For many what I’ve described may be called an omni-channel strategy – I just call it “how to run a modern business that will
still be around in 5 years”
Martin Dowson,
Customer Led Design, ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND
Question 1:
1. How do you go about creating and adopting a mobile first strategy?
Peter Fisher,
Former Interim Customer Experience Manager,
PREMIUM CREDIT
Many organisations developed customer portals and interfaces before mobile was a key channel. As such these portals and interfaces are often not optimised for mobile, even though the majority of customer interactions for many sectors now are via mobile devices. To adopt a mobile first strategy, organisations need a dual approach: Firstly to review existing interfaces and reengineer where necessary, and secondly to start with the mobile channel for all future developments.
Martin Dowson,
Customer Led Design,
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND
Understand why you are even talking about mobile first in the first place:
- Is this about your whole business deploying everything into mobile first?
- Is this about having a design principle that everything you design must first of all work on mobile?
These are two subtly but importantly different motivations.
Understand what your customers actually need from you across different touch points. This may not be necessary for every business. It may also not be necessary to deliver to mobile first as long as all your designs are responsive. It may be restrictive in terms of delivering the full interactions your customers require to design for mobile first.
Basically make sure you have a customer need, a design, delivery and operational need for this.
Articulate that – and this is your route to creating and gaining adoption for the strategy.
Renee Racine-Kinnear
Vice President, Digital Customer Experience,
INDIGO
The first step for me is always to understand the customer’s expectation and to let that drive the strategy. What we need to get to is this: How will the mobile site be used, by who and in what context? What are the essential features of the mobile experience? In what ways might we go beyond essential and into the territory of “awesome”?
Being able to answer these questions for mobile (as well as each breakpoint upward) should ensure we’re not degrading the experience as screen sizes get smaller, rather matching the experience to the needs of the user in context to the device.
Question 2:
How do you use omnichannel strategies to enhance your customer’s experience at every touchpoint?
Peter Fisher
Former Interim Customer Experience Manager
PREMIUM CREDIT
The key element here is to understand the channels your customers are using and would prefer to use. This can only be established via insight and shouldn’t just be via an analysis of what customers are using today. Google analytics will only show you what is on offer now, not what customers would prefer. With that insight, the desired customer experience should be developed whereby customers can seamlessly move between channels such that each touchpoint looks and feels the same.
Martin Dowson,
Customer Led Design,
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND
Terms like Omni/multi channel are used in ways that make it sound like they are the objective. It’s not about an “Omni channel strategy “ – it’s about understanding how, where and when your customers want to interact with you and crucially what you can best deliver as an organisation against that need (that might not be OMNI and it may not even be very multi). It’s about orienting how you design your business around being human centred, design led and sustainably delivered. When you do this then you are naturally designing and delivering experiences that are right for your customers and right for your business.
For many what I’ve described may be called an omnichannel strategy – I just call it “how to run a modern business that will still be around in 5 years”.
Mabel Moya
CRM Leader
ALTIBOX
I prefer to talk about customer strategies instead of omni-channel. The reason for this is because when working omni-channels, you should centralized your customer strategies in a customer-decisioning tool. Think customer first, what is the strategy and them take it to the channels. It is about the customer experience after all but your customer strategy should also be aligned to the business strategy.
Renee Racine-Kinnear
Vice President, Digital Customer Experience
INDIGO
Observing our customers in store showed us specific opportunities to bring digital into the retail channel effectively. Our app makes the lost loyalty card a thing of the past. It also connects the physical product with the richer decision support online by offering a barcode scanning feature. We’re currently at work on a number of omni-channel strategies to further this connection of retail and digital channels including MPOS, digital receipts and harnessing RFID to give recommendations based on multi-channel purchase and browse histories.
Question 3:
How does personalization factor into your overall digital strategy?
Peter Fisher
Former Interim Customer Experience Manager
PREMIUM CREDIT
Customers expect access to their own data and information. Providing information, which is applicable to everyone, will only go part way to delivering against expectations. Linking to back end systems which can deliver the personalisation is key to delivering the very best customer experience.
Martin Dowson
Customer Led Design
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND
The ability to deliver experiences at the level of an “audience of one” will be increasingly important but must be delivered in a balanced way. Personalisation is being used throughout different industries today to drive marketing (or in fact sales) on an increasingly individual and measurable basis. My personal opinion is that this will only go so far before it just gets outright creepy and uncomfortable (if it hasn’t already). However the ability to support conversations with customers about the service they are receiving and to demonstrate that you know your customer – using personalization strategies for this – will be crucial to delivering a more human experience. This contributes to a future thinking company’s overall strategy – clearly. Your digital strategy is to use tech and digital channels to support the company’s overall strategy – unless you are a digital pure play in which case they are likely intertwined and you don’t even talk about digital! Ultimately personalisation will also be important to operational strategies for customer service and sales (through service) in non digital channels too which is why we see many telephony operations aligning with digital ones.
Mabel Moya
CRM Leader
ALTIBOX
Our digital strategy has three pillars: content, personalization and analysis. And on top, cross channel management and omni-channel. Without those pillas or foundation, there is no digital strategy.
Renee Racine-Kinnear
Vice President, Digital Customer Experience
INDIGO
Personalization has been harder to achieve than we expected. While we have an excellent picture of our customer in one channel, our legacy systems are not set up to share that picture across other channels. This is something we are sprinting toward now as we see more of our customers moving between channels.
Question 4:
How are you using digital interaction to drive customer engagement?
Peter Fisher
Former Interim Customer Experience Manager
PREMIUM CREDIT
Digitisation enables a two way process. Not only can organisations deliver relevant information to customers, organisations can generate a higher level of customer engagement and customer experience by optimising the channels. Various channels and techniques can be utilised in this regard but segmentation will be key. Not all customers will want to engage via the same channel – an omni channel approach will deliver an increased customer experience across all segments.
Mabel Moya
CRM Leader
ALTIBOX
In different ways. Altibox is the largest fiber provider in Norway. We distribute TV services as part of it. We are a content distribution platform and therefore we strive to drive customer engagement in all of our digital channels. Social media is one of our much used channels, as well as our TV platform. We have weekly film and entertainment campaigns aim to keep engagement high and these are all distributed digitally.
Renee Racine-Kinnear
Vice President, Digital Customer Experience
INDIGO
We do a number of interesting things with our rewards program that drives engagement (points meter, a responsive rewards centre with 1:1 offers and the ability to earn micro-points by rating your recommendations). That said, I am most proud of the cx programs we have in place to ensure an ongoing two-way dialogue with our customers. We treat them as collaborators / co-designers of our experience. I think this has created an engagement that goes well beyond any single digital feature.
Hear more from these leaders by attending Strategy Institute’s Digital Customer Experience Strategies Summit Europe on 30th June – 1st July, 2016 | 8 Fenchurch Place, Central London, UK.
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