Q1 Podcast: IBM Exceptional Web Experience

Transcription

1 Q1 Podcast: IBM Exceptional Web Experience Moderator: Beth McElroy, Worldwide Marketing Manager for IBM Collaboration Solutions Speaker: Gary Dolsen, Director of Exceptional Web Experience Software Hello and welcome to the podcast Deepen Customer Relationships and Expand Your Brand with IBM Exceptional Web Experience Software. My name is Beth McElroy and I am the Worldwide Marketing Manager for IBM Collaboration Solutions. Today we will be speaking with Gary Dolsen, the Director of Exceptional Web Experience Software. The way individuals interact with business has dramatically changed in the last several years. With the explosion of social media and smart phone devices businesses need to be responsive, engaging and exceptional to stand out. This is true whether you are interacting with the business partner, a vendor or a customer. In this podcast we will discuss the IBM Customer Experience Suite. It s a completely integrated solution that helps businesses design a dynamic web presence allowing them to deepen their customer relationships, stand out from competition, optimize and streamline business processes and gain customer insights through analytics to deliver improved customer satisfaction and increase revenue results. So with that I would like to welcome Gary Dolsen. Thanks Beth. Building an exceptional web experience is an important step in the direction of becoming a social business and it s really a way to reinvent relationships with constituencies of users. Most often it s a philosophy and a set of technologies of engaging people outside your firewall, whether they are direct to consumer customers or partners or dealers, franchises, storage or suppliers, anyone who can influence your ability to attract and retain business. What we have found is that our IBM clients want a way to manage a portfolio of online properties to convey their brand well or to engage those customer constituencies in discussions or to provide some high-value functionality like customer self service or content discovery and wrap themselves around their customers by going where they already are rather than forcing them to visit your specific sites.

2 So the technology elements that organizations sometimes bring into play are things like personalized web delivery, delivery of rich compelling web content, native social capabilities like communities or tagging and rating, integration with external social communities like Facebook or LinkedIn and especially important right now is mobile delivery, whether that is building native applications or web delivered applications through a mobile browser or some hybrid of those things. There are also other elements that come into play like Mashup capabilities or Forms whether that is electronic forms or dynamic web forms and things like analytics so that you re making evidence-based decisions about your online portfolio. It seems like there is a real focus or trend around the end-user customers. I m just wondering if you could give us your thoughts on why we have shifted to such a focus around end-user and the customers. I think the main reason is that there is really excellent ROI to be found when you concentrate on your end customers. So there are some good business reasons and good technology reasons but they both map down into some very hard ROI measures quickly, whether that s in terms of new revenue made or expense saved. So investing in customer acquisition or retention tends to have ROI in the areas of being able to quickly gain new business through new customers or through up sell/cross sell and being able to retain business in the form of making your high-value customers, you re very loyal customers happy over time. So these projects, these IT projects tend to have a lot of strong support from both line of business and IT and they tend to stay funded over time. So some of the numbers that we see from our customers is that they can get to market 75% faster, they get 16% more recommendations by customers for products and services and there is 14% higher repeat purchase. So these types of really hard ROI numbers help to convince people that the end customer projects are very important to have funded. One of the interesting things that we have found is that retention can have a very significant financial impact. So for instance a 2% increase in customer retention can have the same effect on profit as cutting costs by 10%. So making a modest investment and increasing the customer satisfaction and increasing customer retention can really make a dramatic difference in profit. What would you say would make a website stand out as an exceptional experience? What type of qualities would it need to have?

3 There are four things that we talk about when we talk about it with our clients. Those of four things are sites that are engaging and relevant, portable and trustworthy. So let me talk about each of those for minute. In terms of a site being engaging, I think the bar has really been raised by a lot of the consumer sites out there and the clients that we work with want to provide something that is not only a pretty picture, not only an online portfolio or brochure, but they want to have a discussion with their customers. So that implies a couple of things aside from good, rich content. It implies that you want to have a discussion using some social techniques. So it s not just you talking to your customers, it s actually engaging in a process of having joint ownership of your brand and joint ownership of your products so that there is a dialogue happening there. The second is this idea of the site being very relevant. So this means that you are delivering functionality and delivering content that is specific to the user logging on. So people now as an end consumer are not very tolerant of a site that could be intended for anybody, they want you to use knowledge about the products that they own, the trouble tickets they have open, their payment history and even their behavior on the site and their search activity to deliver precisely the type of content and functionality that they need to have available. The third element here is the concept of portability. So consumers want to be able to have the same set of functionality available whether they are getting a set of online properties through their browser, their traditional browser or a mobile device or a kiosk when they walk into a branch. They want their customer contact centers whether it s a teller in a bank or whether it s a call center to have that same sort of information. So there has to be consistency across all of these different channels. Your experience has to be portable across the channels. Finally is this concept of being trustworthy. So how do you ensure that you are delivering a reliable and secure experience at all times? There has to be trust between the company and its customers. Thank you. Who would you say is the target market for these types of products? Is there an ideal customer that you would mention? We are seeing very good uptake across many different verticals. Really the target is anyone making online channels a priority in one of kind of three different areas. One is that they are using online properties for growth and another is that they are using it for customer satisfaction. A third is they are using it for efficiency of some sort.

4 So of course it s especially important that some verticals like consumer products and retail and Telco but the real explosion where we have seen the explosion in growth has come from the more traditional and more staid industries like banks and governments and insurance companies and health care systems. Within those clients there is an interesting thing going on which is that the types of decisions being made are very balanced among a mixed team of both IT and line of business; line of business sometimes on the marketing side and sometimes directly into specific business units. But it is a very balanced decision and I think it s a healthy trend that we are seeing. Based on some market research that we did we have found that well over half of the decisions were a team that was across the company who were concentrating on customer facing sorts of experiences. The success factors that they see that are important to them are the ability to line up the online experience that you are delivering with strategic objectives of the organization. So perhaps establishing a premier online brand, creating customers for life and getting customers invested in their own success and that sort of thing. It s also important to have a very clear ROI framework. So how you re either going to make money through attracting and retaining, cross sell, up sell or save money through better customer service, faster processes or creating awareness through customer communities and maybe tying into external social networks. So those are some of the success factors that these blended teams want to see in order to have a successful project. Can you go into a little bit about what offerings IBM has that help people create these exceptional Web experiences? I would be happy to. The first one I want to talk about is the IBM Customer Experience Suite which is a collection of technologies that people have been using for quite some time that we are integrating together in a consistent stack. So philosophically people can either use it as a consistent integrated stack or they can use it as a set of open flexible components. Inside customer experience suite are things like personalization capabilities in the form of Portal, content delivery capabilities in the form of IBM Web Content Manager, some social community capabilities in the form of IBM Connections and there are some other things like strong integration and mobile capability from Web Experience Factory, the fact that we can consume easily RAS services and provide RAS services. We have traditional web services consumption, web clipping, and web application integration. The ability to mash up things quickly so using Mashup technology to allow line of business folks to quickly

5 aggregate things on a screen. Having some simple instant messaging capability for presence awareness and click to call and search within the site as well as search engine optimization. So the combination of those technologies provides people with a very powerful platform to be able to build sites that are engaging, relevant, portable and trustworthy. So we also have some other modules that people want to add on. There is a lot of interest right now in web analytics; being able to gather data about how people are using your site and then be able to make evidence-based decisions about where to take the site in the future. So that is an example of an add-on module. We are building a very close integration with Core Metrics that allow you to instrument your code automatically using tags that Core Metrics understands and then being able to see specific reports about your web experience in terms of usage patterns. There are other add-on models for things like marketing campaign management through UNICA, dynamic web forms and electronic web forms through some of our natural Forms capability that we have available. We have partnerships with rich media companies and so often people will deliver audio and video in being able to edit those components to put them into the web experience. So not only is that all part of an integrated stack, but these are also available separately as well. So if one of our clients has a Web Content Management or an Enterprise Content Management solution in place that they want to leverage, then they can wrap personalization, mobile capability around it and wrap electronic Forms around it. So we want to make sure we offer maximum flexibility for our clients to be able to use the integrated stack or to use it in an open componentized way. It sounds like a very comprehensive portfolio. Can you touch on next, how that portfolio compares to others that maybe in the marketplace? Yes, I will be happy to. Let me bring out a couple of points where I think we differentiate ourselves clearly. One is the ability to have business relevant integration and personalization. We allow our clients to be able to build not only content rich sites but also context rich sites. So the concept of context is becoming more important. So how do you pull in trouble ticket systems? How do you pull in perhaps your CRM system? How do you pull in all these elements to create context for your consumers going forward? What we have found is that a lot of these web experience and customer experience projects are actually integration projects. So IBM products offer strong capabilities to be able to pull together enterprise assets, to be able to deliver this 360 view of your customer and allow them to make decisions in context.

6 A second is that I think we are really in the forefront with respect to this concept of being able to make evidence-based business decision. So being able to wrap in analytics whether those are web analytics or business analytics, to deliver the best business outcomes that you will experience. The third element I would bring up is this ability to integrate social natively into the experience itself. So whether you are using fine-grained social capabilities to create your own communities, your own blogging and your own tagging your rating within your own site or whether you are reaching out to Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter to be able to support those communities through syndicated content or something like that, the ability to wrap in native social capabilities is especially important. So integration, analytics and native social. Great, thank you. Lastly, can you give us any customer examples that may have used our products or portfolio and what their experience was? I would be happy to. One really good example is Kaiser Permanente in the United States. They have a site where they have 3 million registered patient users. This is kind of an interesting take on the web experience and that their consumers are direct patients. They have about 85 million visitors per year to their kp.org site. They built the site using platform as a service based on our technology. So their business objective was to get their consumers and their patients invested in their own health which is a win-win. So it s a win for the patients because they end up with healthier patients and it s a win for Kaiser because they end up with a lower cost to maintain the health of those patients. They do that through a series of mechanisms. So in addition to establishing their brand they allow some very deep online services like online appointment making, online health records, even as it s through secure , pharmacy prescription refill and that sort of thing. What they have found is that when their consumers, when their patients engage online they get more invested in their own health and make it more invested in maintaining that relationship with the company. So for instance the online appointments that people make, people are much more likely to keep those appointments and not be a no-show. So that is a very critical factor. Not only are people getting better care but the Kaiser providers are in a situation where they have fewer no-shows which is a very expensive thing for them. This type of site has also been employed by Boston Medical, Dallas Children s Hospital, Duke Medicine, Catholic Healthcare West, a lot of healthcare organizations.

7 Let me give you another quick example too. Lufthansa airlines in Europe had a need to really develop their online channel to be able to maintain their customer relationships. So not only did they want to sell more tickets online but they wanted to maintain their whole customer relationship online including checking in, providing loyalty program information and they were one of the first to do this years ago and have been using our portal products to be able to do this. So they delivered personalized web experience for millions of customers across 80 countries and 12 languages. They do it about 16,000 customer check-ins a day and they do about 3 million online ticket sales per year. The idea is that they have a single consistent brand image and a single way of managing their relationship with several different online presences. Thank you so much. They were great examples. I wanted to thank you Gary for your time and thoughtful insights here. For anybody who is looking to learn more or try any of the offerings that Gary spoke about in our Exceptional Web Experience portfolio, you can visit our website at or you can go to Greenhouse and download trials of the software as well. Thank you very much.