Our lives are becoming increasingly elastic with businesses who empower our constantly changing lives as our greatest allies. Service relationships used to be agreed upon as strict packages measured in multi-year contracts with hefty cancellation fees. Mobile phones, insurance plans, and cable subscriptions – anything you couldn’t own outright, involved an ironclad, unchangeable contract. But that’s increasingly passé as businesses tap into the natural ebb and flow of consumer and business life. Namely, if you want to use, rent, or borrow something for a month, a week, or just this moment, an arrangement can be made.
Consistently Inconsistent
These new service relationships make sense when looking at how change is the only constant in our lives. A team can be rapidly growing a business one moment, freezing everything to handle a crisis at another, and then be back expanding at a breakneck pace, all in the same quarter. Naturally, they’d like their services to keep pace.
In our own personal lives, we can be traveling nonstop for what feels like weeks, then come back to a monotonous daily commute for two months. While all of this is going on, we always wonder to ourselves why we are paying for what we often don’t need and can’t increase what we need when we do need it. Why am I paying for utilities when I’m never home? Why can’t I increase my data plan for my phone without entering into another agreement? Why can’t I rent the office space I need, instead of these giant spaces that are available? These were all questions that challenged established businesses to change their perspective on service, and modernize their business models through innovation and flexibility.
For years I have collected miles with a few different airlines, but have managed to fly only twice using my miles. Here, in one sentence, you have the problem with airline loyalty programs, but also my loyalty strategy.
Getting the right information on demand is an eternal problem of today’s knowledge workers, and will only grow. Lack of knowledge causes a delay in decision-making, and ultimately leads to bad decisions. This is the essence of the 
Steam from video game studio Valve Software and and Origin from Electronic Arts are two services that essentially do the same thing. Instead of going to a store to purchase a video game, these services let you do it from your computer via cloud-based direct download. In a sense, it’s iTunes for PC games. The main difference is most gamers (an increasingly diversifying market in age, race, and gender) love Steam and hate Origin.
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a significant shift in how, where and when consumers buy. This shift has completely upset the applecart and is changing customer relationship management. The new way of doing business has several names, be it real-time interaction management, customer experience management, digital customer experience, or a host of others. At its root, it comes down to being able to analyze, understand, predict and act on opportunities to engage with customers. Done right, a customer becomes a fan and the 
When we 
