Thought Leadership

This article was originally published in the Spring 2018 edition of Silicon Slopes Magazine.

For years, Silicon Valley has served as the standard for the tech industry. Its innovations have fundamentally and forever changed the ways we store data, connect with peers, track our customers, call a cab, and receive news. And while success breeds success, it also invites exorbitant costs of living, traffic congestion, and ballooning salaries.

For this reason, many startups, venture capitalists, and top talent have found homes in non-coastal locales where the lifestyle is inviting, and cities put out big welcome mats in the form of tax breaks and eager workers. For up-and-coming technology hubs, “becoming the next Silicon Valley” is not a misguided goal, but I’m not certain it’s an ideal aspiration either.

Our local tech boom along the I-15 corridor has been seismic. Well-known drivers of our up-to-now success include exceptional quality of life in the mountains, a supportive business community, and a local pool of technical talent from the surrounding universities make this an extremely fertile ecosystem for Utah-bred startups.

There are three more factors that don’t get as much air time, but in my outsider’s opinion, are just as critical.

Invested Investors

We still hear a lot of chatter from both insiders and outsiders about the lack of large VC firms hindering our growth. As someone who’s played that game, I have a different perspective. I think Utah companies actually have a unique advantage in a rare breed of local funders who have both the structure and mindset that allows them to invest in companies at different stages of growth. These “invested investors” mean that entrepreneurs spend much less effort trying to fit into someone else’s boxes, and more time building products and organizations that work.

Everybody Wins

The local business ecosystem possesses an ideal balance of humility and ambition, and a general willingness to help others. A climate of collaborative competition, where motivation and support are both in play, is a much more productive environment to grow a successful business. A naturally-occurring, recognizable entrepreneurial culture like this simply can’t be manufactured.

Homogenous Diversity

Part of the reason we’re such a collaborative bunch is that we get each other. Our business leaders have shared experiences that breed both connection and openness to new people and ideas. And while we’ve gotten a lot of mileage of out of it so far, this sameness can also limit us. The next big opportunity for Utah’s entrepreneur and tech community is to harness that openness to seek out people who are different than us — to create environments that attract the unfamiliar and unexpected. This type of outside-in diversity is what fuels that creative spark and leads to next-level innovation.

Utah shouldn’t want to birth the next Twitter. There was a time and a place for that kind of leap, and it’s already been done. This next phase of business-building will be a time where all new companies are technology ventures. And with a rich heritage of foundational tech, paired with our unique strengths and opportunities, we’re more than ready to take the next step that’s all our own. Yes, Silicon Valley will always have wisdom to teach, but its path isn’t ours. And that’s a good thing.

Sometimes CX programs simply need to be saved.

Whether insights seemingly dry up, executive leadership changes, or things simply feel “stale,” sometimes companies need to hit the “reset button” on their CX programs. And more often than not, it’s because businesses get distracted by elements that ultimately do not support their goals.

I don’t need to explain what a distraction is (e.g., your co-worker who insists on showing you videos of his children every five minutes). In CX, they’re no different. Anything that detracts focus from your business objectives and delivering on your brand promise is detrimental to your program’s success. Ultimately, a CX program is about understanding what your customers — and employees — are telling you and focusing on what matters most to them.

If you’re getting distracted from this essential mission, it’s time to shift focus. The path to CX success is riddled with potential pitfalls, and just like Superman navigates Metropolis’ many traps, today’s CX experts should be aware of looming dangers and how to avoid them.

Don’t Get Distracted, Get Focused

For CX in particular, it’s easy to be distracted by NPS, OSAT, and other CX metrics. It’s even easier to become distracted by the sheer amount of data available to today’s organizations. There is of course value in being able to trust your technology, and brands should feel confident about the integrity of their data and the accuracy of reporting. However, many brands are unable to differentiate between metrics and real-world consumer desires and behaviors.

Dedicating too much energy to metrics creates a decision-making environment where stakeholders overemphasize numbers and stop paying attention to emerging trends that positively impact customer and/or employee experiences. In their attempts to be the superheroes who can save the world, CX champions often struggle to support key business objectives.

While some brands cannot dedicate team members to CX research just yet, simple technology integrations make it easier to get on the same page with consumers now. Solutions exist to source and manage important customer feedback, and the most sophisticated can do this both quantitatively and qualitatively. These technologies can also incorporate employee voices to generate a holistic understanding of what an ideal customer experience looks and feels like.

The Benefits of Being a Customer-Centric Organization

There are many benefits to adopting a customer-centric approach to business operations, but the biggest is the ability to pivot and grow with target audiences.

For a multitude of reasons, most companies will come to a crossroads with their CX programs. However, only brands that have committed to learning more about customers and their desired experiences will know when it’s actually the right time for change. If a score stagnates, it’s simply a sign to focus your efforts on things that truly impact the customer experience — not just the score.

Learning more about customers helps stakeholders realign their roadmaps to both address lingering CX concerns and improve outcomes. For example, a brand may be funneling too many resources to mobile application development when in reality, talking to customers reveals that improvements to payments/returns would make a more positive, immediate impact. Rather than getting caught up in its own preconceived notions of what defines a strong CX, this brand would be better off hearing directly from its customers.

Direct customer feedback leads naturally to a blended, productive relationship between metrics and customer behavior information. An organization’s existing KPIs may be what’s holding back its CX program, as these metrics are measured against what was once thought to be true of consumers. In 2018, brands need to revisit their KPIs and allow modern consumer opinions to speak louder than existing operations.

The more comprehensive the review of one’s CX program, the easier it is to identify elements that do not support, and actually distract from, true business goals. And when brands can do this, they open themselves up to a world of new opportunities that trickle down to improvements for customers and employees.

And what superpower is better than that?

As I have discussed in previous posts, the findings from our 2018 CX Trends Report highlighted several misconceptions brands have about their customers. These disconnects show up in different ways, including memorability of experiences or the creepiness of personalization efforts. In this post, I would like to discuss the false assumptions many brands make about Millennials.

It’s safe to say that Millennials (born 1981-1997) have been the subject of a lot of debate and generalizations by brands. It is incredibly common to see articles on their buying preferences and the way they are changing and even killing some industries on a regular basis. Organizations — many begrudgingly — have made changes in an attempt to connect with this generation, but our findings reveal that there are a few myths they have about Millennials that could be misdirecting their attempts.

Myth #1: Millennials don’t think twice about sharing personal data.

Brands tend to believe that Millennials are more excited about new technology than older generations, with few privacy concerns and no hesitation to give away personal information. In fact, the opposite is true: Older generations report fewer creepy experiences from brands, while Millennials report the highest (at 22%, compared to 11% for the Silent Generation and 13% for Baby Boomers).

Myth #2: Millennials are all-digital.

The next misconception brands seem to hold is that Millennials are exclusively digital, preferring to conduct all of their personal and commercial interactions from their mobile devices. Our research finds that there’s a lot more to the story — in fact, Millennials are true omnichannel consumers who find value in shopping online, through mobile apps, and in physical locations. For example, 32% of Millennials rank the ability to buy online and then pick up in store as very valuable, and 29% rank physical locations for e-tailers like Amazon as very important.

Myth #3: Millennials are unique in wanting brands to be aligned with their causes.

While there’s a lot of chatter about Millennials nearly forcing brands to advocate for their specific causes, the data tells a more complex truth. Yes, 58% of Millennials do feel that it is important or very important that brands they support invest in causes near and dear to them — but so do other generations. About 55% of Gen Xers and 51% of Baby Boomers said the same thing.

When it comes down to it, it’s vital that brands understand that Millennials are not all they’ve assumed. To combat misunderstandings, organizations should be transparent in how they use or Millennial data, offer choices in how to engage with the brand, and pay attention to the causes that inspire them without forgetting the basics like price, ease, and functionality.

To learn more about the latest findings in customer experience, download our 2018 CX Trends Report!

In my last post, I discussed findings from Pearl-Plaza’s 2018 CX Trends Report. In this annual study, we explore brand/consumer perspectives on various areas of the customer experience, which allows us to identify where there is alignment as well as disconnects in perception and expectations.

One area where we saw a significant disconnect was around personalization efforts and the requisite need brands have to mine and hoard their customers’ personal details and preferences. While brands brazenly claim they’re asking for these private bits “in an effort to improve the customer experience,” consumers aren’t so sure they’re benefiting from the exchange. In this year’s study we asked consumers and brands to tell us whether these efforts made them feel “cared for” as brands claim, or whether the result instead makes them feel “creepy.”  We put a slight twist on the questions to brands, asking on which end of the spectrum they feel their own actions lie, and the answers were fascinating.

A whopping 75% of consumers find most forms of personalization to be at least somewhat creepy, and 25% found these efforts to be very creepy. Surprisingly, 40% of brands admitted that some of their efforts were creepy, with 10% admitting they are very creepy. Kind of scary.

So what are some examples of “creepy” personalization efforts? Well, you don’t need to rely on second-hand interpretations because true to Pearl-Plaza’s passion for providing forums where customers can have real conversations about their experiences, we asked several open-ended questions to understand what creepy sounds like in their words:    

• “[The experience] was intrusive and too personal, and also presumptive about me and my wants and likes.
• “I didn’t like being emailed about a product I had left in a cart on a website, or emailed about products I have recently searched. Also, I do not like targeted ads on websites. It feels like I’m being stalked.”
• “[The brand] wanted me to enable/install the app to get a great in-store experience, but of course it ALSO asked for permissions to [access] my contacts, location, emails, etc. NO WAY.”
• “I had an ex-boyfriend that lived beside a restaurant. I would sometimes take pictures of his cat. Google would immediately suggest that I upload those pictures to Google and review my experience at that restaurant.”

These comments helped us understand two things. First, consumers are keen to the exchange inequity. And second, the biggest violation occurs when there’s a crossover between the physical and digital worlds, like when they think Facebook or Instagram are listening to and then benefiting (a la targeted marketing) to their conversations.

Customers are creeped out and brands know they’re being creepy. So what? As luck would have it, our study went one step further and asked consumers not just how they felt about personalization attempts, but also what action they took when they veer into creepy. The results: 20% will leave, 22% will begin looking for another brand to serve their needs, and 31% of consumers will trash talk a brand after a creepy experience. So while the initial sting of the loss of business may not feel too painful, the compounding damage to a brand’s reputation may result in a compounding effect — kind of like throwing a stone into a pond. The damage continues to echo.    

At the end of the day, you want to build a relationship with your customers, not creep them out. The balance is tricky, but understanding what your customers truly value — what elements transform a creepy experience into one of real value — is worth the effort.  

To learn more, download the full 2018 CX Trends Report!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been heralded by many organisations as the answer to a myriad of business tasks, such as data analysis, stock management and customer service. Behind the scenes, AI is being used to drive automation and efficiencies that make businesses more responsive to customers in relevant ways to augment staffs’ abilities, and empower them to have more personalized and helpful interactions. AI is also being harnessed to improve the customer experience by intelligently listening and responding to customer feedback and making connections that would most likely elude a human.

In recent years, brands have started to take the journey approach they’ve applied to customers — viewing their interactions as a series of distinct, yet connected experiences – and applying it to employees. Employees sit at the intersection of your business and your customers’ experiences, and thus have a unique perspective on what’s working, what’s not, and most importantly, why.  AI can be utilised to ask employees for their perspective at key moments, for example, immediately after they’ve resolved a customer concern to support in improving overall customer experience.

Learning from the customer journey

Customer demands continually change, with shifting expectations and competitors creating new barometers, metrics and points of comparison each and every day. Nearly all brands survey customers about their experiences, and to a widely varying extent, use that intelligence to make improvements. While this myopic approach may have worked in the past, it will not continue to work in the future. Consumers interact with increasingly sophisticated technologies through multiple channels on a daily basis, and in the process, gain increased expectations of timeliness, personalisation and ease.  For example, dating site apps provide user-friendly, intuitive experiences, whilst many banks offer mobile banking to enable customers to lot into a personalised mobile app and move money with scan of their fingerprint. This means when a customer interacts with a brand and the experience is perceived as more difficult or even archaic in their use of technology, their view of the laggard brand will be tainted. Despite its clear benefits, only one in five businesses across the globe, out of 3,000 surveyed by MIT Sloan Management Review, have adopted some form of AI in their operations. Those brands that readily adopt AI will have a vast range of data at their fingertips and will be able to make critical business decisions much more easily and provide experiences that meet customers’ continually changing expectations.

Forward looking brands are already turning to AI to drive automation and augment human interactions to be more responsive to customers in relevant ways. For example, AI technologies embedded in customer experience feedback can aide in channelling customers to the “right” customer service agent with the suitable emotional and professional background, armed with the customers’ past and recent history, as well as recommendations on how to best engage. Emerging “whisper bots” may serve as virtual real time counsellors, analysing a customer’s words and tone, and then providing coaching to front line staff in the moment of interaction.

Empowering employees with AI

Leveraging AI to empower your employees is one important application of this technology. Wise brands are also harnessing AI to bring employees even deeper into the customer experiences. Specifically, it can be used to prompt follow up questions within an employee and customer experience feedback programme, keying in on what the employee is saying, analyse the data individually, and in aggregate, and then report this intelligence to the relevant people and places across the business who can make changes and key into opportunities. For example, if the AI senses a spike in employees mentioning that customers are calling in with questions on how to operate a product and finding that the problem stems from a part that’s malfunctioning, information can be automatically routed to product, marketing and customer care. Not only does this address customer satisfaction and efficiency issues, employees experience less frustration and a higher level of satisfaction in their own jobs.

The key is harnessing AI across a full range of listening, analysis and reporting processes – in an always-on, systematic fashion – to what employees have to say about both their own experiences, as well as the customer experience. Giving them ownership, as co-creators of the business’ success, creates a fundamental shift in the way employees view and engage in their own jobs, in the success of the brand, and in the relationship with the customer. It’s a non-zero-sum game.

Beyond making efficiencies, AI can be used to understand how employees are faring along their own journeys and professionals and help prevent turnover. The biggest challenges when it comes to understanding employees’ attitudes towards their work and the wider business is keeping open communication. By applying the same technologies and practices more common in customer listening to more systematic and deliberate employee listening, businesses can keep up a continuous flow of understanding about their employees and gain valuable insight into their engagement levels and whether they’re likely to leave the business or perhaps be a key candidate for promotion.

Employee turnover is a key area that if tracked and better understood, major savings can be made. There comes a certain time in the employee journey when they begin to question if they’re a right fit in the organisation. This rings especially true in high-turnover industries like retail, food and hospitality. Predictive technology can determine when an employee’s engagement drops and use this to proactively intervene and provide critical support, reducing turnover and lowering the costs of replacing human capital.

With high training costs and the potential for reduced workload with new staff, retaining employees – even in high-staff volume sectors – is much more cost effective. By closely analysing the employee journey brands can better understand why an employee becomes engaged or disengaged, whether they’re a new hire or a long-time employee.

AI also works to spot patterns in historic data to predict future behaviour. If the data shows that engagement falls at a certain point for specific roles or at distinct milestones, then there is the opportunity to try to change that pattern, and break that cycle. If there is something more profound, for example the company often acts as a stepping stone for millennials in their careers, then being mindful of this pattern can help ensure that recruitment is set up to deal with this engagement curve. As a result customers don’t suffer due to unpredictable employee churn, and their satisfaction does not take a downturn.

Artificial Intelligence should be seen by organisations as a key area of investment over the next five years. Besides improving operations, it can help analyse the points of truth along an employee journey, inform employers about why and when an employee becomes disengaged, and alert managers so they can take the most effective course of action.

Companies say converting more leads to customers will be their top priority over the next year, according to recent research. This is certainly a worthy goal, but it begs a natural next question — how do you keep customers once you have them?

This conundrum is one retailers have been trying to solve for decades. Thanks to new technologies, that’s becoming easier to do in 2017. Recently, Walmart announced a plan to bring Minority Report-style facial recognition technology from the big screen to retail stores to identify and intervene with unhappy customers at scale.

Where Facial Recognition Technology Provides the Most Value

Walmart may not have been top-of-mind when it comes to innovation in the past, but a number of significant tech innovation pushes this past year demonstrate that this legacy brick-and-mortar behemoth is committed to evolving with, and perhaps leading significant change.

Walmart’s stated goal in implementing facial recognition is to understand customer sentiment in real time so staff can provide support to alleviate situations that could damage a customer’s experience around a single transaction, as well as their longer-term loyalty.

But the potential benefits are much broader than simple triage. Here are three scenarios where facial recognition technology can earn retailers greater customer feedback in-store, as well as what retailers can do to productively implement that information.

Understanding the Journey

With facial recognition technology, retailers can examine touch points and flow on the journey purchase and determine how each is impacting the customer experience, including spend, whether positive or negative.

In-store shoppers have many interactions that collectively determine their overall experience. That’s why retailers must work to understand if every single touch point — interactions with sales associates, products, environment, technologies etc. — is working well, and what can be improved if it’s not.

For instance, if shoppers typically leave a retailer’s “Health and Beauty” section more frustrated than when they entered, this indicates issues with experiences specific to that department. Granular insights like these will help retailers make small improvements across their overall in-store customer experiences. Armed with this understanding, human workers can be trained to provide specific types of assistance at various touch points to improve or enrich that specific experience.

Personalizing the Experience

Facial recognition by itself has interesting and helpful applications. However, the real promise lies in using this data in concert with other data sources and analytics technologies to gain a comprehensive understanding of individual customers.

One of the most talked-about buzzwords of the last 18 months has been personalization. And while application of this concept has been used primarily by digital marketers to target offers and content, a study earlier this year confirmed that consumers value personalization during purchase and service interactions above marketing/advertising moments, which they ranked least important of the three.

A future scenario might be leveraging facial recognition to understand when a customer had entered a store, and then harnessing the plethora of other customer and contextual information to serve up a personalized and very meaningful experience, based on past interactions and nimble enough to read and analyze in-store behaviors and sentiment. This stream of real-time “customer experience intelligence” could power everything from targeted offers based on same-day comparison shopping from a customer’s mobile device, to individual customer dossiers to support more helpful associate-to-customer interactions.

Imagine a store manager receiving an alert that a VIP customer had entered the store, a record of her recent browsing history of both your website and your competitors’, her recent purchases, as well as social reviews and feedback she’s given about your brand — along with past and current sentiment. Instead of extending a generic greeting, the technology would augment the floor staff’s expertise to create a very different customer experience, indeed.

Anticipating their Needs

The ultimate promise of today’s emerging technologies and analytics are moving beyond responding to, and instead anticipating, customers’ needs, wants and opportunities for delight. With enough data and time, predictive algorithms can find patterns in past behaviors, and make an educated guess at what customers, and metrics, will do in the future. This allows retailers to avoid drastically bad experiences by preventing the conditions that cause them in the first place. It also allows brands to identify elements of the experience that drive the most positive business and relationship outcomes, and proactively build those into more places along the customer journey.

One national brand we worked with brought together individual store sales data and goals, with customer feedback and sentiment. We ran predictive models that identified which locations would miss sales goals, and exactly why — by location. Armed with this information, each store manager could focus their team on bolstering the experience in ways that both make customers happier, and get them to their monthly sales goals.

In the past, predictive models were run almost exclusively on structured data, and netted a respectable, but still wanting 60% to 70% accuracy rate. By incorporating unstructured human data from facial recognition software, social reviews and survey comments, accuracy can reach well into the 90% range.

Just like any new technology, facial recognition won’t be a silver bullet for understanding and interacting with today’s born-digital customers. However, applied thoughtfully, and in concert with a broader set of data and technologies, facial recognition is set to become a very powerful lens into one of the most elusive and important questions standing between buyers and sellers: Why. Why do they love this and shun that? Why didn’t they purchase? Why did they choose our competitor over our brand? Why do they come back over and over again? Why did they spend more this time than last? Every tool retailers can bring to the solving of this mystery is priceless.

Today’s employer is facing a 21^st century personnel challenge, one which was almost non-existent for their predecessors.

Previous generations held the expectation that an individual would build a professional career within one industry by starting at the bottom of the ladder and working their way up.

No longer is this the case. With the millennial generation now fully immersed in the professional world, career roles have simultaneously become transient and permeable, reflecting the globally mobile society enabled by the technology boom over the last two decades. No longer is a one single ladder approach king — employment has become a multi-faceted snakes and ladders game.

With such movement, a key challenge faced by employers will be adapting to this professional mobility and introducing mechanisms to keep up with the expectations of employment in the digital age. Technology is now available to support employee retention and artificial intelligence (AI) can be harnessed to analyse the employee journey of today.

AI and the price of employee turnover

Research has found that an individual is now expected to move roles between 10 and 15 times throughout their career, with most under 40 years old moving on after fewer than five years in any one role. With such high turnover, recruiting and training new staff is a costly affair.

Placing emphasis on the employee journey and bringing in new devices to understand your workforce in real time is, therefore, becoming increasingly important to address the wider trend for professional job hopping.

Vital learnings can be taken from the customer experience journey approach, which takes into account a multi-faceted relationship with the consumer across time and numerous events or touchpoints, from face-to-face engagement and service interactions, to electronic surveys and digital personalisation. Emphasis lies on ensuring the customer has access to the brand and is confident their voice will be heard and heeded.

Utilising the assets gleaned from customer experience strategies offers employers an opportunity to repurpose learnings and devices to better understand their employees. Looking at employee experience through a CX lens will allow businesses to spot trends, implement new processes, as well as monitor and evaluate the impact these changes have on overall satisfaction and retention rates.

Like CX, listening to the voice of the employee is fundamental to understanding what makes them tick, and likewise providing multiple avenues through with they can share their feedback is key. Blending smarter technology with best practices can speed up results and is proven to provide more accurate and successful outcomes.

Proactive action is particularly important when factoring in turnover levels and many employers have a reactive approach, only taking steps when a letter of notice is handed in. This process needs to be reengineered so businesses can stay ahead of the game — considering and responding to an employee’s development and feedback throughout their journey with a company.

High turnover rates are especially prevalent in industries such as retail, food, and hospitality, where hours can be unsocial and the demands high. For these areas in particular, predictive and AI technologies can provide real benefit, determining when an employee’s engagement drops, allowing an employer to use this intel and proactively prevent turnover, which in turn can reduce the costs of replacing human capital.

Even more compelling perhaps, is AI’s ability to find patterns across the entire workforce, surfacing traits, events, and employment conditions and where they converge to produce more productive, happier, and longer-tenured staff. With this intelligence, brands can hire, incentivise, train, and even exit employees in a more proactive and productive way.

Employee retention and the influence of AI

With the turn in the generation tide, employees have developed different expectations about their careers — we now live in society where individuals are more or at least equally concerned about fulfilment as achievement. In fact, research has found that 64 percent of millennials would rather be in a job they love and earn less, than have a six figure salary.

Ninety-two percent of millennials also believe that business success should be measured by more than just profit. This is a real marked shift and one employers need to build into their retention and engagement strategies, through from graduate roles up to the board of directors.

Using the latest developments in AI will allow companies to better analyse the points of truth along an employee journey, informing employers about why and when an employee becomes disengaged. This intel can then alert managers so they can take the most effective course of action, and redesign experiences to be more fulfilling.

This technology also has the ability to identify top talent for prioritised intervention. AI allows for a more personalised approach — we’re no longer looking at an A4 paper appraisal form. Similarly to CX strategy, a carbon copy tick-box approach is not the prerequisite anymore, nor can or should it be — any customer of employee strategy needs to develop in symbiosis with the technology available to ensure it is successfully received by today’s consumer.

Getting employees engaged in the CX programme is essential to involving employees beyond just asking about their own job satisfaction. It’s harnessing automated, AI-driven technology to listen, analyse, and distribute intelligence — in an always-on, systematic fashion — to what they have to say about the customer experience. Giving them ownership creates a fundamental shift in the way they view and engage in their own jobs, in the success of the brand, and in the relationship with the customer.

Recruiting through AI

By 2020, Gartner has predicted that 2.3 million jobs will be created by AI, whilst eliminating 1.8 million; AI is not only allowing employers to assess their employees but it also impacting the fundamentals of the workplace and the personnel needed. The most heavily impacted areas will be manufacturing, whilst the influence of new technology in healthcare and education will open up new roles.

In tandem with understanding turnover and employee satisfaction, AI can be harnessed within HR to complement recruitment drives. Some of the most attractive places to work for millennials are companies such as Apple, Google, and Disney.

As far as the workspace goes, these businesses are renowned for their high emphasis on employee welfare and are dedicated to building an employee journey which reflects the values of today’s workforce. Companies like these are setting the bar for employers and opening up the recruitment space to be more dynamic and inclusive.

Using tech and AI to search out the right personnel is also at the forefront of their strategies and, through successful implementation, they have developed a stable and highly skilled workforce.

The issue of recruitment is also less focused on a localised approach — the hunt for exceptional personnel has been launched on a global scale and tools such as Skype facilitate this search, bringing the recruiter and prospective employee into closer contact than ever before. Like with CX, the use of AI gives access into new realms of contact with the individual.

AI in recruitment strategies is designed to reduce or remove time-intensive admin tasks such as manually trawling through CVs. Successful use of AI can be implemented to support HR and refine employment drives, with new technology being developed to even predict a potential candidate’s likely performance in a particular role.

The key to truly understanding recruitment, retention, and turnover rates in today’s society is harnessing AI across a blended range of listening, analytical and reporting processes. Taking an always-on, systematic approach will help empower the employee and imbibe confidence in the brand ethos. Ultimately, opening up two-way communication through the vehicle of technology will give employees a sense of ownership as co-creators of the employee experience.

This in turn will create a fundamental shift in the way employees view and engage in their own jobs, in the success of the brand, and in the relationship with the customer.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve seen the course of customer experience intelligence shift drastically, and my home state become a hub for the industry.

While I wholeheartedly believe Utah—home to Pearl-Plaza’s global headquarters—is the most inviting and majestic locale in the entire United States, the climate and geography are certainly not for the faint of heart. Icy cold and snowy winters are followed by long, dry summers, while the shoulder seasons—spring and fall—last about as long as a head cold (but let me tell you, those few days are absolutely glorious). Yes, we have the Greatest Snow on Earth, the Wasatch Range, Uinta Mountains, and five nationals parks…and we also have rattlesnakes, flash floods, and the occasional inversion (a layer of cold, pollutant-filled air that gets trapped in the valley between winter storms).

But none of that compares to the terrors of living in Florida.

I say this partially in jest (see: alligators, cockroaches, mosquitos, and an average daily humidity flirting with 100 percent), while recognizing the harsh, potentially life-threatening realities of living in a tropical climate. We witnessed this truth earlier in the year with the devastation of Hurricane Irma.

In June, two Pearl-Plaza employees relocated to the gulf coast of the Sunshine State—one accepted a CX leadership position with Foot Locker, while the other was afforded the opportunity to live closer to family while remaining a full-time (remote) employee at Pearl-Plaza. Naturally, Pearl-Plaza headquarters was concerned about the well-being of these two newly-minted Floridians and their families as Irma came barreling toward the state in mid-September.

Anyone who tracked this massive storm is familiar with the Cone of Uncertainty. This theory, which describes the evolution of certainty throughout a project or event, is used by meteorologists to provide guidance to local governments, officials, and residents as storms approach. When a tropical storm first becomes a hurricane, the Cone of Uncertainty is, well, quite uncertain. It’s narrow at one end (we have a good idea where the storm will be in an hour), but wide at the other. The further out we try to predict, the larger the margin of error. It’s scientific—but it’s also a bit of a guessing game.

Taking drastic action based on so little certainty would be unreasonable, impractical, and irresponsible. Imagine if we could only see the forecasted hurricane track once, and many days out. Would we evacuate the entire Eastern Seaboard each time a storm popped up in the Atlantic? We might if we had no other choice. Luckily, the forecast track is updated every few hours, and while we may not know the storm’s exact path until it actually makes landfall, the closer it gets, the more certain we become.

In the past, I’ve used the analogy of a car’s dashboard to refer to customer feedback data: the speedometer tells you how fast you’re going (i.e., metrics such as OSAT and NPS) but it’s the GPS (i.e., analysis of unstructured, qualitative data) that ensure you successfully navigate to your destination. While this analogy still rings true, I’ve started to think about CX strategy in terms of the Cone of Uncertainty, and how advanced models and an even deeper understanding of customer stories can reduce the amount of guessing required.

All companies, whether or not they’ve implemented Voice of Customer programs, have a broad view of the customer journey, a general sense of customer expectations, and likely some idea of how to improve customer experiences. This is the wide end of the cone (i.e., evacuating the entire east coast from Miami to Boston). In other words, it’s not very helpful. If you manage a CX program and all you can see is the wide end of the cone, it’s probably time to update your resume on Linkedin.

As I mentioned, when forecasting a hurricane’s track, we typically don’t know what the storm is going to do until it’s actually doing it. Due to wind, water temperature, and other variables, at only 12 hours out, the average forecast track error is still nearly 10 miles. That could mean the difference between a direct hit and a relatively minor meteorological event! Unlike a hurricane, predicting how to improve customer experiences is actually quite an accurate science—assuming you have the right model in place. We’ve been feeding our CX machines, algorithms, and engines with customer feedback data for nearly 15 years; the more data we put in, the better they’re able to prescribe and predict the path to better customer experiences with pinpoint accuracy.  

Going back to my dashboard analogy, from Pearl-Plaza’s inception, CX technology has progressed from a basic speedometer to an advanced GPS, but what’s next? From our standpoint, it’s automation. It’s a self-driving CX engine—based on more than the analysis of structured data and predefined KPIs. As algorithms, machines, models, and data improve, the Cone of Uncertainty will become less of a cone and more of a line—a direct path from Point A to Point B. Companies will no longer rely on tools, but rather always-on CX guidance. An analyst inside the platform—reading tens of thousands of customer stories each week—that understands expectations and experiences, and targets recommendations to various personas within an organization.

Customer experience initiatives should not be a shot in the dark—trial and error. With real-time updates, alerting, and recommendations—fueled by the always-on ingestion of customer feedback data—customer experience initiatives should not be educated guesses, but calculated certainties.

CX programmes are adopted by many organisations across the globe, each with a different approach and ultimate goal. Whilst the concept of CX is namely the same wherever you look, we’re really interested to see and share how it’s interpreted across different countries.

In our CX Trends Study we compared customer experiences in the UK and Germany, two major European economies. We delved into what emotions consumers and brands associate with positive and negative experiences, loyalty and personalisation.

We found that emotion plays a huge part when it comes to CX. As customers, we base our experiences on whether something makes us happy, sad or even indifferent. What emotions do we feel when we have a positive experience? Do we feel satisfied, important or reassured? Our survey identified that 35% of consumers in the UK felt safe and reassured when they had a positive experience in comparison to 40% in Germany.

Whilst it makes sense to feel reassured when we are happy with something, we saw a higher percentage of Germans (13%) who felt excitement when they had a positive experience, with an underwhelming 2.5% of UK consumers experiencing the same emotion. The question is, why is there such a stark difference in this particular emotion? Do Germans express more emotion than Brits? Do they have different values in the exchange process which means their expectations might be lower than neighbouring countries? Or are British people simply harder to please?

Our study also showed that over 20% of British consumers surveyed ranked reassurance as one of their top emotions associated with loyalty to a brand. In comparison, this halves in Germany to 10%. That said, enjoyment and excitement remain significantly higher in Germany than in the UK.

Looking at negative experiences, the differences between UK and German consumers were similarly as stark. When asked what emotions they most associate with something negative, 34% of German consumers said anger was their primary emotion, in comparison with 8% of Brits. In addition, open-ended comments such as “burning anger and hatred” were received by consumers in Germany — some of the most emotive comments submitted in the report.

The CX Trends Study provided lots of rich and valuable statistics from across several different countries helping us to understand the true emotions of our consumers. In a world where expectations are constantly changing, it’s vital that brands stay in tune with their customers’ ever evolving emotions. From this, we can start to understand and learn that some consumers are more emotive in their reactions and develop their CX approach appropriately.

No two customers are the same which is why different CX programmes must cater for all, wherever they are globally. Without this guidance, brands and customers really will be ‘worlds apart’. We’d love to hear your views — have you encountered these differences? Have you been surprised by the nuances in global customer expectations?

We’ll be exploring these differences and more in our next CX Trends study, which will be published early 2018.

In today’s connected world, managing a customer’s expectation and consistently creating positive experiences has proven to be a challenge for many organisations.

Part of the challenges in customer experience can be attributed to a variance in preferences across different industries and geographies. A recent study conducted by the UK Institute of Customer Service (UKCI) revealed that customer needs for specific types of services vary by industry, country, and channel.

Importance of understanding customer differences across sectors

In the modern business context, a healthy customer experience initiative is defined by a brand’s commitment to both satisfying customers and motivating strong loyalty. This in turn requires a firm to have a strong understanding of wide-ranging customer expectations.

Today, customers expect excellent experiences from their bank, insurance provider, mobile operator, and even their electricity supplier. However, priorities and expectations of what is considered excellent vary across industries.

For instance, staff competencies are considered particularly important in the banking and insurance industries while speed of resolving complaints, product reliability, and accessibility is a top priority in retail.

However, amidst these varying expectations, there is one shared ideology that prevails — there is no business without customers. Understanding customer expectations is therefore a prerequisite to delivering a superior service which can in turn create brand advocates and prolonged customer loyalty.

In fact, a study by Wunderman found that a staggering 79 percent of customers base their initial purchase intent on how efficiently a brand understands and cares about them. Suffice to say, understanding customer expectations is a crucial ingredient to the success or failure of a business.

Different customer expectations across countries

It is imperative that customer service representatives are aware of the diverse requirements in different countries and cultures. It is especially vital for companies that wish to expand their operations globally. Understanding disparities in customer priorities will invariably help companies identify strengths and opportunities for improvement and differentiation.

These priorities can vary from price, quality, and physical presence of a representative. For instance, customers in Japan have very high expectations of customer service and do not expect to pay for it. Accordingly, service providers in Japanese markets are expected to go out of their way to serve customers and solve problems.

If a customer seeks out phone support in Japan and is dissatisfied with the outcome, the company will more often than not send someone to help them out. This may not always be expected from companies in countries like the UK or US.

Furthermore, a 2014 Global Customer Service Barometer Report by American Express revealed that 78 percent of US customers rate being connected to someone who is knowledgeable as important, whilst only 65 percent of customers in the UK agreed with this. Moreover, a study conducted by New Voice Media found only 25 percent of Americans will hold while on the phone after 10 minutes, compared to 64 percent of Brits, for whom it is a regular occurrence.

Understanding wavering emotions

Existing UKCSI research notes considerable differences in how customers describe emotions associated with positive experiences. The research showed Danish customers, for example, predominantly using the verbatim “they had what I was looking for” while Spanish customers usually stated “I am satisfied with doing what I came to do.”

Respondents were further analysed to understand which emotions they associate with brands to which they feel the most loyal. Most customers across the countries analysed rated “satisfaction” as the most common emotion they associate with brand loyalty.

Around 20 percent of UK customers associated being safe and reassured with brand loyalty, while only 17 percent of US customers agreed with this. “Entertained” was the lowest-ranked emotion overall. However, 11 percent of Finnish customers chose this emotion — nearly twice as many as the nearest customer group from another region. Meanwhile, customers in France and Finland ranked ‘excited’ higher than in other countries.

The research also suggests customers across Europe share many of the same priorities but there are also a number of nuanced priorities by each country. Differences in the way customers score each priority out of ten was also noted. For example, there is less than an average differentiation in the range of priority scores in Poland, with less than one point difference between the highest rated priority (condition of delivered goods)  and the lowest (organisation contributes to the national economy).

Communicating using the right channels

Most companies today use multiple channels to interact with customers. This has been made easier with the rapid increase in technology and the advent of social media. However, customers across different industries and countries have varied preferences on how they wish to communicate with service professionals.

For instance, banking customers prefer a complete omni-channel experience with physical branches, online banking, mobile apps, text notifications, and phone calls. However, customer expectations with a healthcare company may not go beyond the ability to contact the company via phone and receive a text with reminders of upcoming appointments.

In the UK, UKCSI research revealed that website use is higher than the European average, although this is not uniformly the case across sectors. Website use is particularly high in telecommunications, media, insurance, and utilities, but is slightly less than average for banking, retail (food), and transport. In the Netherlands, “in person” is used less than the European average, although it is still the most popular channel for interacting with organisations.

Acknowledging preferred personalisation levels

In recent years, personalisation strategies have grown in importance and have seen a significant impact on levels of advocacy and loyalty customers have towards a brand. In fact, customers today do not just expect but demand tailored services that suit personal preferences.

They also want e-commerce sites and in-person sales associates to know who they are and offer relevant assistance. UKCSI’s recent survey recognised this fact, as “personalised support” emerged as a prime priority over purchase and advertising.

The report further indicated that customers in North America and the UK chose personalised support even more often than average at 54 percent and 53 percent, respectively. Moreover, 41 percent of customers in Spain value personalisation during the purchase process highest of all countries, a full six points above the average of 35 percent, while German customers weighted the different types of personalisation most equally.

It is imperative that companies today understand and respond to not just a customer’s buying habits and incomes, but also their emotions and states of mind. Acknowledging these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them is undoubtedly important in ensuring that customer satisfaction is more than just a slogan but also an attainable goal.

Walmart is the latest retailer testing facial recognition technology in an effort to create a better customer experience. Customer experience (CX) expert Brennan Wilkie says that facial recognition will be a key technology moving forward in the personalization of shopping.

“Installing facial recognition monitors in stores has the potential to grant retailers insight into the in-store customer experience,” Wilkie, the senior vice president of customer experience strategy at Pearl-Plaza, told FierceRetail. “They can use it to determine, for example, whether customers are frustrated during self check-out and notify staff to respond with triage, pre-empting complaints and ultimately attrition.”

Retailers can then pair the facial expression data with customer demographics, loyalty metrics and other product purchase information, a brand can gain a deep understanding of the consumer.

“This intelligence could fuel action across the organization, from targeting demographics differently, to increasing access to self check-out, to deploying human talent at the specific points along the customer journey where they increase value,” he added.

However, Wilkie warns that Walmart and other retailers will need to be cautious as they test and implement these new tools in order to avoid crossing the line of customer privacy with this new tool. To address this, brands must be transparent about where, when and why they’re using this new technology, and of course, offer value in return for this privacy invasion.

There are several other challenges associated with using facial recognition. For example introducing new data when companies are already swimming in Big Data and struggling to derive value from it.

“Having a strong strategy for how to manage, access, analyze and action the information will is paramount,” Wilkie said. “Practically, there may be pushback from customers who are uncomfortable with the idea of their in-store actions being not only recorded by facial recognition monitors (often already done for security purposes), but observed and analyzed for business strategy reasons. If retailers can communicate the overall benefits of the technology as they roll it out, any negative feedback should be outweighed by the positive. This strategy has worked well with newly introduced in-store technology, such as self-checkout lines and chip readers, in the past.”

Another concern related to this infant technology is that there is the potential for the data to be misread. Therefore, the analytics software needs to be very sophisticated to be able to get results off of reading a customer’s expression.

The final challenge will be knowing when a retailer should implement new changes based on localized behaviors.

“Regionally, customer demographic preferences can differ. This should be considered as CX changes are implemented at scale as a result of learned insights from the technology,” he said.

So which retailers should be leading the way with facial recognition?

Wilkie recommends retailers with Millennials as their main demographic since study findings show that Millennials are most comfortable with the idea of sharing personal data with companies as a means to using their products or services. Additionally, retailers who are testing out the incorporation of robot assistance for processes such as self-checkout and self-price check are great candidates for using facial recognition.

“By better understanding a customer’s reactions at every point in their customer journey, retailers can assess the ideal balance of human and tech at each customer touchpoint. They may find that their demographic of customers prefers the traditional experience, unlike other retailers with more connected consumers as customers,” Wilkie said.

Using facial recognition technology for CX insights is still in its early stages. Advancements in software will add a new layer of understanding of the CX for retailers.

“Written feedback, voice feedback and body language will be the holy trinity to delivering a robust customer experience once facial recognition technology is mastered,” he added.

This post was written by James Bolle, VP Head of Client Services EMEA

There are many factors that go into making a customer’s overall experience a great one, but the impact of your employees might well be the biggest.

Employees are the face of your businesses and must play an important role in any CX programme. The widely accepted model “Value Profit Chain” states that if you have happy employees, you have happy customers.

However there are now many different variables that impact on this process. Customer experience will affect employee experience and vice versa. In order to understand your customers’ experiences you first need to understand your employees’ experiences.

This year’s EMEA Customer Experience Elevated conference (CXE17) highlighted the importance of employee engagement, and the huge part it plays in the CX journey. We welcomed CX experts from across the globe including Revolution Bars Group, and Tiffany & Co. Whilst each is a very different business, engaging employees was the unifying factor in all their presentations.

Employees are impacted every day by customers. They are the primary representatives of an organisation; they know what happens “behind the scenes” and can offer significant insights into what may be creating and impacting the customer experience. It is imperative companies listen to them and when they do so, they often find more specific and relevant insights to improve their business.

Revolution Bars Group told us at CXE17 that their core message is “to deliver an amazing customer experience every time.” Pearl-Plaza worked with Revolution to help the business review the entire perspective of their customer experience and listen to multiple stakeholders, not just customers, to gain a much greater understanding of the overall customer journey. Revolution introduced Pearl-Plaza’s Voice of Employee (VoE) programme alongside Pearl-Plaza’s Active Listening to collect data from both employees and customers to develop a holistic understanding of the customer experience.

The data collected from employees as well as customers has meant Revolution has been able to make changes to its business and has seen marked improvements in its customer experience due to the direct correlation between the employee experience and customer experience.

Revolution’s use of VoE is a clear example of how tapping into employee feedback on the customer experience can have a direct impact on your business.

Employees provide brands with actionable, success-driving insights – they should be considered a key part of the CX mix.