In our previous post, John highlighted some very unique approaches for OEMs to create an engaged customer. Creating a community environment that combines the interactive features of forums, messaging, and blogs with up to date device data and an always-on connection to the device gives the customer a reason to come to the community – and creates a reason to stay engaged.

However, for businesses that want to succeed in bringing their customer closer, where does the responsibility of creating an engaged customer lie? It’s easy for organizations to define initiatives that focus on the customer. We talk to clients every day that are starting initiatives at creating better customer portals, surveys to gather customer input, and online, interactive tools to create a collaborative environment.

Unfortunately, in the manufacturing industry, the lines of responsibility aren’t that clear. Is it the responsibility of the service and support organization to retain and maintain an engaged and loyal customer? What about the marketing department, or sales?

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In our last post we talked about the different levels of customer relationships and how the goal of an OEM should be to drive customer engagement.  The question is how does one move from a low/no growth situation with an apathetic customer base to a fully engaged customer base driving innovation and growth?

On a very positive note, manufacturers of intelligent equipment have a very distinct advantage over other organizations such as retailers or even other manufacturers such as those in the apparel industry or dry goods.  They have an additional channel with which they can stay in contact with and interact with their customers.  This is through the device itself.

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Much has been made about how remote device monitoring can help OEMs achieve customer satisfaction.  Not to throw a wet blanket on anything, but a customer who is merely satisfied will walk away as soon as a better offer comes along.  Customers have an ever increasing number of choices when it comes to technology, features and price.  While they may be satisfied with their current vendor, they also know that they may be able to get that same level of satisfaction for a lower price.  Hence the often requested “productivity enhancements” from your customer’s procurement departments.

But if satisfaction and even loyalty isn’t enough, what’s beyond that? At Palantiri Systems, we see four levels of customer relationship running the gamut from apathy to engagement.  These levels are as follows:

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Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the keynote speech at the recent HIMSS Conference in Orlando, Florida. Schmidt’s main points centered on the need to aggregate healthcare-related information and organize it for the individual patient. In this case, as Schmidt points out, the patient is in fact the primary consumer of the healthcare information.

I begin to wonder, however, how will this be realized? What are the missing pieces? Google’s solution to aggregate this information and organize it for the individual patient - the Google Personal Health Record - is a step in the right direction, but demands that healthcare solution providers and medical equipment manufacturers embrace these changes and move towards interoperability.

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“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” laments Juliet about her true love, Romeo.  While love is probably a bit too strong of a word, I am at least passionate about device connectivity and the impact I am convinced it will have on us all.  The question is - what do we call this space?  There sometimes seems to be an almost religious fervor about this.  Is it M2M? Smart Services? IDM? The acronym overloaded DRM?  What about D2B?  Remote Product Service?  The Internet of Things? The list goes on and on.  This is very unfortunate and is somewhat emblematic of the space itself.  If the proponents of an embryonic space such as this can’t agree on what to call it, how will we ever achieve a critical mass of executive mindshare?

Personally, I am not a big fan of any of them, as none seem to capture the essence of what is really going on here.  Machine-to-Machine (M2M), coined by Nokia and championed by the good folks at Specialty Publishing, Michael Jarosik and Peggy Smedley, among others just doesn’t do it for me.  It seems a bit to techie for any executive level discussion – all this talk of machines and such.

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Welcome to Palantiri Systems and the Seeing Stones Blog!

We have a lot of exciting things going on here at Palantiri Systems, and I invite you to join us as we pave the way for what we believe are major changes to the world that are being brought on by the next generation of device connectivity.

Our plan for this blog is to share some of our thoughts and observations as well as to hopefully engender some feedback and conversation. We’ll share stories and discuss our viewpoints on emerging trends that are affecting the market place and the way we work. We plan to touch on business, sociology and technology issues, all with a common thread of the innovation and collaboration that can result from our increasingly connected world.

So join us if you will for what we hope will be some interesting and informative thoughts and conversations. And extra credit goes to the first person that posts a comment correctly identifying the origin of the name of this blog: “Seeing Stones”.

Thank you for your interest … feel free to add your thoughts and comments and check back with us often.