Many different factors determine how consumers balance data privacy against a desire for personalized products and services — age, geography, and education among them. Companies can help their customers feel more comfortable with the data collection needed for personalized service by understanding customer values and maintaining transparency and good communication when it comes to data collection.

As AI moves from the hype stage to implementation within organizations, retailers and marketers have new competitive opportunities with customer centricity. AI enables companies to apply data about their customers’ wants, needs, and preferences to customize their offerings, create personalized shopping experiences, and make the purchase process simpler and more convenient.

The future of customer service will allow bots and humans to focus on what they do best. For chatbots and virtual agents, that is handling routine cases quickly and efficiently. For the human supervisors, that is solving more complex problems, using empathy and emotional intelligence.

Few business websites offer features that simplify transactions, create deep customer relationships, and drive sales growth. To succeed, they need to personalize and customize their online selling process through high-performance technology and customer-centered business models.

Organizational change is difficult. Some 70% of change efforts fail, and awareness hasn’t improved the odds of success. But there are exceptional companies, making strides with everything from digital transformation to employee engagement to diversity and inclusion. And they have one thing in common: They are customer-obsessed. When customers are truly at the center of your business, change proceeds from one organizing principle: What’s best for them?

Companies aspiring to organic growth leadership in their industries should start with a coherent, affirming innovation narrative and reinforce it with action. The authors tested 18 well-known innovation levers and identified the four that organic growth leaders use most to stay ahead of competitors: (1) invest in innovation talent, (2) encourage prudent risk-taking, (3) adopt a customer-centric innovation process, and (4) align metrics and recognition with innovation activity.

Digital customer service agents (known as virtual assistants, chatbots, or softbots) are typically used to sift through and process only the most straightforward customer inquiries, such as requests for basic information. At most companies, complex issues get passed along to human agents. In that regard, public sector agencies in Australia are ahead of the curve: They are using digital agents to handle complex inquiries from citizens, and businesses stand to learn much from these applications.

Three principles show how successful retailers are responding to digital disruption and using insights to improve customer experience — not just in the end-of-year rush, but year-round.

Digital customer service is becoming more widely adopted, but one place it falls short is in the language and phrases it uses. Many digital service platforms use words that alienate customers rather than engage them; selecting customer-centric language for chatbots and service platforms can make a significant difference in customer satisfaction.

When it comes to transformation, many organizations struggle with a dilemma of digital growth happening at the expense of customer satisfaction. By moving to a platform-based approach, companies can align tech investments and new features with the customer experience.

Loyalty programs provide great value for companies by driving higher sales and boosting brand affinity. However, companies employing traditional “earn-and-burn” rewards programs for customers may miss out on long-term benefits. Tailoring programs to offer great customer experience is key — and when companies implement both types of benefits into their programs, they’re more likely to beat out competitors and build brand loyalty.

Emerging technology and new business models have created new ways of serving customers and allowed digital leaders to disrupt traditional companies. Disruption rarely comes out of nowhere, however: There are common patterns to learn from and three major signals to recognize in evaluating the risk for your industry.

As companies rely more and more on AI-driven chatbots to communicate with customers, they need to consider ways to make computers’ communication and understanding better and more natural.

At the same time that many traditional retailers are closing offline stores, digitally native vertical brands such as Bonobos and Warby Parker are aggressively expanding into offline locations. And both online and offline retailers are converging in experience-oriented “showrooms.”

AI and IoT offer significant benefits — as yet untapped — for facilities maintenance. In most large companies, maintenance and repair is done piecemeal with tremendous inefficiency, something automated, data-centered management practices could reduce. Operations executives should take notice, because the companies that allocate resources toward putting technology to work in this area are likely to gain an important competitive advantage.

There are four different pathways that businesses can take to become top performers in the digital economy. Leadership’s role is to determine which pathway the company should pursue – and how aggressively to move.

Traditionally, big energy companies focused primarily on power generation, not customer-centricity. But that’s changing — and today’s digitally empowered customers have opinions about everything from where their energy should come from to when their bills should arrive. Lynn Good, CEO of Duke Energy Corp., reflects on guiding her company through this transformation.

Chief information officers need to oversee all of IT — in close collaboration with marketers and the business units. Only then can companies deliver digital experiences that win, serve, and retain increasingly demanding customers.