A welcoming face: getting customer experience right

The do's and don'ts of customer-centric delivery

Businesses, governments, charities, media organisations are all becoming more customer centric. This is as close to a universal goal as you get in technology, although it is being pursued in different ways across sectors.

Retailers want to understand customers as individuals rather than in aggregate so that they can tailor individual offers to them; governments want to be seen as more responsive and more efficient spenders of taxpayers' money; charities want to optimise donations as well as targeting their efforts more efficiently; and the consumption of news and advertising is increasingly driven by algorithms that respond to personal preferences and habits.

Providing a responsive and consistent customer experience whatever changes the organisation may be going through is key to longevity in the Darwinistic ‘survival of the most adaptable'.

Meeting customer expectations is heavily reliant on having ready access to reliable sources of data and a platform to deliver it. Companies must able react quickly, which in turn may require a complete overhaul of existing business processes and the systems that support them.

"In our own journey to become a leading digital bank, we had to transform many of our operations and that is where data becomes crucial," said Luis Uguina, chief digital officer (CDO) at Macquarie Bank.

"The only way you can deliver a consistent and seamless experience is when strong alignment between business and technology exists."

Catering in real-time for the individual rather than the average is a big challenge for more traditional firms said David Waugh, SVP market development at big data firm DataStax.

"There is little room for people to make real-time decisions on the scale that businesses operate at today," he said. "That is alarming for many of the more established, traditional brands, as they have never experienced this type of information flow, nor the requirement to process and manage it all in real time."

A welcoming face

Banks are famous (and occasionally infamous) for running core systems on ancient servers and Cobol spaghetti code. Such systems are a positive impediment to digital.

"Most enterprise back-end systems were designed many years ago, and some of them were even built before the eruption of internet or mobile worlds, said Macquarie Bank's Uguina.

"They deliver a quite limited and often poor customer experience. Technology plays a key role in the customer experience we deliver. It is the glue that ensures all customer touch points and interactions work in a seamless and consistent way."

To collect and combine information from all these touch points you need technology that's integrated across the piece, rather than stuck in the old siloed model, agreed Michelle Beeson, analyst for ecommerce and channel strategy at Forrester Research.

"As customers cross channels, information about their experience is captured in multiple, often unconnected systems ranging from campaign management to billing," she said. "Supporting next generation personalisation and creating individualised customer experience requires connected, real-time customer insights feeding the organisation's systems of engagement."

Success in digital means becoming ‘customer-obsessed', Beeson added.

"Customer obsessed firms are evolving across four key operating principles: moving from customer-aware to customer-led decision making; from a data-rich organisation to an insights-driven one; from a slow-moving organisation to one that develops and iterates on minimum viable products to execute and deliver faster; and from a siloed organisation to a connected, cross-functional one."

Not a good look

Becoming more customer-centric, or undergoing digital transformation if you prefer, is a major endeavour as it requires technological and cultural change to happen in tandem. Beeson believes that the cultural side is frequently sidelined in favour of the technology, which is easier to get a handle on, and that this is a mistake.

"Organisations must recognise that pursuing digital transformation does not start and end with technology. Technology is a key enabler, but digital transformation impacts every part of the business," she said.

Giving customers what they want on a personal basis is a balancing act. People may want things delivered on a bespoke basis, but they don't want to feel they are being spied on. The use of personal data must be appropriate to the service provided. This is particularly relevant in line with the new data protection regulations coming out of Europe which mandate privacy by design. Companies that get it wrong face heavy fines.

There is also the question of delivery. With raised expectations on the part of the customer comes increasing pressure to deliver a reliable and consistent service. The data platform must be capable of delivering the right data to where it's needed and the data itself must be trustworthy - current, relevant and in the right format.

"One of the biggest pitfalls around CX is that it takes one negative experience to undo dozens of positive ones," said DataStax's Waugh. "There is no 'downtime' and there are no 'less important' moments. Every single moment counts because brands don't know which ones are going to be the critical ones."

While business strategies can be changed in line with experience and feedback, short-term decisions that characterise interactions with customers need to be right first time, he went on.

"Decisions made in real time, are very hard to undo, and therefore there is a very clear time sensitivity to that data supporting those decisions."

Another common error is mistaking segmentation for personalisation: ‘others that bought a green T-shirt also bought product X'.

"Segmentation leads to suggestions based on aggregate behaviour, when there are many examples where this extrapolation does not hold," Waugh said. "Understanding the complete context leading up to and around my purchase would lead to very different suggestions for each individual."

Being customer centric implies capturing all interactions and delivering a coherent experience based on them. A frequent mistake is to only go part of the way down this road, confusing the user with conflicting information and a jumble of interfaces.

Failing to measure and monitor customer interactions can create a false impression of their wants and needs, Uguina said.

"While companies have clear metrics to measure financial success, such as revenue and profit targets, identifying the customer expectations and needs are much less defined and more difficult to measure."

"As a result, there is often a perception-reality disconnect between the experience that companies believe they deliver and the experience that customers actually have."

Getting it right

In summary, delivering a consistent customer experience while at the same time being able to turn on a sixpence requires the right technology stack, reliable data and an agile approach to development and delivery. Any planned change should be viewed through the eyes of the customer.

As customer expectations rise, so tolerance for downtime and poor performance drops. There must be a determination to get it right first time.

Technology and business processes need to be firmly aligned, which means co-ordination at the highest level via a dedicated customer experience executive. Compliance with data protection laws requires a firm grasp on the way personal data is stored, processed, transferred and used, requiring high-level involvement of a CDO or other qualified executive too.

Finally, digital transformation has no end. Measuring interactions and responding to feedback are essential if lessons are to be learned and acted on in time.

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