Innovating customer experience — Advice from Hotels.com, SwissRe, Wells Fargo, and Post Office execs
Customer experience is predicted to overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator. In fact, 89% of companies are expecting to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience by 2020 (Gartner). We were joined a rich panel of execs to discuss this massive shift and how each company is proactively taking steps to adjust and compete based on customer experience — from managing internal culture to data collaboration to working with startups.
Enterprise Innovation Forum — March 2019
- Hotels.com — Adam Jay, President, Hotels.com
- SwissRe Life Capital — Pravina Ladva, Chief Technology & Operations Officer
- Wells Fargo — Hélène Alunni-Botteri, SVP, Innovation Group
- Post Office — Henk Van Hulle, Managing Director, Group Digital & Innovation
- HeadSpin — Laurent Cordier, Chief Revenue Officer
- The Innovator — Jennifer L. Schenker, Founder and Editor-in-Chief
- Leading Edge Forum — Spencer Izard, Research & Advisory
#1 Internal culture — Embrace true design thinking
The panelists all agreed that culture is ground zero. “Agile” can’t simply be thrown around as a buzzword — it has to become real within the internal corporate culture to match the speed and creativity required to innovate customer experience.
So what are some practical steps for corporates to promote innovative thinking? First, try to make the tie to business objective as real as possible for teams on the ground — are they really connected to the tangible impact of their work? Second, “leave the mothership.” Do everything you can to promote a mindset change. For example, open up working spaces, clean off desks, and find faster cloud-based deployment options. As one panelist provocatively put it: “be like Amazon.” A third suggestion was to put everything on 90 day cycles — from OKR (Objectives and Key Results) goal systems to help drive team agility to putting budgets on a 90-day rolling (from yearly) to help fund new initiatives faster.
#2 Data can be your friend — Make sure to break down organizational silos
Only 11% of customer impacting decisions are currently backed with data insights (HBR). According to panelists, it’s not a lack of access — the data is there. With old legacy solutions, data is often duplicated and dispersed across systems. Consolidating it is painful but corporates are solving for this by replacing multiple tools with newer, more comprehensive cloud data platforms that offer a holistic view of customer experience. Once the data is in hand, the more fundamental challenge is actually around organizational alignment and using the data at a deep level across departments. All the panelists agreed that implementing design thinking is only effective if it breaks through business unit silos, is informed by shared data, and there’s alignment to a performance objective. Sometimes the hardest part is simply figuring out the starting point — what is the problem(s) you need to solve for? What is the data saying? Most importantly, is everyone from development to product to QA aligned on the prioritization of the solutions? Our startup panelist HeadSpin (a mobile experience and testing platform) says that it finds the value of its platform goes far beyond helping different teams (QA, dev, product) assess application performance. In fact, the platform’s higher order value is putting unified customer experience data in front of multiple departments to drive consensus and the product road map. Impacting customer experience actually starts with solid data in concert with culture. Start there and AI, personalization, and other more sophisticated data-driven initiatives follow suit.
#3 Startups — Work with them (just make sure not to smother them)
All the panelists agreed that successful partnership with startups is essential for new, fresh perspectives that help drive both innovative internal culture and innovative customer experiences. The challenge (whether you acquiring or partnering with a startup) is to not create a “them” versus “us” dynamic. Reconciling two different cultures sometimes results in a smothering of the startup’s speed and the fundamental value they bring. Don’t try to blend them in, but don’t leave them too separate. Technology should not be left in the garage. You want to bring the startups into the main house as a unique part of the team and showcase the innovation. Ultimately you hope is for cross-pollination of ideas. As one panelist put it, “Start a fire and suddenly the whole forest is on fire.”
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