• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, October 26, 2015

Over the next year or two, consumer-facing businesses will carefully rethink the notion of personalization -- or find themselves up a creek. That’s the gist of some new findings from Cliff Condon, chief research and product officer at Forrester Research.

“2016 is the year of action for businesses that are advancing down the customer-obsessed path,” according to Condon. “For those that aren’t, the need to do so has only become more dire.”

Among other innovations, the winners of this revolution will shift away from using personas and archetypes in order to deliver what Condon calls “truly personalized experiences.”

Specifically, “These businesses will break out from the competition in their ability to delight customers based on known behaviors, rather than how they are broadly thought to behave.”

What Condon is talking about obviously requires the ability to collect, interpret, and act on a ton of timely data. It almost goes without saying that mobile sits at the center of this personalization revolution.

Consumers are their smartphones: They share the same personal information, have the same connections, and exist in the same dimensions of space and time.

If businesses take Condon’s advice, and fundamentally change their operations to focus on customers above all other business priorities, mobile must factor highly into that equation.

“Those that [don’t], will start to experience churn and set down the slow path toward failure,” Condon warns.

According to Condon, some future success factors include personalizing the customer experience (CX), implementing multidisciplinary CX strategies, operating at the speed of disruptors, and putting in place a customer-obsessed operating model.

Without a strong mobile component, none of these goals are possible.