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Customer expectations drive business. Companies that succeed are great at meeting those expectations. Companies that excel are great at changing them. Customers didn’t expect a cell phone to play music until Apple created the iPhone. The good news is that customer expectations are not random. They are the outcome of movements that have been going on for decades. For a recent industry report titled Customers 2020, Walker Information conducted research to provide a look at what business-to-business companies need to do now to prepare for customer expectations in the year 2020. We reviewed current trends, consulted leading Customer Experience (CX) executives, and talked to hundreds of people in charge of managing their company’s customer experience to provide a look ahead. One overarching conclusion of this report is that a personalized customer experience will increasingly be the key differentiator in B-to-B markets.
Source: Customers2020 Report, Walker Information Inc. In the past companies have only been able to deliver personalized experiences to a select few customers at a time. As interactions between people and companies moved online and the barrier to acquiring and storing information eroded companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix and hundreds of others began delivering these experiences to anyone who had an internet connection. Now that customers are used to getting personalized offers and notifications we are beginning to expect personalized experiences all the time. To prepare for this shift in expectations, leading B-to-B companies are focusing in a few key areas. Of all the potential areas of focus, a strong majority of CX leaders are prioritizing action and investment in better understanding individual customer characteristics (62%) and in simplifying products and processes (58%) to deliver an optimal experience. And they are realizing this will require a dramatic increase in the use of all sources of customer information.
Image Source: Walker Information Inc. In other words, the delivery of a personalized experience to all customers requires a lot of data from a lot of sources so that we can understand customers’ individual needs and create simplified products and processes that allow us to achieve their desired outcomes. Great! Now how do we do that? As Kevin Roche, President of EMC Global Services, outlines in his video, companies should consider a three-prong strategy to deliver a personalized experience with big data:
The personal, or what I call relational, delivery of service adds complexity, but also presents a great opportunity: What better way to reinforce personalization than through personal interaction. This will require our technology (data and analytics) and our processes to work seamlessly with our front-line associates – neither of these pieces can deliver the personalized experience alone. I believe the three-prong strategy for big data is a necessary condition to deliver the required well-oiled interface between the technology and the human actors. EMC has some great examples of this working in practice. One of them is in its Customer Service (CS) organization. For years, CS has conducted a close-the-loop process to address negative customer feedback shared through transactional surveys. However, not every unhappy customer provides feedback. Using customer feedback and service event data from EMC’s Data Lake, EMC partnered with Walker Information to run advanced data analysis and develop a risk model that can automatically predict at-risk service events and notify Service Managers to contact the customer, remediate potential issues, and document the feedback for additional analysis.
This program has had a big impact on customer satisfaction (153% increase in satisfaction to be precise) and behaviors, but it only works because there is almost no friction between the technology (data and analysis) and the Service Managers who act on the intelligence. Every day new data flows through the predictive algorithm, into the alerting system, into the hands of a Service Manager, and leads to a personalized experience for a customer. This is all because EMC implemented the three-prong strategy to create customer intimacy with big data. Thankfully, Walker is working with more and more companies wanting to deliver a personalized experience through their people like a building supply distributor who predicts the type of sales relationship to deliver to each customer to best meet their needs. But for every success story there are many more failures, and each one can be traced back to a failure in one of the prongs. Unless we harness the power of both people and big data analytics we will fail to deliver the consistent, personalized experience customers expect across all channels. It is impossible for even the best sales or service personnel to deliver a consistent, personalized experience if they don’t know all the information, and in today’s world, there is too much information for any human to know, much less process. To succeed at the game of business, we will need all the data we can get, but more importantly we need the technology, the processes, and the culture to deliver the personalized experience customers expect. You can learn more about EMC’s use of big data to deliver a more personalized customer experience in the InFocus Viewpoints for Leaders document, “Unlock Customer Intimacy through Big Data”.
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