Survey: Customers Forcing Businesses to Deploy Emerging Technologies

More sophisticated customer demands are forcing companies to adopt new business models and deploy advanced technologies, a survey by advisory firm KPMG shows. Among the executives surveyed, 33% said customer demand was the most common trigger for transforming their business model, while another 30% of respondents cited technology and domestic competition.

Customer demands ranged from wanting mobile access to be able to shop and pay for products and services, to expectations of better product quality and improved access to customer-service questions.

Some executives said emerging technologies were critical to the success of strategic initiatives they have planned for the months ahead. Data and analytics and business process management tools (both 54%) scored highest in the survey, while respondents also selected mobile and core system modernization (both 49%), digital media (48%) and cloud (47%) as important to meeting their organizations’ goals.

“With the changing customer dynamic, CFOs and CIOs want the most strategic technologies to better manage the back office and the broader workforce in order to maintain margins in product or service delivery,” said Stephen G. Hasty, a KPMG partner.

“Put simply, companies need to continually transform their organization’s business model, using new and emerging technologies to help manage performance and cut costs,” said Stephen Chase, KPMG’s technology analyst for the service sector. “Transformation is about aligning and servicing your customer, optimizing your supply chain, and managing risk and tax issues, as well as about having a better view of the financials and an improved strategic oversight of the workforce,” Chase added.

A majority (63%) of respondents from companies that are preparing for, undergoing, or have completed transformations say that they have a formal process for prioritizing business transformation initiatives.

“Undertaking broad changes to a business operating model—covering everything from the financial, risk and tax transformation, to human capital management, acquisitions and target markets—can create an operation that is innovative, agile, responsive to change, and focused on customers to get ahead of competitors and the marketplace,” Hasty said.