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How technology can help when revolution is in the air

brexit and tech

Ian McVey, UK Director of customer and employee engagement firm Qualtrics, looks at how technology can enable societal, economic and political change.

Democracy is in doubt. On the one hand, Labour MPs are second guessing their grassroots members, on the other, Parliament is in complete disarray over the results of the Brexit referendum, as David Cameron resigns and Theresa May is looking to be his likely successor.

The referendum cut across every single societal metric. It divided age groups, professions, political persuasions, regions and ideologies as people argued with each other and between themselves. The role of traditional research came into question, once again, as people pivoted at the last minute and made their decisions on emotional, rather than scientific grounds.

So we are left with an electorate that is either angry or triumphant, disaffected or defiant, delighted or disillusioned. An entirely new isolationism, unusual in a country that has resolved so many societal problems with such ease, is now apparent.

The dilemma facing public and private organisations, politicians and government is the same. Exactly what was the electorate calling for when it voted to ‘leave’, and in such high numbers. Did those who voted to ‘remain’ want the status quo or reform ? Was the result a howl of protest or a considered call for economic security?

What does it mean to a global firm when 48% of the population reject globalisation? How do we assess national identity when nobody knows what it means to be a Brit? Is it socially acceptable to be a populist, or is it cool to be an individualist against a backdrop of political and economic volatility?

More importantly, will Minis still be painted in the Union Jack, or will such patriotic plumage be out of place in a nation that compensates for its rejection of Europe by reaching out to it?

Interestingly, the only research that accurately predicted the outcome was social, that ill disciplined gathering of emotional outbursts, however accurately or badly expressed. Digital advocacy combined intuition and insight, big data found proper context and evidence of people’s attitudes and intentions was plain for all to see.

Ricocheting across networks, connected citizens became propagandists, pamphleteers and conscientious objectors. The anarchy of the internet spelled the future for a fragmented society, revealing deep divides between the governing and the governed, the conflicting demands and aspirations of older and younger voters and pleadings that individual opinions be respected by all concerned.

An enabler of change

Technology enabled this change, so it follows that technology will help us to interpret it. This new dynamic might be hard to analyse, but it is not hard to spot. Democratisation is all around us; in politics, where Jeremy Corbyn’s socially crowd sourced PMQs made democracy a weekly event, in local government, where digital cities enable citizens to share insights and report problems, in organisations, where real time feedback is reported back to managers and reaction is immediate.

Wherever one looks, apathy is a thing of the past. Enabled by technology and encouraged by social media’s peer pressure, people have never been keener to engage. No longer are we content to accept the collective punishment of one size fits all. Today we actively want to share our personal thoughts, to create personalised products that make us feel distinctive. In the connected age, customers are enjoying the limelight of social recognition and social power. Much as workers have become associates, citizens have become activists and customers have become partners.

For organisations of all sizes faced with such vocal opinion, the question is less ‘where will it end’ and more ‘how do we keep up?’. The voice of the customer gets louder by the day, but it co incides with unmatched levels of scrutiny, regulation and threat from disruption, with the result that it often goes unnoticed between management disciplines and daily problems.

The art of listening

Ironically, this often happens not because a company does not want to listen, but because it lacks the means with which to do so. The CEO might want to know how many touchpoints the organisation needs successfully to monitor the peaks and troughs in its customers’ trust. But who is tasked to provide the answer and the platform that solves the problem? Within a company, unanswered questions about customer centricity are as useless as the feedback that goes into the same algorithm that sent it out in the first place.

Customers need to be addressed as much with the narrative of marketing as with the scalpel of scrutiny, as individuals whose opinion one values. That takes technology served with a scientific approach capable of analysing demographics, regions and responses, testing product tweaks and services before investing, with feedback fed back to management and decisions made, and all in real time, a task that sits well with the sophisticated software on which cutting edge, customer driven firms depend.

The wholesale rejection of the established order we have witnessed at the hands of the electorate must serve as a wake up call to companies wrestling with art of customer connectivity. Understanding change is a task of superhuman proportions. It is not merely a question of pushing out surveys, but of pulling in data, the lifeblood of markets. Companies that ask the right questions of themselves, and include their employees and customers in the debate, will not only understand change, but influence it.

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