The 2021 framework for Customer Centric Transformation
How to drive growth by focusing on customer engagement and hyper-personalization.
Leading a customer-centered transformation in 2021 is not an easy mission but the rewards for companies that address it extensively can be enormous. Most executives of incumbent companies in their markets are now definitively considering the best way to approach this transformation.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way consumers interact and buy and has accelerated the need for companies to completely rethink how they engage with customers. Companies that do not undertake a true transformation in the relationship with their clients, in a predominantly digital world, are even at risk of disappearing. As the recently published IBM 2021 CEO Study shows, outperformers CEOs give heightened attention to customer relationships. During 2020, they stressed virtual engagement with end users up to 50% more than other CEOs. These are not times to doubt, you have to act!
To help all those CEOs, CMOs, CXOs … in this customer transformation, this article develops a framework around 5 main lines of action:
#1. Deliver cross-channel delightful experiences at scale
Every company must be obsessed with continually delighting their customers. Every customer journey needs to be periodically reviewed to offer our customers the best experience and value. The only way to do it is with an unquestionable belief in the power of design. Experience design practices and a solid Design Team are essential for a successful customer experience transformation. In order to deliver highly differentiated experiences, design must be elevated, prioritized, and scalable.
Once deployed a Human-centered and value-driven design approach by applying an Enterprise Design Thinking framework through all the customer journeys, it’s very important to understand that new ways of buying are driven by content experiences. Today, customer experience goes far beyond traditional digital sales channels. Social Commerce and Cross-Channel Commerce focusses on hyper-personalized content combined with frictionless integration with consumer platforms. Content acts as a key differentiator to attract, engage and convert users along their journeys.
Therefore, delivering experiences at scale means managing the content lifecycle. The ever-increasing content velocity require to streamline the content lifecycle including Content Strategy, Creation, Optimization, Distribution and Data Insights. Your Digital Assets are the key ingredient to create customer’s next experience. Executing great experiences requires to rely on the digital assets that have been created. Selecting a Digital Asset Management System that ensures high quality, standards, license compliance and enables marketeers to easily find and re-use experience fragments is key.
Finally, analyze and improve customer journeys at scale it’s about insights. Understanding the context and visualizing the customer journey in order to discover omnichannel insights in real-time is key. For this purpose, the company will need an architecture that provides capabilities to analyze cross-channel interactions — online and offline — and make use of AI to enhance the analysis.
#2 Put Customer Data at the Core of your personalization efforts
The core of every successful customer transformation is data. Data capabilities help to understand the context of the users, help to take control of decisions and deliver the great experiences to customer that we have already agreed are essential.
At the same time, data-driven marketing is faced with a setback because new data privacy regulations prevent the use of third-party cookies. In this scenario1st party data takes an important role, in the same way that the exchange of data between partners
to enable hyper-personalization. To achieve this goal, we have the very fashionable Customer Data Platforms. Although there is no absolute consensus on what a CDP is, we can specify the need for them to provide two types of functionalities:
- Insight. CDPs should deliver a “single source of truth” across customer data by unifying customer records into unified profiles, and making them available for segmentation, activation, and analysis. This type of functionality is similar to traditional CRMs or master data management (MDM) solutions but with the ability to produce a rich customer profile based on consent.
- Engagement. CDPs leverage real-time profile store of customer data to manage personalization across channels including messaging offers, website content, and advertising creatives.
#3. Deploy a modular commerce architecture
Much work has been done in the last 20 years to ensure an online presence and deploy e-commerce platforms. However, the current needs of these platforms are not the same, mainly due to the multitude of channels through which we interact with our clients. Architectures and architectural paradigms have evolved over the last years. Historically built monolithic applications that acted as first commerce solutions have been replaced by layered and decoupled applications. In recent years, companies focused on headless approaches leveraging microservices. However, too many “heads” can make headless architectures complex to maintain.
Therefore, the paradigm of Modular Commerce comes in. It combines the advantages of layered and headless microservices architectures, enabling shift to Customer Experience centric view, opens possibilities to create headless services under JAMstack and also allows to keep benefits of layered & decoupled architectures when needed. This architecture should focus on Customer Journeys, Capabilities needed and Technology Stack. Modular Commerce is constituted of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC) which are independently deployable business functions which have self-contained data, logic and API view.
With this new paradigm in mind all organizations should consider if their probably monolithic e-commerce architectures designed only for the web channel give them the needed flexibility and reaction velocity for a multi-channel world. If the answer is that a new platform has to be deployed, then more important is to ensure technology doesn’t come first. When defining a modern composable e-commerce architecture we start understanding the customer journeys end-to-end. Then we derive the needed capabilities for future journeys and experiences. And finally, we define the technology, based on required capabilities.
#4. Transform customer service capitalizing on cognitive technologies
The 4th pilar should be transform your customer care to provide an exceptional digital experience while reducing costs and improving satisfaction. Current Customer Care has different challenges:
- Efficiency extremely streamlined: contracting models with providers adjusted to the fullest, automation through IVRs / CTIs has reached their limit, agent productivity with narrow improvement margin.
- Client demanding new interaction models: new digital channels support, ability to maintain a conversation through any channel without losing the context, unexpectable increase due to WhatsApp as communication channel.
- Seize the momentum to propose personalized offer: direct commercial interaction is declining so every contact must be harnessed, transform the Contact Center in a commercial channel that proposes personalized offers.
- First interaction must be unbeatable: resolution must be fast and effective in the same contact, no tolerance to long resolution times, department transfers or lack of information sharing.
To approach these challenges there are many levers to improve the customer service model, but when all parts are not correctly connected, and the user is not at the center of the entire model, the transformation approach is incomplete. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the most important:
1. Processes / Customer Journey & Experience: redesign, reengineering and process automation, unique customer vision, call back. click to call, affinity model between client and manager.
2. Artificial intelligent: speech recognition, cognitive call support for clients, voice classifier, cognitive chatbot for clients, sentiment analysis.
3. Routing and typing call deflection, crisis menu improvement. menus reorganization., single priority queue, multichannel routing, customer identification and context understanding.
4. Multichannel approach: multichannel CRM, integration of email, SMS and social media, core services API, same Customer Service Platform in Stores and Contact Center.
5. Agent / Employee Tools: 360º view of customer, co-browsing, scripting and process guidance, virtual agent and semantic search, Next Best Action.
6. Supplier Management: establishment of vendor championship, SLAs linked to business and collective results, agent analytics, contacts forecast.
#5. Heavily invest in organizational change
Non transformation will succeed if we forget the organizational and operational challenges to be managed for this journey. A new Operating Model needs to be deployed considering the right governance structure, the right roles, skills and a lean team setup.
Most projects fail because they have a great technical approach but forget the people. How will we operate all this architecture delivering continuous improvements with all the inherent complexity?
Here, culture goes first. A culture that changes old ways of thinking, that believes in the deep possibilities of change that come from creativity and design, corporate innovation, working like a start-up and with radical collaboration between all organizational layers.
In second place, a clear Operating Model and processes for all phases. From needs identification to user stories detail, to implementation and end-to-end operation.
Third, the agile methodology deployment with all its capabilities. Current complexity could not be managed with traditional water-fall methods.
And finally, a government model.
All with high investment in change management, investment in the teams.
In this age of opportunities, the only viable strategy is to think and execute. I hope this framework helps all those lost in how to get started.
The time to act is now.
Arturo Gavilan is the leader of Enterprise Strategy & iX Growth Platform at IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel. Feel free to reach out to him on Linkedin.
