IT's leading role in customer experience

By David Gee on Dec 22, 2014 10:30 AM
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[Blog post] A recipe for a customer-centred ethos.

Creating the ideal customer experience is one of the hot areas of focus right now for organisations who believe it will provide them a competitive advantage.

So what’s the role of the CIO and IT team in helping develop the customer experience? It's clear that there is often a lack of clarity over who owns the ‘customer’ in an organisation. Is it marketing, sales, operations or the customer contact team?

As enterprise is being transformed by digitisation, my view is IT has a key leadership role to play.
Many define customer experience as the sum of all experiences that one has with an organisation. But what is customer experience really all about?

Is it to create a brand-new class of experience or just to eliminate the bad episodes? Is customer experience about reinventing the interactions or eliminating process variation?
Client experience advocate at Deloitte, Geoff Stalley, believes consistency is an important factor.

“The key to great customer experience is consistency and thus the objective for any organisation has to be to embed a way of dealing with customers that provides a consistent, excellent experience," he said.

“Bad experiences are the ones remembered and often communicated on social media or by word of mouth, and when this happens these can outweigh the great experiences by a factor of ten. Thus any activity that removes variations and creates a consistent excellent experience is one that will succeed”, he said.

Walking in the customers’ shoes
Stalley noted that the real challenge is seeing things from the customer’s point of view; try walking in the customers’ shoes to define the experience your organisation could provide.

This journey will help to uncover the gap between the standard processes your organisation adopts today and missing interaction points that would make for a smoother experience.
According to Raj Mendes, the managing director of The Customer Experience, it doesn’t matter how exceptional your experience is on paper "if you can’t execute it consistently - then it’s worth nothing".

To create a truly noteworthy experience, Mendes recommends companies start with customer needs, goals and expectations. This forms the basis for a customer strategy and allows an organisation to be targeted in the way it approaches improving customer experience. Then a business can select the areas in which it wants to be exceptional.  

Who owns the customer? In Australia, often no single job role holds ownership of the customer, meaning the customer is orphaned and neglected.

Tim Sheedy, who helps his Forrester clients design and implement digital and mobile strategies, said “too many Australian businesses de-prioritise customer experience. Many customer experience people I speak to are junior, with little influence or budget.”

Customer experience isn’t a destination, it’s a journey
A journey suggests this is an ongoing odyssey and not a one-off project. Early adopters have changed the fabric of the organisation.

It is not about implementing a new CRM system with some technology bells and whistles.  Stalley said dedicated customer experience programs needed to be embedded into the culture of the organisation.

“This starts with listening to the customer and systematically obtaining feedback from a range of interactions, understanding the good, bad and the ugly at each interaction point, making changes to processes that will improve the experience and then measuring and rewarding the behaviours that matter to customers," he said.

"In essence it’s all about connecting with customers and understanding what they want.”

Stalley cited Zurich Insurance in Europe, which realised that great customer experience actually results in a far better financial outcome for the business.

The company took steps to measure and adjust the customer-facing activities of various teams in the marketplace to lift their financial performance.

Since then, many organisations have recognised that profitable and happy clients are the sweet spot of longevity in the market, and focusing on these dimensions helps companies outperform those that don’t.

Embracing a customer-centric approach
For many in IT, this may sound like marketing mumbo jumbo. How can IT contribute to a customer experience program?

“A good customer experience management program, which delivers actionable feedback at all levels, is really critical to sustaining focus,” Mendes said.

“This needs to be driven by a strong customer strategy which can identify and target initiatives and execute them within the business.

“However unless you embed customer centricity into the underlying culture of the organisation you won’t be able to ensure that the customer stays front of mind. These three elements become the foundation for sustained, customer centric action from all staff.”

IT teams are the best placed to role model this culture change. Our reactions to both internal and external customers need to reflect a customer-centric culture.

IT teams need to see things from the customer’s perspective ourselves. We have to understand what interactions really matter and what we do to support those efforts.

What IT does in terms of providing people, process and technology are the fundamental components of any organisation - they just need to be arranged in a way that provides a great customer experience.

Sheedy pointed out that it is hard to deliver a great customer experience without ensuring a ‘good’ employee experience. Employees need to be enabled to deliver experiences that make sense to the customer with processes and technology aligned to support them.

Case study—Shanghai hot pot
Hai Di Lao is a chain of restaurants serving spicy hotpot soup. Its ethos is to ‘serve the people’, and this starts upon arrival when staff take and remember your name.

When no table is available, cheerful staff will provide you free drinks (wine and beer) as well as snacks. There is free wi-fi and board games to pass the time. Some locations even provide a shoe shine or manicure as a complimentary service. Waiters are given discretion to provide clients extras such a fruit platter or dessert.

In the case of Hai Di Lao, each staff member lives in a free company apartment, is paid well and provided other services, such as a nanny service.

This translates into genuinely happy staff who deliver an incredible customer experience.

Looking from the outside in
This case study is a great example of looking at the dining experience from the shoes of the diner.

What does a diner want when they are waiting for a table? How can we delight the customer?

Build and deliver what the customer wants. If that means working with the regulator to change legislation then that's what needs to be done. The banking sector has demonstrated businesses who push the limits and push the regulations tend to be more successful.

That’s a powerful example and a lesson for every CIO and his IT team. How can we start to look at the world from the outside in and find ways to partner with the business to deliver what’s needed?

Good luck with the journey...

Read more: http://www.itnews.com.au/BlogEntry/398608,its-leading-role-in-customer-experience.aspx#ixzz3NKeN75Bi

Everyone loves a good hack

Is holding a 'hackathon' a good way to drive innovation inside your business?

David Gee (CIO) on 12 December, 2014 09:32

In this age of cyber security concern, it is amusing that the word “hack” has entered our lexicon. The word has never had a positive connotation and in my view, it’s always a negative. In golf parlance, a “hacker” is not a description that anyone wants to be labeled with.

Wikipedia defines a hack as an inelegant but effective solution to a computing problem.

From the notion that this is about breaking into a computer network, through to the Facebook programming language – there are various meanings attributed and all appear not to be favourable.

But several large enterprises are jumping on the hacking bandwagon, particularly financial services firms, holding their own “hackathons” to create new, innovative apps and solve issues that plague their businesses.

Westpac held a hackathon at its recently opened ‘Hive’ innovation centre. National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank (CBA) have also held hackathon events.

I attended the CBA hackathon that was held at the University of New South Wales, where 50 students spent two and a half days hacking retail technology to create a product that would provide a seamless experience for retailers and customers.

The event was very well run and I was immediately impressed with its focus and the capability of the students who were participating.

We can be cynical and say this is all about getting something for nothing, but actually CBA had one of its executives provided great context around innovations in retail industries. He used examples from retailers Hointer, John Lewis, C&A, and Shoes of Prey.

Hointer’s jeans hang down from the roof of its stores and are scanned and sent down chutes into the customer’s assigned change room. This speeds up the process of buying jeans and improves the overall experience for the customer.

The second example, Shoes of Prey, is an online business that enables consumers to custom design shoes – a great example of a micro segment customisation.

You could sense that the audience of students were impressed with the innovative case studies that were shown and there were audible gasps.

Another CBA exec explained the bank’s ‘Albert and Leo’ purpose-built tablet devices for payments. These devices run CBA’s Pi platform, which features an app store that would house the most successful apps created during the hackathon.

Essentially, the teams had an open license to tackle whatever problem they desired. There was a bounty cash prize on offer for the best app that came out of the four day event and also an internship up for grabs.

Winners and losers

It is a cliché but I’m not sure that there are losers in this instance, those who toil away for several days and their product doesn’t get recognised.

But there are winners of course, lucky teams of developers who create something truly innovative.

A group called CrowdSauce won the CBA UNSW Hackathon with an app for self payment that incorporated user ratings. This was an interactive menu that you use at a restaurant to self order and pay while also seeing what other diners are ordering.

 

I like the social aspect of this, although it may sound creepy and in certain pubs to become a talking point of what you are eating or drinking (perhaps a replacement for dating apps?)

The team – Isharn Varshney, Sohaib Mushtaq and Pavs Raju – delivered a validated solution and business model with evidence of a prototype.

A hackathon is no marathon

Hackathons are essentially ‘sprints’, and are about creating a minimum viable product.

YouTube stars, Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari from the Institute of Design at Stanford created a ‘named pulse’ for a project. This app displays news from multiple RSS feeds in one page using a tile interface.

Well, guess what? It was purchased by LinkedIn for US$90 million. Legend has it that the students created the app in five to six weeks.

The other key success attribute when creating innovative technology is your ability to be nimble and avoid hierarchy. So the size of your team matters.

It is interesting to note that McKinsey consultants have teams of 4 or 5 as does the US Navy Seals. Once a team is greater than 5 or 6 then coordination becomes the focus not the work.

Professor Bob Sutton from Stanford refers to the work by coincidently named Richard (Hackman) at Harvard. In short, Hackman’s rule is that ‘big teams suck’.

I think, he’s right. It gets harder as you add more members to the team and like it or not the communication becomes harder and roles become more splintered.

Let me close by noting that a ‘hack writer’ is a person who is paid to write quick inferior articles. Not that I resemble this!

But in all seriousness, is a hackathon something that CIOs should organising to create innovation inside their businesses? My belief is that hackathons are just one tool that can be used to garner ideas especially from an external group.

For the CIO, there are many other approaches to injecting innovation, including innovating with external partners, engaging a startup accelerator to run a program for you or building an innovation lab. The list goes on.

Hackathons are just one piece of the puzzle and whether or not they will continue to be used by corporates to create innovative products and services remains to be seen.

Follow the ‘yellow brick road’ to innovation

Just like members of the travelling party in the classic 1939 film, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, CIOs need some ‘courage, heart, and brains’ on the epic journey to achieving true innovation, says David Gee

David Gee (CIO) on 19 November, 2014

 

Organisations across all industries are undergoing technology-led transformations. More than ever, CIOs need to reflect and ask themselves one question: What is my value to the business?

Most us of will answer this question by saying that we are driving strategic projects which deliver valuable products and services that help our organisations run more effectively.

This is certainly ‘valued’ but it’s only part of what is expected of you. It gives you table stakes, but it’s an innovative CIO who is really respected by the business.

An innovative CIO can deliver on both the technology and operational aspects of a transformation project. At the same, they have the business knowledge and technology savvy to understand what innovations will make a difference in their organisations.

A great CIO will be able to have the right balance of ‘discovery and delivery’ skills, what Dr Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center, describes as the innovator’s DNA. A few years ago, while a professor at Insead, Dr Gregersen was running an innovation program for several CIOs in Europe. In this program, he used a large dataset of the behaviour of senior management in large corporations.

A 360 degree survey of your manager, peers and staff was the foundation to provide insights and your rating versus the database of senior executives from enterprises around the world.

This was not that different to other surveys that most managers are involved in, except for the focus was on specific behaviours relating to innovation.

Dr Gregersen later published his book entitled the ‘The Innovator’s DNA’, which I recommend you read for further insights on the subject.

The Wizard of Oz

In the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions travelled down the yellow brick road to The Emerald City, seeking three items from the wizard. The cowardly lion wanted courage, the tin man a heart, and the scarecrow a brain.

Believe it or not, we CIOs need an injection of ‘courage, heart and brains’ to take the journey to the next level. Simply, we need to demonstrate new behaviours to succeed in business.

Dr Gregerson’s study talks about the following four attributes required to be an innovator.

1. Questioning. Learn to constantly ask disruptive questions. Being curious and not settling will allow you to constantly challenge the status quo.

2. Observing. The best innovators are just also great observers. They look broadly at customers, other companies outside of their own industry and whatever takes their broad interest.

What interests an innovative CIO can be and should be diverse and not necessarily mainstream. New patterns can be often found by looking at unrelated areas.

3. Networking. Work your internal and external networks. It is interesting to think about the concept of six degrees of separation, which has been calculated to be actually less at a number of five.

Innovators do this to gain new perspectives and learn new things. In contrast, a ‘delivery-focused CIO’ would do this only for career management reasons or to access a specific resource for a key task.

4. Experimenting. Innovators are willing to try new things (to live in new countries, work in many diverse industries). They also like to take things apart and deconstruct concepts. They just understand that pilots are really to learn and test ideas, hence they are not afraid to fail.

Finally to tie this all together, the innovator needs to apply associational thinking to connect different and disparate ideas. These collections of ideas may not have immediate value but when combined with another different notion, can provide a breakthrough idea.

Simple right? Just four behaviours plus some willingness to take some risks and synthesise the thinking process will place you on the right road.

So what’s stopping you from making progress on this front? Your boss? The staff who work for you? Your peers?

Likely they all play a part, but the largest barrier is you. Being an innovative CIO requires an environment that is supportive but you will ultimately provide the major obstacle to making a change.

Good luck with your journey to The Emerald City.

David Gee is the former CIO of CUA where he recently completed a core banking transformation. He has more than 18 years' experience as a CIO, and was also previously director at KPMG Consulting. Connect with David on LinkedIn.