Anticipatory Customer Care and the NPS of One.

Transcription

1 Anticipatory Customer Care and the NPS of One. A high aggregate NPS score was once the ultimate goal. But thanks to data analytics, companies can now calculate the NPS of One how each individual customer feels about a brand. The next generation of AI will redefine expectations for personalized customer service rooted in anticipatory design. Bernardo Rodriguez, Managing Director, Strategy brodriguez@hugeinc.com hugeinc.com 45 Main Street 3rd Floor Brooklyn, NY 11201

2 Summary We are entering a new era in user experience, enabled by the advance and ubiquity in artificial intelligence and the blending of the physical and digital worlds through the Internet of Things. Smart brands will increase exponentially their ability to know their customers, and predict how to create value, or avoid pain, for them. Over the next 3 to 5 years, brands that fall behind on this front will face an unbridgeable gap. Although traditional brands have headwinds from legacy organization, technology infrastructure, and capabilities, they can succeed if they commit to a journey that seeks to optimize around individual customer interactions, not averages like net promoter scores (NPS). The goal is to create empathy one customer at a time a philosophy based on what we call the NPS of One and to provide interactions that balance business KPIs and customer value, or Unselfish Anticipatory Design. The Shift Digital native companies like Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify deliver the large majority of online interactions and have created a new standard for customer experience. And it s not just happening online-- products and services like Echo, Dash, Google Now, and Uber will extend the expectation of relevant, ubiquitous, and real-time brand interactions to the physical world. Artificial intelligence will help smart brands learn about individual customers and sustain personal conversations with users from the get-go, rather than waiting for complaints or problems to arise--traditionally, where customer care began. The adoption of AI will be accelerated through open services 1 : As of 2015, IBM had 350 company partners using Watson to create products, and 70,000 software developers are using Watson software, 1. Anticipatory Customer Care 1

3 according to the company. Using data to scale personalized customer care creates strong bonds with users by anticipating their needs. Using data to scale personalized customer care creates strong bonds with users by anticipating their needs: Google Now or Google Assistant can proactively let me know there s traffic so I should leave for the airport 30 minutes early--and offer to order me an Uber. My cable company could let me know via text that there s a soccer game from my favorite team coming up that I won t want to miss and remind me to watch it for free on their app, or in a near-by bar. If my phone bill spikes, a heads up and explanation from my carrier may fend off the inevitable, likely unpleasant customerservice call. Expectations for this level of personal, anticipatory service are flowing to digital customer care. But most current implementations still feel impersonal dry, digital presentations of account information, preferences, or options to upgrade or cancel services. Although efficiency and customer engagement metrics have increased, they have failed to create meaningful market differentiators or cost advantages. In the best scenarios, traditional digital customer-care implementations bring companies to parity in their respective industries, but fall short greatly when compared to digital-first companies. As customers, we want brands to know us, love us, tell us what matters, and anticipate our next moves before we do. Only then do we love brands back. We also expect brands to be transparent and offer a fair value exchange at the very least, to put our interest in par with theirs. We want brands to tell us what s relevant to us, even if it doesn t necessarily mean new sales for them. Anticipatory Customer Care 2

4 Brands earn our trust if and when they consistently demonstrate with actions (not words) that they are looking out for us. The Impact The best customer support experience is personalized, empathetic, and effective. This traditionally has been associated with well-trained personnel who talked to customers, understood their needs and problems, and provided quick solutions. When done well, it s great for customers, but expensive for business. The good news is that with the ubiquity of connectivity and advances in experience design and artificial intelligence, it is now possible to make personal services scalable even to a level that feels more personalized than human interactions, since machines can access data and run algorithms much faster than us. Using the knowledge gleaned from AI, smart brands will leverage anticipatory design 2 and create seamless customer service experiences, sometimes even fixing issues before they occur. Only the brands that do so will be able to capture the cost advantage of a fully automated service, and the customer trust and love that comes with a valuable, personalized connection. Smart brands will leverage anticipatory design and create seamless customer service experiences, sometimes even fixing issues before they occur. In a time when all major industries are being threatened by digital-first companies, your competitors will come from unexpected places that are already designing products and services users love. Fintech startups like Venmo are nipping at the heels of traditional banks; with Fiber, Google has cable providers in its sights; Oscar is building a strong alternative to ². Anticipatory Customer Care 3

5 traditional insurance companies--and the list goes on. The failure to achieve best-in-class customer care will decrease significantly the ability to compete. The customer experiences at digital-first companies are rooted in customer data, strong AI capabilities, and an obsession for experience design. Traditional companies are typically encumbered by channel conflicts, legacy technology, meager AI capabilities, and loose guiding principles to balance revenue growth, cost management, and customer experience. Successful companies will understand the call to action and put the customer (each individual, not the average) truly at the center. The Way Forward A vision for the customer service experience should be ambitious enough to rally an organization, and focused enough to guide decisions and resource allocation. It should be centered on providing meaningful value to your customers, and engaging them with relevancy, transparency, and convenience. Modern technology allows companies to optimize experiences one customer at a time. Empathy and personalization can be scaled, but you must do so iteratively, making simple steps and optimizing along the way. The key is making consistent investments in capabilities that enable personalized conversations with your customers. Companies should start with simple algorithms and move progressively to AI. One way to visualize the end goal is to agree on the questions that need to be answered systematically. If Sarah is a customer that you have selected randomly, how would you answer these questions: How s Sarah doing? What additional value can we bring her? Anticipatory Customer Care 4

6 Framing it this way can drive your decisions about what information to collect, what algorithms to run, and ultimately how to engage your customer. So how can you make this happen inside your organization? There are three imperatives: PRIORITIZE THE NPS OF ONE In the past decade or so, companies have distilled their user centricity into a single metric: net promoter score, or NPS the standard measure of a customer s loyalty. That made sense ten years ago, but it s outdated in a world where digital is the medium. Imagine a service company with tens of millions of users that takes measure of its customer experience solely by averaging the results of a survey that s the same for every user, and only asks one question. Averages are good to manage a business, but not to optimize the capabilities that will drive personal conversations with your customer. A high aggregate NPS score was once the ultimate goal, but today, customer intimacy is the new make-or-break measure. A high aggregate NPS score was once the ultimate goal, but today, customer intimacy the ability to understand, empathize, and ultimately anticipate the needs of any one specific user is the new make-or-break measure. Scaling customer empathy and automating solutions for personal conversations will become the new norm. The NPS of One is the ability to assess how each customer feels about your brand. Companies can find implicit predictors of a user s feeling about their brand through data analytics. For example, a telecom company could look at time spent with the call center or on an account page, calls dropped, peaks in charges, and plans purchased through direct sales but not used as indicators of a low promoter score; responses to SMS messages, reduced support calls, Anticipatory Customer Care 5

7 addition of lines and length of relation could be predictors of a high score. BUILD TRUST THROUGH ANTICIPATORY DESIGN Understanding individual users through data is the jumping-off point to successful anticipatory design; infusing anticipatory design into customer service channels would help traditional companies elevate their digital experiences to the level of digital-first companies. While most companies recognize this need, few have adopted anticipatory tactics into their experiences. In some cases, they have been selfishly anticipatory, optimizing for up-sales but neglecting other drivers of customer value. Unselfish anticipatory design asks, what is the most valuable thing that we can do for that user now? Unselfish anticipatory design asks, what is the most valuable thing that we can do for that user now? The answer to this question should drive the next customer interaction. But early implementations of anticipatory design in most traditional companies focus on finding the thing that a customer is most likely to buy now. That could be appropriate and valuable to a user, but the approach would quickly kill customer trust if it were always one-sided. Imagine that Sarah purchased an international calling plan for $25 a month, but has not made international calls for 4 months. Would it be valuable and anticipatory to propose to cancel it? The answer is yes--but is your technology, and more importantly, your culture and incentive structure, ready to actually support that option? High-value anticipatory design will surprise the user if it is unselfish, creating significant brand equity. Anticipatory Customer Care 6

8 ALIGN YOUR CHANNELS Customers interact with a brand through multiple channels: retail, call center, chat, social, web, mobile, cars, watches, and so on. Although companies have studied customer journeys across channels, few companies have been able to align experience optimization initiatives. The reason is that it is hard to break legacy organizational structure and the competing incentives that often govern channels like retail, call center, and digital, independently. Customer journey optimization needs to be implemented across channels. The first step is to define and capture information about individual customers at every touchpoint. This information should live inside a data infrastructure that is accessible using a modern API service architecture. This data repository should be augmented with second- and third-party data that can enrich your customer empathy, intent, and value drivers. Optimization cycles should draw from this data to progressively improve experience for each customer, using anticipatory design and simple feedback loops. This process will test the organization, its processes, and technology infrastructure. Optimization cycles will cut across them and should be measured in weeks, not months or quarters. Although KPIs and business goals can be shared across channels, they will require making decisions that balance the customer experience against cost reduction benefits and sales targets, which can affect channels unevenly. Progressively, this will tune your organization and capabilities to continuously optimize for customer value and business benefit holistically: your customer, your brand. Anticipatory Customer Care 7

9 Getting Started The journey to create empathy and anticipatory experience will force you to make choices. Some of them could impact the way you structure employee incentives. Others will expose the tricky balance between revenue growth, cost savings, and doing what is best for your customer. And others will dictate how you allocate resources, architect your technology infrastructure, or select the right partners for your business. In any case, the first step is to get started: Agree on what constitutes an outstanding experience, and outline the related business opportunities and risks. Look beyond your traditional competitors. Quantify a call-toaction. Create and communicate internally a vision for customer experience that sets the bar for execution and guides strategy, tactics, and capital allocation. Deploy best-in-class multidisciplinary teams to improve customer experience in key journeys. Define and tackle the questions about individual customers you need to answer. Move from reactive to anticipatory design. Have an unselfish bias and get proof points. Start designing and continuously expand a customer data repository. Build a strong data science team that seeks to optimize algorithms for empathy and anticipatory care. Anticipatory Customer Care 8