Abstract
The classical customer journey with its touchpoints is transformed into a lifelong, interactive customer relationship within an IoT-based product-service ecosystem. The customer journey happens in multiple, partially automatic loops that make it significantly less predictable for manufacturers and retailers. For many product categories, the IoT is not going to take off until providers and retailers succeed in getting at what their customers really want. For one thing, they need to better understand individual usage behavior, and for another, there is a need to better personalize products and services, creating emotional and situation-specific customer experiences. Expanding the ability of digital products to communicate with each other, to record and analyze usage behavior and to implement concrete product improvements will be decisive. If customer centricity is reinvented in the IoT space, customers will see a real value and smart products will replace classical products in the next five to ten years.