There are two huge gaps in the digital economy... and no-one is talking about it

Why there's a $bn market right in front of us, but most can't see it

Hi everyone,

Thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the fundamental shifts around Empowerment Tech.

Digital wallets, Personal AI and new digital customer relationships.

This is a PERSPECTIVE edition, a regular take on the future of digital customer relationships.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet signed up, why not join over two thousand executives, entrepreneurs, designers, regulators and other digital leaders by clicking below. To the regular subscribers, thank you.

---

Almost every business today is racing to offer new digital services. To transform their customer experiences and improve their operations.

Ever-fuelled by AI.

The result is a fantastic blizzard of new digital features for customers.

Where we can now order things from our sofa. We can skip the physical queue. And we can breeze through online check-out with only one tap.

It means more stuff, faster. It means more seamless, more personalised experiences. And we’re already needing fewer and fewer face-to-face interactions.

It’s saving customers hours of wasted time. And it’s saving businesses a boatload of cash because they can cut back on expensive and manual operations.

The hope is that we can all free up lots of time to focus on the more important things in life. Like spending time with family.

But how’s it really going?

OK, so some things are faster, cheaper, and more personalised. But why then is trust - especially around the use of personal data - collapsing? And digital life more complicated than ever?

There are 2 root causes. Two huge gaping holes in the ‘digital thesis’.

And no one is talking about them.

1. Our digital relationships are dysfunctional

We’ve all experienced the explosion of unwieldy apps. Online forms. Faceless chatbots. Consent checkboxes for who-knows-what.

It’s a splintering of online experiences, where customers are bounced between browsers and apps, websites and one-time passwords.

We can all feel it.

For example in that moment when a regulated business - like a bank, insurance company, pension business or healthcare provider - gets in touch.

They email to say “We have a message for you”.

But there’s no message in the message.

Instead, they say “Ah, but you can’t read it here. Because, you know, we don’t trust that it’s really you, and we can’t trust this email. So please login to your account to read the message”.

So you try to do that on the website or app.

But it’s been so long (naturally, because you try to deal with this company as little as possible, ironically, because the experience is so terrible) that you forget your login details.

A random account number. Which email was it? What is the secure password or the other one?

You optimistically request a reset, hoping you’ve used the right email address.

And guess what? They send a reset to your bloody email.

You know, the one they don’t trust to send a message to.

So you fetch the email, faff around, and eventually get in to read the important message. Which is often some useless update like an account summary, and maybe an awkward attempt to cross-sell or up-sell you to another product.

---

---

Look, I’m labouring this point because the businesses that we do interact with can’t get it right.

Why?

Because they only really have four ‘channels’ to ‘engage’ us.

• SMS - send a crappy text, with maybe a reminder or a one-time-password

• Email - send a more detailed message, perhaps with an attachment (woohoo)

Both of these are PUSH. They are interruptive. And so customers put up barriers. Spam detection. Filters and folders. Rules to auto-ignore.

The other two channels are PULL:

• Websites - ask the customer to come to your home page, fill out forms etc. Perhaps even login (and we know how that goes)

• Apps - get the customer to download, or login to, ANOTHER app. I have so many of these now I need to manually search my phone to find the right one (rather than have them organised neatly into folders, like the good old days of 2013, when I only had 1879 apps to deal with)

That’s it. Four channels.

So imagine you are in charge of customer engagement in the business and you’re sending a message to 1.8M customers about an update?

No wonder things are broken.

2. Today’s digital transformation is only one-sided

We’re in this mess because we’re only really making digital changes on the business side.

Customers have been left behind. Where each organisation is ‘doing digital’ on its own.

Collectively businesses are creating more and more digital walled gardens, more and more accounts, and more and more channels.

The apps on your phone’s screen are only pixels apart. But data can’t flow between them.

They are their own data silos. Their own micro-managed-experiences.

And we have hundreds of online accounts to manage.

On average it’s 150, if you spend the time counting them. On top of that, households have around 40 ‘relationships’ with companies. Utilities. Plumbers. Insurance x3. Banks x 2. And on and on.

Now multiply that awful email-SMS-website-app experience by ALL the businesses you deal with. Now you can see why we all have a low-grade headache with this digital crap.

And that from the customer’s perspective, ‘digital’ is getting worse every day.

It’s happened slowly, quietly. And yet it’s having a huge impact on customers’ lives. But like frogs boiling slowly, we can’t see it either.

We can’t recognise the scale of this digital mess anymore. We all just accept it because we don’t have an alternative.

And - despite the ‘successful’ waves of digital transformation - customers still have to trek from place to place. Dragging their password and identity baggage to each and every site and app.

It’s ironic. For all the talk of becoming ‘customer-centric’, we’re only ever solving our digital problems one business at a time.

Companies today are making our digital experiences ever more dizzying and complicated. And the result is a collapse in digital trust.

A way out

The good news is that a few digital pioneers can see the way out of this mess.

They are hacking their way through the dense forest of digital transformation. But via a new route. And with new tools.

They are building on the customer side.

The patient side. The parent side. The employee side. The athlete side.

It’s a completely new category of tools for individuals - software and solutions that start and end with people, not businesses. 

And this new and exciting market is about to explode. I call it EmpowermentTech because it’s about digital freedom. Getting things done.

Back in 2014 I co-wrote a paper for the UK Government about the potential size of the market for customer-controlled data.

The answer was that individuals using their own digital tools (we called them ‘Personal Information Management Services’ back then) would generate $20bn of new value… in the UK alone. (And even then, it was a pretty conservative estimate).

So why hasn’t it happened already?

Many talk about privacy, security, digital identity and digital surveillance. Those are all important things. And much effort is going into them.

But I believe there are three reasons we’ve not made enough headway.

First, the expert communities working on them have tended to get quite academic. We’ve probably spent at least a decade debating distinctions without a difference. Not working out how to solve customer problems.

Second, each of those terms above can be ‘dealt with’ on the business side. More transparency (great). Collect less data (excellent). Stop tracking people (even better).

And while we’ve made brilliant progress - most now agree that data should be ‘controlled’, ‘transparent’ and ‘valuable’ - solutions are still only being developed on the business side.

New digital customer platforms. New onboarding flows and privacy policies. Yet customers still don’t have their own digital tools.

Third, and finally, the discussion around privacy, security and identity tends to be quite ‘static’. It doesn’t necessarily solve a problem. Or help people make progress in their lives.

It’s why I’m talking about Empowerment Tech.

Helping people Get Things Done. Make Better Decisions. Save Time, Money and Effort. Build Digital Trust. Increase Digital Confidence. And Unlock New Value (that’s not just about $$$).

And I’m excited.

For those close enough to it, it’s a bit like 1993, where a pioneering group of innovators can see the potential of the World Wide Web.

But this time it’s on warp speed, and what took over a decade with the Web will happen in a few short years with AI.

I believe these new digital tools - Empowerment Tech on the customer side - will fix so many of these problems in one go.

And believe me, everyone’s going to be talking about it.

---

OTHER THINGS

Whilst this is a perspective edition, there are some important read-worthy Customer Futures things to point to this week.

• Talk: We don’t need wallets we need agents WATCH

• Article: Personalisation’s pivot to partner platforms READ

• Blog: Towards AI Agents: addressing rule-based governance deficiencies READ

• News: 18,000-person pilot on Digital Birth Certificates READ

• Post: Of Wardley Maps And Knowledge Graphs READ

• Article: Mobile Driver’s Licenses, Other Digital Credentials Poised to Grow READ

  ---

Thanks for reading this week’s edition.

Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.

And if you want to learn more about the future of Empowerment Tech, digital wallets and customer engagement, then why not sign up: