In the last few months, I have traveled to meet customers in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. A handful of topics seem to be in focus, regardless of country and sector:

  • Innovation
  • Digital ecosystems
  • Customer journey mapping (in a truly customer oriented way)

Below are some key questions being asked and thus also indicate where companies are spending attention in their ongoing transformation programs.

Innovation

  • How do we best work with innovation?
  • Optimal innovation processes?
  • Dedicated innovation group or everyone involved all the time?
  • Interfacing external parties, such as the startup-scene, partners, customers, etc
  • How can achieve traceability between ideas to incubate/try and our business’ core business objectives?
  • How can we experiment externally, without hurting the brand?

Digital ecosystems

  • How can we open up our products, services, operational processes, and systems, to better collaborate with the world outside the company?
  • How can we both protect our data and at the same time provide easy access to it?
  • If we don’t know how to make money (business model) from sharing data or participate in new digital ecosystems, is it at all worth the efforts?
  • What are the best API-platform management practices?

Customer journey mapping

  • How can we better understand WHY our customer buys or product/service?
  • What happens before and after that the customer has interacted with us, and how can we digitally improve those experiences?
  • How do we test the outcome of changed digital touchpoints acorss entire customer journeys?