PatronManager

I’ll bet you’re surprised I’m suggesting you go to Disney World, but it may just be the best example of our future you can experience today. The first line of this article in Wired sums it up best:

IF YOU WANT to imagine how the world will look in just a few years, once our cell phones become the keepers of both our money and identity, skip Silicon Valley and book a ticket to Orlando. Go to Disney World.

The folks at Disney spent two years figuring out how to remove all the transactional aspects of going to a theme park, and transferred them to a wearable device. According to the article, the “magic band” they created has a singular goal:

The goal was to create a system that would essentially replace the time spent fiddling with payments and tickets for moments of personal interactions with visitors. The MagicBands and MyMagicPlus allow employees to “move past transactions, into an interactive space, where they can personalize the experience,” Crofton says. What started as a grand technology platform has inevitably changed the texture of the experience.

Did you catch the part about “tickets” and “moments of personal interaction”? This is pretty much why I’ve been evangelizing CRM as most important innovation of this generation for our industry, and it’s only now getting started. And, amazingly, Disney is leading the way.