CHAPTER 12

TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Technology as it relates to customer experience can be a double-edged sword. On one side, many organizations lean on old-fashioned technology, such as Net Promoter Score methods, Customer Relationship Management tools, and digital surveys. Virtually all of these provide erroneous and fractional insights about what customers truly love and truly hate. Yet installing some form of technology often gives many executives a warm, comfortable feeling. It’s as if doing so removes the responsibility of really getting to know and understand their customers.

On the other side of the blade is the fact that there’s no doubt that good technology can provide better insights and ways of aggregating and responding to those insights. But if this is done poorly, it usually results in failure.

Therefore, I recommend that organizations develop an integrated power plan that includes both digital and non-digital channels. It should also include technology stacks, which are ranges of technologies that help you do a better job of identifying what customers need and want and how to deliver better solutions to them. In this way we use the powerful insight-gaining potential of technology for the right purpose—to deeply understand what our customers love and what they hate.

Without a complete and integrated plan, chances are we will just lean on old-fashioned, fractional approaches toward customer experience. We will assume that customer relationship programs—typically marketing programs—are going to save the day. Of course, as we’ve seen throughout this book, they can’t.

TECHNOLOGY AS POWER

Earlier, I told you to stay away from focusing on technology. In this chapter, however, I’m saying you should use technology. Do I contradict myself? Not really.

What I’m suggesting is that the old-fashioned methods—often CRM programs—of leveraging technology were really about trying to find new ways to push out sales pitches to customers. The problem with that is customers don’t want to be managed. They want to be honored and respected.

So as we begin the process of leveraging technology, we do it from the perspective that the technology we use will enable a more efficient and effective job of delivering surprising value to the customer across both digital and non-digital channels. If we start from that perspective, the insights gathered will be far more relevant and will move us toward innovation and customer experience superstardom.

FIVE KEY DRIVERS OF TECHNOLOGY
FOR THE LONG TERM

Yesterday, I returned from the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Today, I could write this chapter telling you exactly what I think you should do now based on available technologies. Unfortunately, in just a short few weeks, those recommendations will be totally wrong.

As I reflected on sharing with you the future of technology and customer experience, I decided to focus on five key drivers that will determine the success of your enterprise as it relates to technology. Regardless of changes in the foreseeable future, these drivers will remain relevant, and they will be applicable to the way you build your customer experience power plan. They will affect the use and benefit of technologies over the next several decades.

Driver #1:
Digital Ubiquity

One of the most conspicuous trends that will change the way in which customers engage us, the way we engage them, the way we gain insights, and the way we measure and monitor the results of the products and services we deliver to the market is the concept of digital ubiquity. This is the idea that digital connectivity is everywhere, and it will only become more so.

The way in which we leverage the advantage of being continuously connected to our customers will have a massive impact on the way we deliver and build delicious customer experiences. Digital ubiquity says our customers can find us, research us, vet us, and try to glean value from us. They’re engaging our products, services, and brand through connected devices.

Today, those connected devices are likely mobile devices. As I mentioned in Chapter 1 and explained with the Google example, micro-digital moments (or micro-moments) are incredibly important in terms of how a customer engages and connects to a brand. Tomorrow, this digital ubiquity will only expand as our connected devices come in the form of wearable technologies.

There is digital ubiquity today in that we’re all connected. In the next wave, we will of course still always be connected, but we will be connected to a great many more things and in more ways than we are now. We will be in touch with our customers, they will be in touch with us, and we will have the advantage of the ability to glean data and insights as never before.

So how is your organization going to leverage the fact that your customer today is digitally ubiquitous—and will be even more so in the future—and constantly connected? What are you going to do to leverage your connection to your customer and create amazing experiences? We must create seamless, integrated, and elegant connections blending both digital and non-digital human experiences.

One problem I find many organizations have is that they create two customer experience silos: (1) the real world, non-digital, side, where team members build real-life experiences for their customers, and (2) the digital side, where the team builds out digital experiences. Regrettably, organizations often do a poor job of seamlessly integrating the two.

The trick is to always build out these experiences concurrently with your entire team to ensure that the products, services, delivery channels, and branding square up to create one integrated solution. In this way, your digital ubiquity and your digital brand promise will be in sync with the non-digital physical, real experiences you also provide.

Driver #2:
Granularity

In the past, our tools for obtaining consumer data were poor. Often, the information was so vague that we were unable to use it to come up with customer driven innovations. Fortunately, today we are able to be extremely granular. We don’t just look at pet owners, for example—we look at single female French bulldog owners in New York City.

The more granular we become, the better we will be at delivering relevant messaging, and the better job we will do of delivering products, technologies, and services that the customers we serve consider excellent. Technologies will continue to afford us the ability to have far greater granularity in the way in which we identify our customer types, and because of this, we will be able to build packets of solutions that are very, very relevant to them.

Remember, historically we were designers of macro-customer experiences. Today, we must be micro-designers, designing micro-experiences to micro-segments of a subsegment. It may seem ridiculous to get that granular, but through technology we have the ability to do it, and because we have the ability to do it, we should do it.

The headwater of excellent customer experience is really relevance. If we want to create relevant experiences, we must become more granular in understanding the unique segments and subsegments of all our customer types so we can build out messaging and solutions that are special to them.

Driver #3:
Meaningful Data

The third trend is meaningful data. Cognitive computing (previously called artificial intelligence) is one of the most exciting areas in big data and data analytics. Not only must we get lots and lots of data (because, well, we can), but we also need to understand what that data means. Every data signal has meaning. We need to look at every piece of data and leverage the power of cognitive computing to understand ways to deliver better experiences. Many times this will happen in ways we never thought of.

The future of technology, as it relates to customer experience and to meaningful data, will have much to do with acquiring large amounts of data sets. Cognitive computing will take that data and do a far better job of aggregating and leveraging it to understand its full meaning. Once we begin to see these small signals, we can identify unique and special ways to deliver perfect human experiences.

Several great organizations are already in this business. Certainly, for example, IBM Watson is full speed ahead developing a wide range of technologies and solutions for understanding the meaningfulness of data. For these reasons, cognitive computing will be the next big technological wave in customer experience design.

Social listening is another exciting area in big data and data analytics. Analyzing the Voice of the Customer through social media data provides organizations with the ability to understand consumers as they never have before. Consumers share hundreds of billions of posts about their experiences, likes, and dislikes every year.

Customer experience and marketing executives can not only use social data to measure brand health and the impact of marketing campaigns on purchase intent, but they can also use this data to identify unmet needs in the market to inform future product innovation.

Using cutting-edge big data analytics techniques, you can perform virtual ethnography at scale. Organizations that tap into unsolicited social data have a distinct advantage over those that rely only on traditional, solicited data (such as surveys) that frequently merely confirm what they already know, thereby perpetuating the status quo.

Driver #4:
Actionable Insights

Actionable insights derive from having meaningful data; this means having information we can actually do something with. Duh! Seems pretty obvious, but I have witnessed millions, and in some cases tens of millions, of dollars spent obtaining insights that were all one-dimensional and meant virtually nothing. In the future, the beauty of technology—the elegance and poetry of technology as it relates to customer experience—will be our ability to understand the meaning of what our customers are doing, what they’re saying, and how they’re behaving.

When we are able to understand the meaning of our customers’ behaviors, we have the nucleus of what we need to create disruptive innovations that will blindside our competition while delighting our valued customers.

Driver #5:
Measurability

The last trend in the future of technology is measurability. As we in the management consulting field say, “What gets measured gets done.”

Sadly, most organizations are involved in initiatives that either can’t be measured or use incorrect measurement tools. Therefore, most organizations have little ability to determine the success of a range of initiatives. Worse, some organizations measure only the success of an initiative based on its profitability, without regard to its impact on the customer and the market the organization serves.

Measurements should be in the form of executive dashboards, which allow you to take lots of complex data (that might normally appear in a spreadsheet) and deliver it to the user in a simple graphic way. Anything you can measure can go into this simple graphic interface. An executive dashboard is a handy tool that allows you to clearly see the effect of current customer experience initiatives and to pinpoint ways to improve your customers’ experiences based on the data. Setting up a wide range of powerful measurement tools and reporting them to key executives via executive dashboards is by far one of the most powerful technologies that will serve the future of customer experience, particularly as the data and methods by which it is delivered will continue to improve in the future.

Most organizations look at the way they impact customers annually or—surprisingly—they never do it. However, by using executive dashboards that are in the hands of people who have the authority, the inclination, and the motivation to make changes quickly, you can make sure your company doesn’t go off track. Your organization can be proactive instead of reactive. In our hypercompetitive environment, by the time we realize we’re headed down the wrong road, it’s often too late. We’ve been blindsided by the competition because we didn’t have the pulse of our market, our customers, and their entire journey at our fingertips.

Executive dashboards leveraging cognitive computing and better insights across the customer experience are the future of customer experience.

These five trends will morph in many different ways. Some of them are in development stages and some are already available.

Digital ubiquity is here and will continue to be more so as new sensors and technologies are invented.

Granularity is the only way we can create real and meaningful experiences across a wide range of customer experiences.

Meaningful data, understandable information about what our customers really care about, is essential. The key to managing lots of data is the ability to aggregate it and identify what matters.

The ability to come up with meaningful data through cognitive computing and social listening will have a major impact on the way we identify meaning. It will allow us to have actionable insights to transform what we learn into innovations that deliver exceptional customer experiences instantaneously over long developmental life cycles.

And finally, measurability via graphic user interfaces or executive dashboard interfaces will allow us to get complicated information reported to a range of executives quickly so that they have the authority, motivation, and inclination to move fast and improve the quality of our customer experiences.

These five technology drivers should be part of everything you do as you build your power plan. There is no doubt technology will have an incredible impact on the future of the customer experience.