Marketing’s Role in Employee & Customer Experience Journeys

Publié le par hanswillertbleuazurconsultingeu

Is your Marketing department aligned with customer experience and employee experience? The necessity and logic of doing this was highlighted in a recent presentation by Hootsuite’s Vice President of Customer, Kirsty Traill. She pointed out that Marketing Communications is unfortunately the typical focus of customer journey maps and customer-centric marketing.

Her observations are in accordance with the first half of this six-part series which also pointed out that MarCom-focus for customer-centric marketing is extremely short-sighted in what’s needed by your company. It short-changes marketing’s impact.

Hootsuite takes a holistic view of “brand experience” by applying customer-centric research and thinking to each phase of the end-to-end customer experience and employee experience journey maps — for use by all groups within Marketing and beyond. Brand integrity relies upon both employees’ and customers’ perceptions. It also relies on the company’s fulfillment of their needs. Marketing plays a significant role in understanding, communicating and assuring these needs.

“We recognize the importance of employee engagement in driving the customer experience,” said Kirsty. “Marketing touches every part of the employee journey and is a key part of driving a truly customer-centric culture, starting with recruiting and whether the public’s image of our employer brand is likely to attract high-caliber talent.”

The journey team at Hootsuite includes Marketing, Sales and Customer Success representatives. This allows them to look through different lenses. Their work has developed an overarching messaging hierarchy informed by customer journey mapping, and grounded in customer needs. “It’s an overall guide of how customers talk about the category,” explained Kirsty. “It describes how customers and employees think about each phase of their journeys, and how they talk about their needs. It provides vocabulary for consistent messaging to each of four core customer personas and to employees.”

Marketing decisions are guided by a table of customer insights available for each journey stage, showing which voice-of-customer insights inform each stage and who owns it. Julie Garrah, Customer Experience Manager on Kirsty’s team at Hootsuite, explained: “We emphasize closing-the-loop in communicating what action we’re taking. This drives improvement in scores. We send customers a closing-the-loop email on a six-month cadence, sharing what we’re doing.”

The image below describes the interpretation. Green phrasing is the suggestion to foster outside-in thinking.

Research for Marketing Across the Customer Experience Journey

Hootsuite has defined four core personas and developed a customer journey map for each persona. (identify natural customer segments by looking for patterns across qualitative data) Hootsuite builds a deep understanding of each segment’s journey stages by answering these questions:

  • Need Something: How does a customer become aware of the need for what your category represents, how would they describe the need in their own words, what is it that triggers the activation of that customer need?
  • What are My Choices: Which other companies are in your customers’ consideration set, where are they finding information to make a decision in the category, what is their evaluation criteria?
  • Decide & Buy: What information are they looking for to make their decision, what is it that locks them in to your product versus your competition’s, do they talk to anyone, what does your purchase process look like, how long does it take, how easy was it for customers relative to their expectations?
  • Receive Order: What do they need to get started, where do they find information during this stage?
  • Install / Use: How do customers use your product/service, how do they define the value, how do you deliver upon that value, how do you reinforce that they’ve made the right decision?
  • Questions / Moments of Truth (1) : Which touch-points triggered repeat purchase, upgrade or expansion; where did you fail to deliver on their expectations; what caused customers to cancel, suspend, return, leave, what were the triggers; what information do they need and in what format?
  • Integrations (2): Which touch-points turn fans into loyal fans and advocates, what is the customers’ context for usage of your product, what are their interactions with your people, what is their connection with your brand?
  1. Questions / Moments of Truth: Researching the “moments of truth” stage can be a difficult process to go through, but Kirsty explained: “This information is rich and can be used in very productive ways for improving customer experience as well as your marketing mix and marketing touch-points.”
  2. Integrations: Integrations might be the most significant part of the journey as it answers “what is the customer trying to get done . . . with or by whom, under what circumstances, in combination with what processes or hardware/software?” This context can be a game-changer for up-leveling your marketing, product development, and operations.

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Research & Actions for Marketing Across the Employee Experience Journey

Hootsuite applies customer experience insights to all stages of the employee experience journey:

  • Need a Job Opportunity / What are My Choices: Does your Careers web page paint the image of a customer-centric company, how employees are portraying you on LinkedIn and GlassDoor, is your employer brand aligned with your corporate brand and customer-focus?
  • Decide & Sign / Start Job: Educate every new employee on buyer personas and user personas in every team and department, show videos from customers explaining what they use and like, provide pocket guide with customer needs and value proposition, explain company standards to new hires so they understand how important customer-focus is and how their specific role affects customer experience.
  • Daily Work: Empower everyone in the company to address customer issues since it’s impossible for your Customer Success team to manage every touch-point customers have with your company, role-based training, create a central repository of customer information and unified customer profile across the journey, design your tech stack to integrate the fewest systems necessary to house customer data for a comprehensive story of individual customers.
  • Higher Purpose: Make “customer love” visible through stories shared with employees, display your Customer Support vision, encourage employees to participate in shadowing, ride-alongs, and capturing customer quotes.
  • Championing: Encourage brand spirit through corporate apparel and swag, empower employees to “share love” through social media, arrange for people from development to shadow Customer Support and Sales Enablement to sit in on sales calls, invite Product Marketing and Vertical Marketing teams to attend customer events to see how customers are interacting and engaging with content.

Hootsuite studies a flow of qualitative data from marketing touch-points about what customers want and need. By gaining a deeper understanding of how customers are thinking and feeling about information at each stage in their journey, the company has also gained appreciation for how the touch-points interact with one another.

These insights re-orient employees’ outlooks. They break down traditional silo mentality. The goal is to become a more customer-centric organization by driving behavior in doing what’s best for the customer as the way to drive business growth.

Click here to access CustomerThink-10-Big-Ideas-Customer-Experience-Success Paper

How to Transform Your CX Strategy with AI

Publié le par hanswillertbleuazurconsultingeu

Consumers have more ways than ever to communicate with the brands they buy — be it through private chat or in public on social media sites such as Twitter. If a conversation conveys a negative sentiment, it can be detrimental if it’s not addressed quickly. Many companies are leaning on early stage AI tools for help.

Companies can use artificial intelligence in customer service to build a brand that’s associated with excellent customer experience (CX). This is critically important in an era in which consumers can easily compare product prices on the web, said Gene Alvarez, a Gartner managing VP, during a September 2018 webinar in which analysts discussed ways artificial intelligence in customer service can drive business growth. « When your price is equal, what’s left? Your customer experience, » Alvarez said. « If you deliver a poor customer experience, they’ll go with the company that delivers a good one. This has created a challenge for organizations trying to take on the behemoths who are doing well with customer experience, with the challenge being scale. »

AI in customer service enables companies to understand what their customers are doing today and to quickly scale CX strategies in response. Chatbots can be deployed relatively quickly to handle customer requests around the clock, while social listening tools can track customer sentiment online to gain insight, identify potential new customers, and take proactive action to protect and grow brands.

With that, AI technologies including text analytics, sentiment analysis, speech analytics and natural language processing all play an increasingly important role in customer experience management. By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be handled by AI — that’s 400% higher than in 2017, according to Gartner.

Where AI for customer service makes sense

With the current hype around AI, companies may rush into projects without thinking about how artificial intelligence can help execute their vision for customer experience — if it’s appropriate at all, Alvarez said.

« Organizations have to ask the question, ‘How will I use AI to build the next component of my vision in terms of execution from a strategy perspective?‘ [and] not just try AI at scattershot approaches, » he said. « Look for moments of truth in the customer experience and say, ‘This is a good place to try [AI] because it aligns with our vision and strategy and the type of customer experience we want to deliver.' »

For example, an extraordinary number of companies have deployed chatbots or virtual assistants or are in the process of deploying them. Twenty-five percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020, up from less than 2% in 2017, Gartner reported.

But chatbots certainly aren’t the right choice for all companies. Customers who shop a luxury brand may expect a higher level of personalized customer service; self-service models and chatbots aren’t appropriate for customers who expect their calls to be answered by a person, Alvarez said.

And it’s no secret that virtual agents haven’t delivered the success companies hoped for with AI in customer service, said Brian Manusama, Gartner research director, in the webinar. All the experimentation with chatbots and virtual agents has, in some cases, hurt the customer experience instead of contributing to it. Companies have a long way to go to learn which technologies to use for the right use cases, he said.

« Companies really getting into [AI for CX] are disproportionally getting rewarded for it while companies that don’t do well with it are getting disproportionally punished for it, » Manusama said.

Match the product to the CX

The first step in choosing software for artificial intelligence in customer service is to understand that there is no single tool that works for every customer in every scenario, said Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner. For example, a customer who buys an inexpensive product may be fine interacting with a chatbot about that purchase, but not other types of purchases, he said.

« You have to identify the people who want to work with a chatbot and be realistic about the fact that if someone says they’d rather work with a chatbot, they might mean that for one situation but not another, » Andrews said.

To put a finer point on it, Jessica Ekholm, a Gartner research VP, advised companies to « pick the right battles » with AI tools by examining where the customer pain points are and developing a CX strategy that uses artificial intelligence in customer service strategically.

Cohesive AI in CRM strategies requires a singular 360 view

AI in CRM today is like mobile in the 1990s and social media channels in the 2000s, according to Jeff Nicholson, vice president of CRM product marketing at Pegasystems: It seems everyone wants a piece of the pie.

« Companies are anxious to deploy AI, so they try a little over here, maybe a little over there, just to keep up, » Nicholson said. « Before you know it, you’ve created another stack of silos across the enterprise. » To succeed with AI in CRM, he explained, organizations need a holistic strategy that ties AI across all departments and customer-facing channels. Using a channel-less approach, companies can avoid a disjointed user experience and very frustrated customers and instead take advantage of the full power of their data.

At the center of an experience platform where the AI brain lives, businesses should react in real time with chatbots, mobile apps, webpages, on the phone or in person at the store, Nicholson said. « This singular AI brain approach, » he noted, « allows [companies] to extend predictive intelligence to all other channels, without having to start from scratch for each new interface that comes along. »

Pega is ahead of the curve, he claimed, with the Customer Decision Hub, which serves as the central AI brain across all its CRM applications — from marketing to sales to customer service. « We’ve seen our clients leverage it to redefine how they engage with customers to turn their businesses around, » he reported, citing two examples: Royal Bank of Scotland raised its Net Promoter Score by 18 points across its 17 million customers, while Sprint overcame industry-high turnover rates and realized a 14% increase in customer retention.

SAP‘s Leonardo AI and machine learning tool can help companies with their digital transformation and customer engagement strategies. It also helps organizations address key technologies, including machine learning, internet of things, blockchain, big data and analytics. SAP Hybris follows an organic development approach to AI in CRM, using data scientists and development teams across all areas of the business. Find out more about Pega, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP AI systems in the following chart:

content_management-cohesive_ai_crm

AI strategy comes first, then AI tools second

For all the talk and focus on technological innovations that have disrupted and changed business processes, what has really changed the most during the technology revolution of the last 20 years is the customer.

Customers enter the buying process equipped with more information and perspective than ever before. From a bygone era of personal experiences and finite wells of word-of-mouth reviews, customers are now engaged with millions of other customer experiences through social media and online reviews, as well as unlimited resources, when making product or service comparisons. This paradigm shift has left marketers, sellers and service teams playing catch-up to develop strategies combined with technology to better equip themselves and capitalize on the customer’s experience.

Companies and brands hope that infusing a CRM AI strategy within their business will help balance the scales when interacting with customers. No business wants to enter a negotiation knowing less than its counterpart. And based on the marketing churn of most software companies, it’s easy to assume that many businesses have already implemented AI into their marketing and sales processes, and those that haven’t will be left in the dust.

« If the AI-driven environment can learn enough and be trained correctly, it can deliver better customers that are more relevant and timely and on the right device and right promotion, » Forrester Research principal analyst Joe Stanhope said. But AI in customer experience comes with a caveat. « It will play out as a multiyear process, and it’s not necessarily a technology problem, » Stanhope warned. « It’s more of a change of management and a cultural issue. »

Delivering on customer expectations

The importance of implementing an AI strategy into the customer experience isn’t lost on business executives. According to Bluewolf’s latest « State of Salesforce » annual report, 63% of C-level executives are counting on AI to improve the customer experience. A 2017 IBM study also indicated that 26% of respondents expect AI to have a significant impact on customer experience today, while 47% expect the impact to be within the next two or three years.

Chief marketing officers set sights on CRM AI

In the next two to three years, one-third of organizations plan to implement AI technologies, according to a 2017 study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value. Yet some organizations surveyed have already implemented AI technologies and intend to license more.

IBM‘s « Cognitive Catalysts: Reinventing Enterprises and Experiences With Artificial Intelligence » divided chief marketing officers into three groups of respondents:

  • Reinventors are AI-enabled with significant future investment,
  • Tacticians are AI-enabled with minimal future investment
  • and Aspirationals are planning their first AI-enabled investment.

In the next two years, 63% of reinventors, 48% of tacticians and 70% of aspirationals plan to implement AI technologies to help reinvent the customer experience, demonstrating that an AI implementation needs to start at the executive level and work its way down to the user base.

By then, there should be a substantial increase in use cases for AI customer service — not just in the product servicing sense, but also in the marketing and sales stages of the customer experience. « Buyers expect something different these days; they come in much more educated, » said Dana Hamerschlag, chief product officer at sales consultancy Miller Heiman Group. « The trick and challenge around AI is how do you leverage this powerful machine to tell you that process, rather than just give you the outcome data. »

The significance of gaining an edge on the customer extends to marketing, too, with a CRM AI strategy that can solve prospecting concerns. According to the Bluewolf’s annual report, 33% of marketing organizations that are increasing AI capabilities within the next year expect the technology to have the greatest impact on the ability to qualify prospects. « You need to enter a conversation with a customer understanding their context, » Hamerschlag advised. « You need to be informed and, with AI, not only [of] who they are but what they have looked at, what they are reading on my site, what emails they have opened. »

Technology based on strategy

The emphasis on customer experience has provided an outlet for AI’s potential. Companies are beginning to explore ways that a CRM AI strategy and the subsequent technologies can help improve customer service and experience.

Personalized photo books company Chatbooks Inc. helps customers convert photos on their phone or tablet into physical photo albums. It uses customer service reps to help customers complete the process and started implementing chatbots to streamline the customer service process. « It’s important that the customer service team is there when customers need them, » said Angel Brockbank, director of customer experience at Chatbooks, based in Provo, Utah.

The initial chatbot established by Chatbooks, created using Helpshift, a San Francisco-based customer service platform, helps customers create an account and input basic information like name and email. Brockbank said the company has an AI strategy in place and will be implementing another chatbot to help direct customer inquiries to the correct chat agent. « We haven’t done that yet, » she acknowledged, « but it will be helpful and useful for our team. »

This blending of product and experience has created an important need for AI technologies, according to Mika Yamamoto, chief digital marketing officer at SAP. « The technology is only as good as the strategy that goes with it, » Yamamoto said. « Companies have to understand how they want to show up for their customers and what type of customer engagement or experience they’re trying to enable. »

One of the impediments to implementing AI is employee adoption, according to a recent Forrester survey. Among CRM professionals, 28% said that one of the largest challenges to improving CRM last year was gaining user acceptance of new technologies, compared to 20% in 2015, a 40% increase. However, the CRM professionals thought it was easier working with IT to adopt new technologies last year (19%) than it was in 2015 (31%), a near 40% drop.

Still, the increased importance of the customer experience and knowing the customer is the main objective driving an AI strategy and the departmental changes that requires. In the Forrester survey, 64% of CRM professionals said creating a single view of customer data and information is the largest challenge they face when improving CRM capabilities, up from 47% in 2015.

BI0618_AI-impact

Click here to access TechTarget’s publication

Insurance Fraud Report 2019

Publié le par hanswillertbleuazurconsultingeu

Let’s start with some numbers. In this 2019 Insurance Fraud survey, loss ratios were 73% in the US. On average, 10% of the incurred losses were related to fraud, resulting in losses of $34 billion per year.

By actively fighting fraud we can improve these ratios and our customers’ experience. It’s time to take our anti-fraud efforts to a higher level. To effectively fight fraud, a company needs support and commitment throughout the organization, from top management to customer service. Detecting fraudulent claims is important. However, it can’t be the only priority. Insurance carriers must also focus on portfolio quality instead of quantity or volume.

It all comes down to profitable portfolio growth. Why should honest customers have to bear the risks brought in by others? In the end, our entire society suffers from fraud. We’re all paying higher premiums to cover for the dishonest. Things don’t change overnight, but an effective industry-wide fraud approach will result in healthy portfolios for insurers and fair insurance premiums for customers. You can call this honest insurance.

The Insurance Fraud Survey was conducted

  • to gain a better understanding of the current market state,
  • the challenges insurers must overcome
  • and the maturity level of the industry regarding insurance fraud.

This report is a follow up to the Insurance Fraud & Digital Transformation Survey published in 2016. Fraudsters are constantly innovating, so it is important to continuously monitor developments. Today you are reading the latest update on insurance fraud. For some topics the results of this survey are compared to those from the 2016 study.

This report explores global fraud trends in P&C insurance. This research addresses

  • challenges,
  • different approaches,
  • engagement,
  • priority,
  • maturity
  • and data sharing.

It provides insights for online presence, mobile apps, visual screening technology, telematics and predictive analytics.

Fraud-Fighting-Culture

Fraudsters are getting smarter in their attempts to stay under their insurer’s radar. They are often one step ahead of the fraud investigator. As a result, money flows to the wrong people. Of course, these fraudulent claims payments have a negative effect on loss ratio and insurance premiums. Therefore, regulators in many countries around the globe created anti-fraud plans and fraud awareness campaigns. Several industry associations have also issued guidelines and proposed preventive measures to help insurers and their customers.

Fraud1

Engagement between Departments

Fraud affects the entire industry, and fighting it pays off. US insurers say that fraud has climbed over 60% over the last three years. Meanwhile, the total savings of proven fraud cases exceeded $116 million. Insurers are seeing an increase in fraudulent cases and believe awareness and cooperation between departments is key to stopping this costly problem.

Fraud2

Weapons to Fight Fraud

Companies like Google, Spotify and Uber all deliver personalized products or services. Data is the engine of it all. The more you know, the better you can serve your customers. This also holds true for the insurance industry. Knowing your customer is very important, and with lots of data, insurers now know them even better. You’d think in today’s fast digital age, fighting fraud would be an automated task.

That’s not the case. Many companies still rely on their staff instead of automated fraud solutions. 67% of the survey respondents state that their company fights fraud based on the gut feeling of their claim adjusters. There is little or no change when compared to 2016.

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Data, Data, Data …

In the fight against fraud, insurance carriers face numerous challenges – many related to data. Compared to the 2016 survey results, there have been minor, yet important developments. Regulations around privacy and security have become stricter and clearer.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is only one example of centralized rules being pushed from a governmental level. Laws like this improve clarity on what data can be used, how it may be leveraged, and for what purposes.

Indicating risks or detecting fraud is difficult when the quality of internal data is subpar. However, it is also a growing pain when trying to enhance the customer experience. To improve customer experience, internal data needs to be accurate.

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Benefits of Using Fraud Detection Software

Fighting fraud can be a time-consuming and error-prone process, especially when done manually. This approach is often based on the knowledge of claims adjustors. But what if that knowledge leaves the company? The influence of bias or prejudice when investigating fraud also comes into play.

With well-organized and automated risk analysis and fraud detection, the chances of fraudsters slipping into the portfolio are diminished significantly. This is the common belief among 42% of insurers. And applications can be processed even faster. Straightthrough processing or touchless claims handling improves customer experience, and thus customer satisfaction. The survey reported 61% of insurers currently work with fraud detection software to improve realtime fraud detection.

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Click here to access FRISS’ detailed Report