The Changing Customer

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Change Management   CRM   Innovation   Stakeholder Management   Strategy  

In previous articles, I’ve spoken about how the pace of change is accelerating, and how for many people (and organizations) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and that things may be changing faster than some of us humans are able to absorb. I’ve spoken about how we are in the middle of a period of discontinuity, thrust upon us by the rapid advances in computing and mobile connectivity that have put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a target on most organizations’ backs.

Why are things changing so fast? Is it that we’ve hit some sort of inflection point never achieved before in human history that is allowing us to innovate and displace the status quo faster than ever before? Maybe. Have we reached some sort of perfect storm where the innovation curve has gone vertical and the singularity will be here tomorrow? Probably not.

So if we are not necessarily innovating faster than ever before or destined to reach the singularity tomorrow and become one with machines, then what is creating the feeling that things are changing more rapidly? One word: expectations.

Changing Customer Expectations
It feels as if the world is changing faster than ever before because the expectations of our customers—and our expectations as customers—are changing faster than ever before. Why?

Because we as consumers are seeing …

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