the global leader of the IBM Institute for Business Value.
The idea behind the lab is to let clients tap into a part of IBM they've never been able to access before. The IBM lab will provide executives direct access to a virtual team of 100 researchers, supported by thousands of IBM business consultants addressing the opportunities of the digital front office. The firm spends $6 billion annually on research and development, Korsten says.
"Our best clients will have access to a part of IBM they've never been able to access before," Korsten says. "We're going to go where no one has gone before and come up with a solution that seems impossible, or an innovation that was previously unheard of, that's where we go. That's what we do."
IBM researchers, scientists and consultants will co-create with clients to deliver systems that learn and personalize the experiences of each individual customer, identify patterns, preferences and create context from Big Data, he says.
In the new age of Big Data and analytics, organizations are reassessing how to move from addressing mass audiences to personalized relationships, says Jade Nguyen Strattner, the Vice President of Front Office Innovation at IBM Research.
"There's a lot of confusion in the marketplace," she says. In a recent IBM CMO study, for instance, 71 percent of CMOs feel under prepared. "They want to inject technology and see that as a solution to the problems they are seeing but are confused as to how to approach it," she says. "That presents an opportunity for us to take a leadership position."
The IBM Customer Experience Lab will be headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., supported by researchers at IBM's 12 global labs including Africa, Brazil, California, China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Texas.
"I think what's so exciting is IBM will integrate research capabilites with consulting capabilities," Nguyen Strattner says. "Bringing those two things together and then working in a very co-creative and collaborative way with clients is special. I think that's where the magic happens."
Korsten adds: "This is something the consulting world has never seen before. We're creating a platform to come up with business models that simply can not be conceived in other constructs. How cool is that?"
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