Approaching the singularity: What to do when technology no longer limits customer interaction experience.
written by Karl Dixon & Jeremy Williams
We are fast approaching a singularity in customer experience. The smart technologies enabling sales, customer service, marketing, and digital continue to enhance their ability to react in real-time and generate vast, rich data assets. Data, systems, processes, insight, prediction, recommendation, and execution will all converge into one, cohesive machine that enables businesses to know all about their customers and how best to execute against their needs for best effect.
This has the power to revolutionise the way businesses interact with their customers by removing barriers that have traditionally constrained thinking and hampered execution. But, are businesses able and ready to benefit from this smart technology? Or will technological capability finally surpass our ability to know what to do with it? Are we, in effect, coming to a point where the machine knows better than us?
We imagine a world where businesses, enabled by this technology, are organised to focus completely on the customer, starting at the top with a chief customer officer driving the business to create exceptional experiences for customers that generate natural advocacy…and demand. Traditional sales oriented KPIs have been replaced with engagement and advocacy scores to set the pace and pulse of the business.
Silos and functional divides have also gone, replaced by vertical ‘customer’ teams comprising multiple skills and disciplines empowered to add value to the overall experience for the customers in their charge. Ownership and accountability, whilst still hierarchical, is also democratised to ensure staff are focused on what is important: customers receiving the best possible service and opportunities.
The culture has changed from treating customers merely as quarterly sales figures or inconveniences, to treating them as welcome friends.
To fully understand this direction of travel, let’s pause quickly to view the destination in the context of where we’ve been in our CX journey, before following the curve into the near future to examine some of the challenges and opportunities facing decision makers who wish to truly exploit the next generation of technologies.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin our journey with a trip down the ages…
Ancient History (Pre-1985) — oral legends, handed down from the dim and distant past talk of a time when companies sent customers letters (or papyrus scrolls, archaeologists argue to this day) and kept details on rolodexes (or sometimes stone tablets), a wild and savage world.
Classical Period (late 80’s — 90’s) — CRM & one to one marketing emerge from the maelstrom of shoulder pads, hairspray, and short-sighted economic policies — changing forever the way sales, customer service and marketing are managed. A little tool called Unica arrives and unwittingly kickstarts one of the most exciting streams of innovation across the technology landscape. Databases, email, and traditional channels combine into multichannel outbound marketing. Generation X were like “whatever, man…” because it was 1992, and set sights on the next mountain to climb…the single customer view.
Age of Enlightenment (2000’s) — Now we are really getting up a head of steam! It’s the early 000s, The Strokes are rocking, The Libertines are imploding and MarTech & CRM see an explosion of innovation — Salesforce bursts onto the scene a couple of years previous with enterprise-grade, cloud-native, Hawaiian-themed CRM for sales & service; ePiphany, Silverpop, Eloqua, Neolane, and Pontis — all bring their own brands of creativity and innovation to the table for marketers.
KIQ, arguably the pioneers of real time inbound at scale, are soon to be bought by CRM/BPM company, Chordiant — one of the first big examples of the merging of specialist marketing technology into broader solutions that will soon become commonplace. And in the shadows, to almost no fanfare, another giant slowly beings to take shape — Dynamics CRM.
The Digital Revolution — Spotted by pioneers since the heady days of Angelfire, Yahoo, MySpace, and Google (remember them?) digital really starts cooking with nuclear fusion as dial up gives way to broadband, Amazon shifts from online book store to emperor of hyper convenient eCommerce, and the iPhone makes staring at your hand for hours acceptable in public, all of which combine to drive more and more consumer behaviour online. Google acquires Urchin on Demand and, later, Adaptive Path and — after a slightly shaky start — Google Analytics unlocks a huge amount of insight for… anyone who wants it (and boy do they want it!). SEO rapidly evolves, as does social media, display, and app-based messaging.
An explosion of point solutions, central hubs, and AdTech to manage customers and prospects across digital channels, and (crucially) distinct digital teams continue to take an increasing share of the overall value from customers.
Present Day — Today we find ourselves adrift in a sea of solutions covering everything from free email marketing for the small business to monolithic central brains for decisioning, and niche inchannel specialists to multichannel monsters. All of it awash with AI (which is, often, a fancy term for…nested if statements) and real-time processing. We’re sure many of you have seen the Marketing Landscape infographic — so jammed with logos that its sole purpose seems to be to scare the cash out of platform owners and decision makers.
The single customer view has evolved from a sophisticated, home-brewed, data engineering feat to an off the shelf product in the form of the Customer Data Platform (CDP). The companies leading today’s efforts are finding new and exciting ways to blend data science, behavioural economics, and creative flair to create emotionally rich, hyper-personalised engagement in real time, and putting experience in its rightful place at the heart of customer service.
And, you know what? It’s pretty cool.
There are some awesome people out there doing great work and building genuinely innovative solutions focussed on solving real business problems — giants like Microsoft, whose Dynamics CRM has evolved from staggering toddler to super-charged, super-flexible Customer Engagement platform, and exciting independent companies like Exponea are working magic when it comes to helping businesses understand, and engage positively with, their customers.
But this is not about today, this is about tomorrow — about where we are going, and what we might find when we get there.
Throughout this relatively short and extremely storied history, the spark of innovation has come from a mixture of evolving customer expectations and creative ideation within marketing, sales, and customer service departments (or attendant consultancies), driving software vendors to iterate, improve, and increase their offerings to remain relevant in an ever more competitive market.
Moore’s law [1] may be reaching its limit in silicon [2] but the power of the cloud, and immense scope for process and functionality enhancement, means technology innovation is unlikely to slow. In contrast, real-world experience and human psychology demonstrates that (for the most part) people and organisations change slowly, and not always positively or intentionally.
This dichotomy is summed up perfectly by Scott Brinker’s martec’s law [3], which recognises that “where technology changes exponentially; organisations change logarithmically”.
Technology has progressed from a barrier to an enabler of innovative customer engagement, and now we are witnessing its second transition — from enabler to leader — where the sky has become the limit to the art of the possible. This is not inherently a bad thing as the more points of view and differing experiences drive innovation, the more choice and flexibility available to business decision makers.
The risk, then, lies in the chance that businesses, in a race to keep up, lose sight of what’s important — both the experience of the customer and the delivery of commercial results — or invest poorly, having failed to clearly articulate needs and aspirations to technology partners. Both paths are already creating significant challenges [4] and, when taken to the extreme, could lead to oblivion.
This is not a problem that is likely to go away. Google’s recent declaration of Quantum Supremacy [5] by Google, reinforces the great futurist, Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns [6] which suggests that the art of the possible will continue to evolve at pace into the foreseeable future, and so it falls to business decision-makers to ensure that a new balance is struck in the ownership of future capability.
Those who rely on technology to facilitate interactions with customers must balance multiple sets of needs and goals with an intelligent and innovative strategy, integrating technology and creativity with commercial focus and customer experience, if they wish to stay ahead of the curve.
That is no mean feat. Whilst the ‘ask’ could well prove to be enormous in some organisations, it also presents significant opportunities.
For those watching the customer technology sector, the clear market direction among the industry’s titans is unification. The bringing together of disparate, specialist systems into tightly integrated, end-to-end platforms will become the norm over the next decade.
Unified Customer Platforms: Why should I care?
Here’s a definition with which to work: A Unified Customer Platform (UCP) is a single platform consuming and feeding a single view of the truth for customer and operational data, and servicing all customer focussed activity across all channels and the entire lifecycle — from anonymous digital prospect, through marketing, sales, and customer service.
Why is this important? The most successful business decisions are made when the most complete and accurate information is available. Anything less usually means guessing or using intuition, which often results in being lucky, or wrong.
You might think you have a single customer view already, but chances are, you probably have more than one ‘single view’ in your business. We jest not — some of your customer data is probably still locked away in a legacy system or is duplicated across different departments and systems. Not many large, complex businesses can claim to have every possible piece of customer data in just one, single, accessible place.
It’s not just a case of legacy data storage issues either, Pega’s 2019 Global Customer Service Insights study[7], which surveys 3,600 customer facing employees from across the globe, paints a picture of passionate, knowledgeable agents, hamstrung by poor or lacking technology investment and strategy, resulting in 82% of customers frustrated by the time taken to resolve an issue, 76% having to repeat themselves between agents & channels, and 64% struggling with the lack of clarity throughout the interaction.
However, as of today, most instances of a UCP are more promise than reality. Don’t get us wrong, the promises are often built on a foundation of well-earned trust and respect, and are not to be dismissed…but they are not, by any means, the finished article, given they typically comprise a mixture of native and acquired solutions stitched together under a common moniker. Yes, really. Regardless of current vendor progress, though, one thing is certain — truly Unified Customer Platforms are coming and it behoves those of us for whom customer management technology is a central component of what we do, to understand them, the opportunities they unlock, and what needs to happen to fully realise their potential.
The unification of all customer activities onto one platform — and arguably just as importantly, one data instance — is both exciting and politically complex. With the resulting solutions so wide in scope that they impact across a significant number of stakeholders, each of whom have their own KPIs and objectives, their own preferred way of working and accompanying set of experiences.
Current providers, such as Oracle, Salesforce, and others provide a huge breadth of solutions — from Sales Automation to Field Services, Commerce to Inbound Decisioning, Digital Asset Management to Batch Campaigning — under one brand, and alliances such as Microsoft and Adobe are competing with a similar breadth of integrated offering.
In order to overcome the objection “just because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean we should” from those within the business for whom change is anathema, vendors need to continue investing in integrating the constituent parts, nativising acquisitions into the core platforms as quickly as possible, and maintaining clean, uniform UI’s designed specifically for non-technical users, whilst maintaining the functionality sophisticated technical users demand.
Doing all of this, whilst maintaining a focus on compelling and flexible functionality across each constituent area of the platform, is no small feat.
The Argument in Favour
Let’s be real, many of the issues in customer focussed departments today centre around data, integrations, and adaptability. The ability to react quickly to market conditions, unforeseen issues or opportunities, and ever-changing customer expectation can have a huge impact on success. A single platform & UI servicing all customer focussed teams, drawing from a single version of the truth, whilst not solving all problems, goes a long way toward enabling a huge range of activities:
• Reducing the complexity and potential risks of effectively surfacing Next Best Actions on contact centre systems or the web.
• Tracking from first anonymous online visit through to customer retention and providing a hugely rich, behavioural history to inform decisions.
• Empowering sales and service agents with the intelligence and processes they need to turn customers into advocates.
• Informing any point in the life-cycle or touch-point with the relevant data and recommendations in real time.
• The consignment of the customer journey to the bin of history’s “necessary fictions”, in favour of true contextual interactions.
• Using a richer blend of behavioural and transactional data for better content personalisation.
Of course, with proper care and planning, it is not necessary to have a single platform do all of the above. A watertight strategy, buy-in across all key customer decision-makers, avoidance of overly political wrangling, and expert selection of best-of-breed platforms can yield the same results…easy to say, but not so easy to achieve.
However, we can go further still; consider, dear reader, the following:
Look back at the last 30 years of data driven customer strategy, and your own experiences…if technology was no barrier and you had control over marketing, digital, sales, service, and commerce…would you still organise things in the traditional way they’ve organically developed in most companies?
The same KPIs? Same goals? …Same silos?
A leading question, certainly — and, at present, a purely hypothetical one for most — but one that certainly merits consideration.
As outlined in our introduction, a business structured in this way would be architected, or re-architected, into a radical and (as far as we know) currently unproven structure for all customer facing operations. It would mean dispensing with the traditional silos and restrictive measurements and replacing them with advocacy scores and a commercially rigorous, holistic framework in which to understand customers. The company’s customer focussed operations would also function more like a single organism — akin to a human body, if you will — enabling all the limbs and extremities to work in unison.
The Brain: Think, Analyse, Design, Understand, Learn, Adapt
A central insight & planning function, aligned to the broad commercial goals of the business, comprising of a right hemisphere (machine learning & behavioural economics) and left hemisphere (creative & customer strategy) working in unison, nourished by a single source of customer and operational truth available in real time. The brain is tasked with designing, building, and measuring all customer interaction activity across all channels at any point in a perceived or literal life-cycle. Continuous experimentation and optimisation sorting and amplifying creative output. Orchestration of all interactions and audiences whether anonymous acquisition or customer development and retention.
The Body: Build, Execute, Sense, Listen, Observe, Monitor
All channels working to execute and feedback response data back in real time and in perfect synchronisation and alignment with each other and the brain, enabling true omnichannel conversation and continuous refinement for future opportunities and treatments.
The Nervous System: Feedback, React, Integrate, Interface
Real time, closed loop data and accompanying analysis and insight for all interaction and operational performance. At the time of writing (late 2019), there are a smattering of companies that have shown glimmers of what this could look like; individual examples, such as Intel’s “Operation Crush” [8] as far back as the early 80s, show what can be achieved when a whole organisation pivots in unison to focus on a single objective with unwavering belief and ruthless efficiency — and that was back in the days of technology still lagging well behind the imagination of the users!
Technology can’t make this happen, but it can provide the tools for those businesses bold enough to dare. The next paradigm shift will likely be ushered in by the company who first finds the right blend of agile, goal-driven alignment and technological enablement to completely rewrite how it serves its customers.
The Argument Against
As alluded to above, there are — of course — a number of challenges to this (whether one platform or many), such as delivering the kind of sweeping change across complex decision maker communities, data environments, and mission critical platforms, particularly all in one go. Of course, the modularised architecture of modern solutions combined with a staggered roll-out strategy certainly helps here.
However, regardless of how well-planned change is and how much budget is available, such a big shift, particularly an environment where each component is already well established individually, does, of course, have significant risk.
As it stands, there are still elements of current generation technology that still needs to evolve, and getting people with such a broad range of expectations and requirements to agree on, and buy into, a single solution will always be a herculean task, dependent as much on the vision, commercial savvy, and outright charisma of its supporters as on the ability of any one technology provider to deliver first class solutions across the board.
For those companies for whom complex, political decision-maker webs are not a problem there is, of course, another challenge ready to step in and fill the gap — cost. Licencing, staffing, business integration, running & maintenance — total cost of ownership, for both the unified platform and particularly the best-of-breed component model with its added integration and licencing complexity will, for many be a mountain too far, particularly if packaged up with the added risk of a radical redesign of the traditional teams and silos such technology would usually serve.
For many smaller companies, the value of, say, a customer data platform and strong digital campaign orchestration can outweigh traditional customer relationship management solutions, thus diminishing the need for such a Goliath solution, even with future scaling in mind.
In closing
Irrespective of how companies choose to engage with the evermore comprehensive suite of customer technology on the market, it is clear that choice and flexibility are less and less barriers to success. Older, more established organisations need to find ways to effectively integrate new solutions into their offering, and in a way that maximises the benefit of their investment. Too often new tools are Frankensteined on to an existing stack in a way that diminishes their effectiveness, causes headaches for users, and frustration for owners.
We have seen, over the last few years, significant disruption of long-established industries — relentless optimists stepping back to examine problems the average person had long since thought solved to deliver radical new solutions [9]. As large organisations struggle to break free of their own complexity, digital innovation continues to make it easier for smaller, nimbler challengers to react quickly to the shifting whims of the consumer zeitgeist and ride waves of explosive growth.
Our world is broadly one of several, parallel evolutions in CRM, digital, data, and machine learning — and often it is extremely difficult to find the time and freedom to take a step back to look across the entire customer facing operation, it’s structure, focus, and supporting systems.
However, the opportunity to take the constituent parts and reconfigure them into a commercially driven, customer-experience focussed whole is rapidly approaching, and from those with the vision and expertise to pull it off — whether in an established and sophisticated market leader or perhaps, more likely, a visionary challenger — We think we may soon see something very special.
References
[1] Wikipedia.org. Moore’s Law, Wikimedia Foundation, [Internet]. December 6, 2019. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
[2] Tom Simonite, Intel Puts the Brakes on Moore’s Law MIT Technology Review [internet]; March 23, 2016. Available from: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601102/intel-puts-the-brakes-onmoores-law/
[3] Scott Brinker, Martec’s Law: Technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically. Chiefmartec.com [Internet]. June 13, 2013. Available from: https://chiefmartec.com/2013/06/martecs-law-technology-changes-exponentially-organizationschange-logarithmically/
[4] Acquia, Customer Experience Trends Report 2019 (Aus Edition) [Internet], 2019, pp. 9–11. Available from: https://www.acquia.com/resources/ebooks/customer-experience-trends-reportaustralia-2019
[5] Arute, F., Arya, K., Babbush, R. et al.”Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor”. Nature 574 (505–510). 23 October, 2019.
[6] Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweilai.net [Internet], March 7, 2001. Available from: https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
[7] Pega, 2019 Global Customer Service Insights, [Internet], 2019, pp7–12. Available from https://www.pega.com/2019-customer-serviceinsights?utm_expid=.4eOZdBwIQBaKi43pFXEowg.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co m%2F
[8] Intel, Intel at 50: The 8086 and Operation Crush, [internet]; May 31, 2018. Available from: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-50-8086-operation-crush/
[9] Thomas Macaulay, Virgin Trains CIO launches world-first application of RCS messaging, CIO.co.uk [Internet], September 17, 2018. Available from: https://www.cio.co.uk/cio-interviews/virgin-trainscio-launches-world-first-application-of-rcs-messaging-3683897/
