If we take a closer look at the traditional marketing funnel, we see that a sale is determined by how a consumer enters the funnel, when they enter the funnel and what actions they take while in the funnel. Traditionally, the marketing funnel illustrates the customer journey from initial product awareness through to point of purchase. Today, with more people spending more time online, consumers are making purchasing decisions further up the funnel. Consumers are researching brands and products themselves and continuously providing real-time feedback via social:

Rethinking customer journeys with the next-generation operating model. “When we think about an effective, next-generation operating model we really think about two things. One is organizing the efforts around the end-to-end customer journeys, as well as some of the internal back-office processes. This means identifying the critical journeys and providing the perspective on the customer journey end to end and where the value is. The second element is moving away from individual technologies and operations capabilities in a piecemeal and siloed way of applying them to these journeys in combination and in the right sequence. So that’s moving away from the silo thinking that we have had for years in the organization.”

Businesses must apply AI in innovative ways to fuel growth, says Accenture report. “If companies were to invest in AI and Human-Machine Collaboration at the same level as the top performing fifth of companies, they could boost revenues by 38% and lift employment levels by 10% between 2018 and 2022. That equates to an average of US$7.5 billion and 5,000 jobs for an S7P company in that time.”

2018: The year of the mobile wallet reset. “As wallets, they’ve been presented to consumers as the way to make checkout easier — convenient, fast, efficient. That doesn’t seem to be enough. In our own recent studies of mobile wallet adoption, we’ve started to see a slight uptick in concerns over security by the large majority of consumers who don’t use them. That’s a change from where we were two years ago. In a world where the certainty of a consumer’s identity and her authorized use of those credentials is essential to building trust in a world where the consumer and her credentials become more and more intangible, he who cracks the authentication code will take payments and commerce to its full, digital potential. And even become the tailwind that moves identity and authentication beyond the retail payments use cases we speak about today.”

Digital to the Core: Chatbots, AI, Open Banking, and APIs. “As digital currencies and AR/VR technologies are on the horizon as the next big disruptors within the banking and financial services, we must stay one step ahead. The competition for customers will never slow down as new technology is deployed. A well thought out, digital at the core of banking strategy will not only engage customers but retain them and foster a healthy pipeline of new referrals.

Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga. “Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. On a bill-by-the-minute basis, none of this makes sense.”