Real Time

Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer

By Regis McKenna

The Collapse of Time and Space

Real time is characterized by the shortest possible lapse between idea and action; between initiation and result. In the context of business, a real time experience is created from self-service and self-satisfaction by customers. It is instant response.

Bits and Bytes in Perpetual Motion

Society and technology are in a continual dance, each moving and swaying in response to unanticipated moves by the other. Real time technology swiftly embeds itself in everything, everywhere, profoundly affecting the marketplace and every business participating in it. To discover how best to use the new technological tools to cross traditional market or geographic boundaries, adapt their modus operandi, and still keep their customers happy, manager must first get acquainted with the dimensions of the new technological power and its incipient social affects.

The Never Satisfied Customer

New consumers are never satisfied consumers. Managers hoping to serve them must work to eliminate time and space constraints on service. They must push the technological bandwidth with interactive dialogue systems – equipped with advanced software interfaces – in the interest of forging more intimate ties with these consumers. Managers must exploit every available means to obtain their end: building self-satisfaction capabilities into services and products and providing customers with access anytime, anywhere.

What Is the Message When the Medium Is Everywhere?

The new digital media fundamentally change the old broadcast model for communication between institutions and society to one of access. In business, succeeding with these media calls for both imagination and vision – the former to discover and explore uncharted space, the latter to lead in new, real time ways of engaging consumers. Engagement is dialogue: the new digital media will deliver information wrapped in forms of interactive entertainment.

A Brand New Brand

Brand is a virtual experience derived from the consumer’s experience with the product, service, or company – not from the messages of broadcast media. The development of brand requires that an infrastructure or distribution, support, and service be in place when and where the consumer wants it. Real time technology delivers brand experience anytime, anyplace.

The Real Time Corporation

The task of implementing a real time corporation is difficult and complex, but it is an essential investment in your competitive future. The implementation of real time systems will have the effect of changing the working relationships within your organization as well as those with your partners and customers. The application of the technology will change your corporate culture. As these systems are adopted, new ideas for services and products, new ways of gaining customer loyalty and new methods of team collaboration will take shape. Then information technology will indeed become a valued corporate asset.

Continuous Discontinuous Change

Real time managers will be different from today’s in five important ways:

1. They will not sacrifice economies of time for economies of scale.

2. They will understand that consumers given more control over what and how they buy through dialogue with companies are, paradoxically, consumers more open to being guided by companies.

3. They will use – both inside and outside their companies – new media allowing unprecedentedly subtle and nuanced human interaction.

4. They will have seen how real time tears down organizational walls and boxes just like TQM.

5. They will invest heavily in technologies that let customers satisfy themselves.

Preparing for the Eventuality of Anything

Companies will learn about the technologies of real time in the only way they truly can – by adopting them and putting them to practical use. They will deploy them not to predict the future but to live virtually on top of changing patterns and tends affecting every sphere of their business environment, making rapid and continuous refinements in their way of doing business.

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