Employee engagement is central to an organization’s success — that’s how we feel at Bluewolf. As part of our digital and business transformation projects, I have been lucky enough to receive and test the Apple Watch over the past few months. While the wearable tech segment of the Internet of Things is rapidly growing, with Salesforce leading the wave of companies to explore wearable capabilities, I have been thinking about how the Apple Watch can influence the way we create customer moments. Here are my takeaways distilled from my first two months of use:

1. Few apps are ready — outside of geolocation and health.
   
   I found that the first batch of Apple Watch apps merely mimic the user experience customers already have on their mobile apps with no real added value. Fully native apps are not yet ready — but certainly will be — so the most useful apps thus are are those that use the Watch as a remote or fitness tracker. Tracking my weekly workout sessions, requesting a car with Uber, or checking if my train arrives on time were the main things I did with this device. Though there is still a clear lack of social integration within those applications, companies that collect location, activity, or health data will likely be the biggest early adopters.
2. Companies with a clear data segmentation and governance will take the lead.
   
   If laptops and tablets were designed as devices for creating and consuming media, the main purpose of the Apple Watch is to push notifications. Clear audience segmentation coupled with  strong data governance will prevent inappropriate notifications and optimize customer moments on smart watches. Seeing as customers do not want to differentiate between the channels they use, companies – especially retailers – will have to ensure smooth integration between each channel. Because data quality is not a destination, but a journey, the continuous challenge for companies will be to analyze all this data to derive valuable insight into what their customers want and need.
3. CRM system users will use it — and Salesforce knows it.
   
   According to a recent survey, around 80% of users are accessing CRM on multiples devices, and nearly half of them are using at least three different devices. Even though Salesforce was the only true enterprise app shown during the Apple Watch launch event, you can bet there will be a high and immediate demand for CRM users and customers to turn on this channel. When creating customer moments, companies should keep in mind that interactions with the Apple Watch are made for a tiny screen, and since scrolling your favorite feeds or answering emails from your wrist makes no sense at all, the interactions will work best if they are as short as possible. 
4. Less is more.
   
   From a Salesforce perspective, approvals processes from Salesforce1 and dashboard visualization from Wave Analytics will be the main use cases at this time. In the future, you can imagine a world in which a device like the Apple Watch can provide field sales a list of customers to visit based on a routing capabilities, and alert them about the topics to be discussed. Pushing alerts such as marketing promotions or order issues will then turn the sales rep from an order-taker to an order-maker.

We can see parallel growth in predictive analytics and wearable technologies. Even if smartwatch technologies are not yet fully mature, these devices will soon create tons of data from which companies must glean valuable information about their users and customers. To learn more about building an engaging mobile strategy in your organization, get in touch with our mobile experts, or download our Guide to Mobile Engagement.