According to the 2022 Gartner Overcoming the Barriers to Digital Execution Survey, 48% of respondents’ primary objective for making digital technology investments is to improve the customer (or citizen) experience.
According to the 2023 CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 18% of respondents have already deployed edge computing, while another 51% are planning to deploy it by 2025. For them, creating an experiential business moment at the edge for customers – at the digital touchpoint – is the new, scalable way to engage.
Characteristics of a digital touchpoint
Digital touchpoints connect enterprises and customers to enable the digital economy. A digital touchpoint is a space where digital services, products and solutions come to life and are executed to deliver on the digital business initiatives of an organisation.
Digital touchpoints are the ultimate way to connect the digital with the physical world and have an immediate impact on the customer/end-consumer experience and interaction.
Why digital touchpoints matter!
While cloud infrastructure is very much about centralized computing, storage and back-end processing at scale, new business models at the digital touchpoint expect agility in real-time.
Here, interactions are much more immediate and truly interactive. As a result, digital touchpoints are based on specific experiential moments.
Experiential moments are transient opportunities where people, businesses, data, and things work together dynamically to create value for customers, and they can be created by focusing on personalizing customer experiences.
Those moments happen all the time. As part of digital business initiatives, the explosion of connected things and immersion in human-machine interfaces are pushing more services closer to the edge in support of digital touchpoints.
Why care about digital touchpoints!
Digital business initiatives drive enterprises to interact much closer and in real-time with their customers to help reduce cost and customer effort, as well as improve customer experience and engagement.
Digital business blurs the digital and physical worlds, and it pushes services from the cloud above the edge to the digital touchpoint. Based on cloud-enabled digital devices, products, services or solutions, organisations are looking to immediately create value through experiential business moments in a dynamic way during the interaction of people, business, and things.
While the majority of organisations start their digital business journey leveraging centralized cloud services, more organisations focus on the edge and IoT to engage much closer with customers at the digital touchpoint.
According to the 2021 Gartner ETT End Users Survey, 14% of surveyed emerging technology end users cited IoT as the emerging technology their company has invested the most in the past year. Meanwhile, 16% and 12% cited edge AI or edge computing, respectively, to support their initiatives.
First published on Gartner Blog Network
