The clock never tires; it ticks faster by the hour in a tech world where newer innovations render pathbreaking achievements of the not-so-distant past the norm.
For example, notifying Susan of the newest arrivals at Prada and Jack of those at Bergdorf as they enter Saks Fifth Avenue was once considered innovative. Today’s algorithms do a lot more work, stitching together even more context to determine if Susan and Jack are moving in together. Or, given their common interest in Italian food, the time of day and a dozen other things, maybe they’re heading toward Armani/Ristorante and need the chef’s menu. This is cool, but what if Susan and Jack begin to wonder, “If something I don’t pay for directly can do all of these things, then what should the banker I invest in be doing for me?” Do bankers have a convincing answer?
Personalization at scale, delivering positive experiences and steering customers toward deeper engagements that lead to a higher share of wallet is the need of the hour—even more so in verticals where customers stay invested longer.
Are BFSI and telcos chalk and cheese?
While banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and telecommunications companies (“telcos”) have different business priorities, when seen from the customer lifecycle, technical maturity and marketing technology (martech) complexity angles, they are not that different. These are large enterprises offering long-term services to their customers—engagements can easily span several years, if not decades. These enterprises have evolved over time, have stood witness to many tech revolutions (e.g., big data, digital, the cloud), and have rich representation from all of these waves in their IT ecosystem.
Unlike verticals, where lack of data is a big handicap to informed decision making, these enterprises are soaked in data but are largely constrained in their freedom to unleash the full potential due to privacy/consent regulations. They both have millions of customers, hundreds of integrations and billions of events spread across transactional and engagement axes. They are both challenged by newer players, be that neobanks or digital VoIP vendors and risk running into an imminent existential crisis unless they reinvest themselves in their customers’ interests and offer them the most relevant experiences.
Outcome-Driven Mindset
Personalization holds the key to relevance, and enterprises are well aware of that. The most important question is whether their personalization initiatives are outcome-driven or experience-driven. To be successful today, enterprises need to go beyond instant gratification.
Pick a telco company or bank—they likely have a string of models to offer tailored experiences by discovering and aligning to their customers’ preferred channels, time for contact, language and even their preferred products. But do they have a sufficient understanding of the purpose and objectives of every single customer? If they did, why is the phrase “segment of one” so common but not “purpose of one?” Outcomes are not created by chance; they are earned.
The Journey Route
Enterprises need to look beyond customer transactions and connect to the driving force that is holding them onto the brand. What drives each interaction? Rather than looking at customer activities as a loose combination of unrelated events, enterprises need to take a quantitative approach and sequence the events by tying them along the purpose axis.
Over the past week, say Alice has checked for home loans on a bank website, liked the new credit card promotion on the bank’s Facebook page, re-tweeted the bank’s special home loan offer for public servants, downloaded the banking app and paid the utility bills. It’s messy to group all of these interactions over the recency axis and then try to infer the next-best recommendation for Alice.
Martech of the future should be able to recognize the two strands here—one along the home loan axis and another along credit cards—run through her current portfolio, past engagements, collective interactions with the bank over the last few months and then enumerate all the distinct purposes for which Alice is interacting with the bank and pull them up.
This is called “journey discovery,” a systematic mapping of all of a customer’s engagements—including actions, inactions and silence—grouped over smaller purpose axes, spread along the time axis and then nurtured by aligning them with the enterprise’s business objectives.
How To Walk the Journey Talk
- Map the customer journey. Get to a whiteboard or leverage a good journey mapping tool to map all of the experiences, engagements, interactions, emotions, etc., a customer may experience at various touchpoints in the customer lifecycle. Try to map the journeys like the branches of a tree, where each branch is quite detailed and has its own purpose, yet they all stem from a larger objective rooted in the current lifecycle of a customer.
- Stitch all transactions, events and engagements across multiple touchpoints and try to cluster them along the purpose axis. Journey discovery demands sufficient use of machine learning, deep learning and heuristics alongside proficient business know-how, as one needs to correlate seemingly different events spread over time and channels with deeply interwoven purposes.
- Nudge each of the micro-journeys toward the next milestones on their respective journeys. This is called “journey orchestration.” In a truly customer-centric approach, customer purposes are respected at face value and not prioritized based on enterprise objectives or profitability.
When nudges are aligned with customers’ purposes, they translate into desired business outcomes. Customer journey management helps large enterprises, such as BFSI and telcos, realize outcome-driven personalization. Recommendations are provided as long-term prescriptions tailored to help customers meet each of their purposes while aligning with the larger business objectives of the enterprise—not the other way around.
This article was originally published here.
