Idea in Brief

The Reality

A personalized customer experience has become the basis for competitive advantage.

The Problem

However, providing personalization requires more than just a technological fix.

The Solution

Businesses must design intelligent experience engines, which assemble high-quality, end-to-end customer experiences using AI powered by customer data.

Brinks is a 163-year-old business well-known for its fleet of armored trucks. The company also licenses its brand to a lesser-known, independently operated sister company, Brinks Home. The Dallas-based smart-home-technology business has struggled to gain brand recognition commensurate with the Brinks name. It competes against better-known systems from ADT, Google Nest, and Ring, and although it has earned stellar reviews from industry analysts and customers, its market share is only 2%. But its systems have generated a wealth of product usage information; its call centers have accumulated voluminous historical customer-level transaction data; and its field reps have been gathering competitive data since it began operations, in 1994.

A version of this article appeared in the March–April 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review.