Master Customer Experience Excellence - APPWAY · PDF fileMaster Customer Experience Excellence ... airline tickets online or using a ticketing machine at a ... Service Joint Self

A white paper by Appway

Master Customer Experience Excellence Today customers decide how and when they interact with an organization: they choose

the channel, device, and amount of time they’re willing to spend. This shift in power has

triggered mandates in companies across industries to adopt a customer-centric

perspective that prioritizes the customer experience. With the customer experience front

and center, the onus is on businesses to ensure both digital and physical interactions

carry seamlessly across channels and devices. Further, organizations must ensure these

seamless interactions enable customers to complete processes smoothly, even as they

occur across different modes and types of interactions, in both the digital and physical

realms - as well as at the intersections of the two, the so-called "DiPhy" situations.

This Appway white paper explains why cohesive customer experiences are central to

gaining a sustainable advantage, and what it means and requires to combine the digital

and physical worlds for seamless, uninterrupted interactions and processes. The paper

also explains the three distinct interaction modes most popular with customers and how

they must be designed and orchestrated to suit the customer’s needs. It also explores

reasons that organizations struggle to digitalize their businesses to achieve this vision,

and offers a way they can realize digital operational excellence and, with it, a

competitive edge.

Copyright © 2015 Appway AG. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Table of Contents

Operationalizing Digital Initiatives to Deliver Optimal Customer Experience and Sustain a Competitive Advantage 1

Interacting the Way Customers Prefer 3

Understand the Enabler of Effective Customer Interactions 6

Understand the Challenge of Digitalizing the Business 7

Disconnected processes destroy the customer experience 9 An outdated, fragmented application development approach is to blame 11

Adopt the Smart Approach to Achieving Digital Maturity 12

Conclusion: Business Must Drive the Digitalization Agenda 14

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Copyright © 2016 Appway AG. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form

or by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Operationalizing Digital Initiatives to Deliver Optimal Customer Experience and Sustain a Competitive Advantage In the digital era, business leaders across industries are waking up to the need to transform the way they serve their customers and becoming truly customer centric. As they optimize interactions with today’s self-empowered buyers, organizations find it’s a top priority to digitalize their businesses. After all, today’s buyers choose how and when to interact with organizations across digital and physical (also known as “DiPhy”) touch points. And many of today’s physical interactions are touched in some way by digital technologies.

Most people are accustomed to the amazing experiences delivered by “born digital” leaders such as Google, LinkedIn, Dropbox, or Whatsapp, to name a few. In fact, people increasingly judge a brand by the quality of their digital experiences with the company. As a result, achieving customer experience excellence is key to acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. And retaining customers not only improves profit margins, but also enables added opportunities in terms of gaining more insight into customer behaviors, preferences, and more.

This shift to more digital interactions means that customers are increasingly involved in the processes that were once handled solely by the businesses serving them. And while employees

may be forgiving – though increasingly less so – of a disconnected experience as they go through a process using various systems and means, customers are much less likely to tolerate these frustrations.

Customer centricity puts a strong emphasis on the outside-in perspective, but it needs to be backed up with a smart inside-out approach. Digitalization means that the customers become an integral part of the business. As a consequence, organizations need to break down existing boundaries to allow customers to interact instantly. Simultaneously, they need to open up their environments if they want to prevent disjointed customer and employee journeys.

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At the end of the day, it’s the experience a customer has with a company that either creates a strong bond between the customer and the brand or leaves an opening for another business to steal the relationship. With so much innovation across so many sectors, any given product or service can easily and quickly be supplanted.

Figure 1: The value of a great customer experience

(Source: http://blog.neosperience.com/how-customer-obsession-will-drive-your-digital-transformation

and Forrester Research, The Business Impact of Customer Experience, 2014)

While digital strategy is the driver of a digitized business, technology is critical to putting a digital strategy into play. To succeed, organizations need to harness technology that supports their digital transformation journey, technology that enables the organization to pace its progress and choose the most suitable path forward. By supporting their digital initiatives with the right application development platform,

According to Forrester Research, customer experience is an organization’s only source of sustainable competitive advantage.

80% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. 2020

By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

4x A customer is 4x more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service-related vs. price- or product-related.

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.

Survey says: customers highly value great customer experience

According to Forrester’s Customer Index, Customer Experience leaders gained 43% in performance – compared to Customer Experience laggards, who saw a 33.9% decrease.

43%

-33.9%

39% of outperforming companies have developed a fully integrated digital-

physical strategy

Outperforming companies prioritize the customer experience

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organizations can successfully transform their businesses and deliver experiences that satisfy and delight customers.

This paper explores how the rise in customer expectations prompted by experiences with digitally native organizations puts even more pressure on traditional businesses to transform. It also explains why traditional businesses must adapt their existing business models and infrastructures, and modernize their products and services. This paper then presents three main types of interactions between customers and businesses and illustrates how traditional approaches to deploying and managing the applications behind these interactions complicates efforts to ensure a seamless user experience spanning diverse channels and devices. It then offers a new way of ensuring successful digital interactions and delivering an experience customers have come to expect.

Interacting the Way Customers Prefer Customers decide how they want to interact with businesses

today; business can no longer dictate how this works. Despite the many possibilities, at Appway, we identified a base pattern of three distinct modes of interaction:

• Pure service (“Service”) – The organization handles the entire process for the customer. For instance, a financial services customer wanting to buy shares of a company could meet her relationship manager and instruct her that the order be placed. This same interaction could be handled strictly in the digital realm. The customer could send a message via e-mail or LinkedIn with the request to her relationship manager. The relationship manager performs the operation and informs the customer when the transaction is completed.

• Self-service (“Self”) – Customers are empowered to handle a process on their own, such as booking their own airline tickets online or using a ticketing machine at a train station to buy a ticket.

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• Joint DiPhy experience (“Joint”) – Someone from the business accompanies the customer through a process. An example is a customer sitting with an insurance agent over an iPad to select the conditions of an insurance policy. Once the meeting is complete and the policy has been finalized, the customer and agent sign the contract.

Figure 2: Interactions happen in three main ways, both digital

To satisfy the needs of all customers, businesses must enable seamless interactions across these three modes. This is especially true for businesses serving a range of demographics and generations. Millennials, individuals who reached adulthood around the turn of the 21st century, are highly autonomous, but the older generation often wants the support and involvement of someone from the business. At the same time, numerous factors impact the choice of interaction mode. These include complexity of the service or product and urgency of completing the interaction, as well as the user’s location, mood, and available time. Ideally, whatever their preference, customers can jump from one mode to another. In fact, many

people today switch seamlessly between devices, channels and modes of interaction without a thought. But any discontinuity of experience between the different interaction points will lead to confusion and frustration, and eventually, the loss of a customer.

Client Company Joint

Service

Joint

Self

“DiPhy”

Interactions between prospective or existing customers and an organization occur in both the digital and physical realms as well as at the intersections of the two,

the so-called "DiPhy" situations..

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At the same time, today’s businesses must provide contextual user experiences that wrap the customer’s profile, past engagement history, and current situation into a contextually-personalized customer experience. They need to orchestrate interactions across all touch points and monitor what buyers are doing when they are engaging with the company. A contextual user experience aligns the goals for interaction with the context of the individual customer or user as defined by location, device, personal experience, and support requirements.

Figure 3: Organizations must enable these three interaction modes to occur seamlessly across channels and devices

For example, a consumer might register online for a new bank account (1), go into the branch to sign forms (2), receive their new account information and ATM card in the mail (3), and then go online to manage their account (again 1). In an ideal world, the company would have a full view into the entire customer journey and be able to ensure an optimal experience for the customer.

Consider interactions from the user’s perspective Today’s customers want to engage, interact and transact with organizations using a range of devices (e.g., smartphones, laptops, traditional phones) and channels (e.g., mobile, online, and in-person) – and any combination – yet enjoying a seamless, uninterrupted

experience.

More than 50% of organizations already support 12+ distinct customer touchpoints

47% of digital experience providers plan to reduce their dependency on IT within the next year

Client Company Joint

Service

Joint

Self

Figure 4: Many organizations are faced with a confusing landscape of technologies and approaches, which often leads to a fragmented customer

experience ( Source: Forrester Research, Understanding The Challenges Of Building An Integrated Digital Experience St rategy, 2014)

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Understand the Enabler of Effective Customer Interactions In today’s business world, these interactions, experiences and monitoring are enabled by customer-facing applications that integrate with back-end systems. The goal is to create an intuitive and cohesive user experience along the customer journeys across the three modes of interaction. Many organizations develop or implement their own business applications to suit the unique needs of their customers, and to maintain control of their intellectual property. In fact, the strategic use of technology is quickly becoming a key business differentiator and necessary in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in the digital age.

Complicating matters, organizations must deliver value to customers as quickly as possible, rapidly adjust to evolving customer needs and preferences and, ideally, anticipate those requirements and proactively reflect them in their applications. Some must also modernize legacy applications to suit today’s

needs. Addressing all of this requires changes to application development, frequency of releases, length of application cycles, and even how user adoption is enabled.

In today’s multi-channel world, customers expect seamless interactions with organizations. To satisfy this mandate, organizations need to use technology to enable, monitor, and continuously improve these integrated experiences – and ensure a holistic view of the customer.

Enterprise process norms

Customer process norms

Cycles Years Months Weeks

Releases Annual Weekly Quarterly

Adoption Training Intuitive now Community support

Figure 5: Organizations must adapt their processes to align with customer processes and expectations

(Source: Forrester, “Reinventing BPM For The Age Of The Customer”, 2015)

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In light of these complexities, it’s imperative that organizations adopt the right technological approach for their digitalization initiatives, especially when it comes to user experience. That said, in order to operationalize the customer and employee journeys as well as provide a seamless experience, organizations must consider processes from the customer’s point of view, mapping all possible customer interactions. Then they must ensure that they are enabling a seamless, contextual experience. In other words, “one experience fits all” is not sufficient.

Understand the Challenge of Digitalizing the Business According to Forrester, enterprises manage an average of 268 different customer-facing web and mobile experiences that must take place seamlessly on different devices (tablet, desktop,

smartphone, and laptop), across which access must be guaranteed.

“…it’s evident that optimizing the end-to-end customer experience requires organizations to assimilate once disconnected channels of engagement. Indeed, four out of ten respondents report that multichannel management is a significant challenge to their organizations. What emerges is that the key issues with creating a consistent customer experience are systems integration, multichannel complexity, data issues, and organizational structure.

Source: Source: Harvard Business Review, Lessons from the Leading Edge of Customer Experience Management

Weeks

Weekly

1.4 million Android Apps

1.3 million iOS Apps

177 million websites

268 average number of customer-facing web

and mobile experiences managed by enterprises

Managing digital properties challenges firms Around the world, firms manage

millions of digital properties

Tablet Desktop Smartphone Laptop

40%

63% 67% 71% More than ever, customers engage via a variety of channels Percentage of US online adults who

personally use a:

Figure 6: Enterprises must manage an overwhelming number of customer-facing experiences

(Source: Forrester Research, The State Of Digital Experience Delivery, 2015)

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In terms of effective interaction design, organizations must design their business applications around the use case, not the device or channel. In other words, while it’s vital that business applications adapt to different screens sizes and device capabilities, it’s just as important to ensure application and interaction design consistency regardless of device, channel, or interaction mode. More specifically, organizations should ensure as much application consistency as possible from the end-user’s perspective to avoid any confusion. In parallel, they also should be able to take advantage of the benefits that the specific devices, channels, or interaction modes provide. In other words, customers should know what they are supposed to

do and should be able to achieve the result they want in the most efficient and effective way. Across all devices, channels, and interaction modes, they should also be able to easily engage a peer or expert for help with questions, or even a

concierge-style services to deal with more complicated matters or collaboratively solve a problem.

However, focusing on interaction design alone is not sufficient. Organizations must put in place the right processes to orchestrate interactions along and across the customer and employee journeys. This means supporting the full spectrum of interactions, from a very structured process to ad-hoc interactions, enabling flexibility to adapt to the situation at hand. Organizations need to identify the types of interactions and processes that will best support the customers’ needs and the business goal before defining how the interactions are orchestrated. Pushing too strongly in the structured direction

can prove counterproductive when it comes to serving customers. After all, different use cases require different levels of structure depending on whether or not decisions can be pre-determined or if the involved people – e.g., the customer and relationship manager – need the flexibility to make their own decisions.

Consider that in the investment banking world, relationship managers expect to be able to initiate an account opening at their office desk (likely a very structured process) and research investment options on an iPad alongside the client (an unstructured process with ad-hoc decisions). They then need to create an investment proposal on the laptop (perhaps a semi-

It’s about a spectrum of process functionality

There is no duality between structured vs. unstructured processes. Depending on their role, different stakeholders may perform either highly structured or highly dynamic functions. In order to cohesively orchestrate interactions across the interaction modes, both ends of the process spectrum are needed – and everything in between.

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structured process, requiring some level of flexibility), and finalize the process at home using their mobile phone (again, a structured process). If the bank only addressed this end-to-end process online, it would fail to address all scenarios and would be unable to optimize the experience for all interaction modes.

For customers, these various digital and physical (including the combined "DiPhy"-situations) interactions across different channels are the means to an end. In other words, the customer experience is not a one-time event happening at a certain touch point, but rather the sum of all interactions customers have with a business as they accomplish their goals.

Enabling all three interaction modes (pure service, self-service, and joint) by implementing many different specific technologies will make interconnection between systems complicated, especially as customers switch between interaction modes. Without careful forethought and planning, businesses risk developing an unwieldy technology infrastructure that will create numerous problems. This includes isolated technologies that must be supported in parallel, resulting in even more fragmentation, difficult application maintenance, and no support for agility. In the end, the organization won't be able to respond quickly and adeptly to customer needs.

Disconnected processes destroy the customer experience

As another example, picture a consumer preparing to purchase a vehicle. She conducts research online (in self-service mode) and then calls to make an appointment with a sales rep at a local car dealership. At the dealership, the sales rep walks her through the vehicle options and notes her selections using an application on his iPad as she looks on (in joint mode). After the order is placed, a confirmation email is sent to the customer. Unfortunately, the backend systems are not seamlessly integrated so as the order is being transmitted to the manufacturing plant, relevant data are lost. No one at the manufacturing plant realizes a problem has occurred, so the vehicle is manufactured based on the incorrect specifications (service mode).

“The leading-edge firms are doing substantially better across a range of key business indicators from revenue growth to quality and customer retention rates, in some cases outperforming by a factor of two or more. And they are confident about their ability to derive maximum value from customer experience in the future.”

Source: HBR, Lessons from the Leading Edge of Customer Experience Management

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When the customer receives a delivery email two weeks later, she calls the sales rep to arrange a time to pick up her vehicle. However, when she arrives at the dealership, she is dismayed to see that the vehicle does not match her specifications. When she points this out, the sales rep and his manager deny any error on their part and insist this is the car she ordered. The consumer refuses to pay for the vehicle and storms out of the dealership, frustrated and annoyed at all the time she wasted and the fact that she still needs to purchase a car. Once home, she posts an update to Facebook and Twitter about her horrible experience. In this scenario, disconnected interactions along the customer and employee journeys led to a poor customer experience,

which reflected poorly on the business.

In customers’ minds, it’s irrelevant what underlying systems and technology are enabling these interactions – their focus is on completing a process or transaction and accessing a service. And along the way, they want a seamless, continuous experience. They want businesses to hide all the underlying complexity and deliver an uninterrupted experience from beginning to end. Yet research by Forrester has found the biggest obstacles to effective customer-facing systems and initiatives include a lack of agility and inadequate integration with back-end systems.

Figure 7: Biggest barriers to digital experience success

(Source: Forrester Research, The State Of Digital Experience Delivery, 2015)

“When delivering customer-facing mobile and web initiatives, what are your biggest barriers to success?”

Organizations struggle to:

Create modern digital delivery organizations with limited budgets

Bridge silos between marketing, technology, and the business

Achieve agility and fast time-to-market

Organizational challenges

Lack of resources 61%

Lack of agility and time-to-market 57%

Process challenges 44%

Technology challenges

Integration challenges 61%

Technology implementation challenges 57%

Organizations struggle to:

Modernize legacy – often custom-coded – solutions

Use modern solutions to deliver multi-device experiences

Reconcile technical debt Integrate siloed solutions

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An outdated, fragmented application development approach is to blame Part of the explanation lies in the drawbacks of the traditional approach to developing and managing all these experiences or applications: it’s a disjointed, compartmentalized process requiring lots of back and forth between developers and business stakeholders. This is often complicated by the participation of a “middleman” who sometimes misinterprets business needs or fails to explain what is and isn’t technically possible.

At the same time, many organizations lack the skills or resources to adequately bridge the silos between technology and the business – especially when they are trying to modernize legacy applications. Further, many organizations still adopt an all-or-nothing approach to digitalizing their business, spearheading an overarching initiative to digitalize every aspect of their business and every customer interaction at once – a nearly impossible task for most companies.

Yet even in the midst of these broad-reaching efforts, the different departments, business units, and brands within an

organization usually work in silos rather than in collaboration to enable a truly unified customer experience. Because of this approach, digitalization initiatives are bogged down by agendas instead of focused on enabling a shared vision and goal of being customer centric. As a result, it’s a struggle to effectively understand and operationalize the full customer journey along all involved touch points. In other words, this approach makes it challenging – if not impossible – to meet customers’ expectations of a consistent experience across channels. Moreover, the application development and deployment process is too resource-intensive and lengthy.

“In the digital economy, businesses will live or die based on how they handle complex application strategies, including packaged applications, analytics, customer applications, cloud-based applications and mobile apps. All of these application environments need to deliver seamless user results and compelling, consumer-like user experiences.”

Gartner, Digital Business is Transforming How Organizations Approach Application

Development, June 22, 2015

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Adopt the Smart Approach to Achieving Digital Maturity As mentioned earlier, delivering a contextual user experience across touch points requires an understanding of the customer’s situation, channel, device, historical transactions and more. And as the user experience moves from one touch point to another, the organization must orchestrate different patterns of interactions. This requires the ability to manage all process types across the spectrum, from structured to ad-hoc, unstructured ones – and everything in between.

The challenge for the organization is two-fold:

• Orchestrate the interactions across these modes and channels into a seamless, contextual experience

• Collect and combine the information that is generated via the individual interactions and make it available on all other devices, channels and interaction modes.

To do this quickly, consistently and effectively, businesses must operationalize how they orchestrate, track and analyze these interactions.

Accomplishing this requires digital operational excellence. The organization must collect data at each customer touch point and use integrated analytics to fully understand customer behavior and likely next steps. Gaining this level of transparency into customer interactions is difficult using traditional architecture as the data is siloed across multiple departments and systems. Moreover, whenever the experience changes or needs to be adjusted, the organization is forced to tweak numerous

technologies and systems. Even a minor change can result in high cost and lots of effort.

Business Process Management (BPM) has traditionally been used to manage business processes.

More recently, Adaptive or Dynamic Case Management has surfaced to orchestrate more complex forms

of work.

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Figure 8: Digital operational excellence is the precursor to delivering an excellent digital customer experience

(Source: Forrester Research, Unleash Your Digital Business, 2014)

The solution is a platform that supports an agile, collaborative and iterative development process, along with optimization and upscaling of applications and experiences. This platform obviates the need for complex “waterfall” method projects and long testing and deployment cycles, enabling agility and a

reliable application management process. Moreover, it enables organizations to scale effortlessly as they build and continually release integrated applications that address rapidly changing customer needs and preferences. Plus, this platform enables businesses to build applications once and use them at any point in the customer and employee journeys, across channels, devices, and interaction modes for utmost efficiency. As a result, organizations can successfully implement a digital roadmap.

Digital customer experience

Digitize end-to-end

customer experience

Digitize products and services as part of the

value ecosystem.

Create trusted machines

Customer

Source enhanced operational capabilities

within a dynamic

ecosystem.

Drive rapid customer-

centric innovation.

Digitize for agility over

efficiency

Digital operational excellence

Enterprise

Two key imperatives: Digital customer experience and digital operational excellence Percentage of US online adults who personally use a:

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Conclusion: Business Must Drive the Digitalization Agenda In the past, organizations mainly introduced systems and applications to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but in the age of the customer, it’s imperative to introduce ones that drive revenue growth. After all, Gartner's 2014 CEO Survey revealed revenue growth as the most pressing strategic mandate in business today (Source: Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2015 and Beyond: Digital Business Is Driving 'Big Change' 4 October 2014). To achieve competitive advantage and drive revenues, organizations need to support and deliver a seamless user experience across devices, channels, and interaction modes. This fits perfectly with the growing trend of adopting an outside-in approach that prioritizes the satisfaction of customer needs over the achievement of organizational goals. That’s why it makes perfect sense that the CEOs surveyed by Gartner identified customer experience as one of their top priorities when it came to technology-related business capabilities needed to support their growth agendas.

With so much revenue growth at stake, the onus is on the business to assume ownership of this strategic initiative. One critical step in that direction is to focus on increasing agility and achieving business results rather than focusing on technical architecture when building applications. With that in mind, the business needs a platform that enables both business and IT to optimally design and orchestrate all interactions along the entire customer and employee journeys – even as customers and employees switch from one mode to another. In other words, business leaders should drive the adoption and use of technology that promotes a customer focus and empowers

employees to deliver on that goal – thereby combining the outside-in with the inside-out approach and fostering real-time engagement between all involved stakeholders.

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Figure 9: Combine the outside-in and inside-out approaches and enable them across the three interaction modes

This platform should make it possible for business and IT to efficiently collaborate around adapting existing applications and processes as well as developing new ones underpinning an excellent customer experience. Such a platform should enable both digital customer experience – a seamless, cohesive and contextual experience along the entire customer and employee

journeys in both the digital and physical realms – but also serve as the foundation for achieving digital operational excellence.

More information:

• Visit www.appway.com/customerjourney to download “Vendor Landscape: BPM Platforms For Digital Business” (Forrester Research, 2015) and watch an exclusive video interview between Appway's CEO Hanspeter Wolf and Clay Richardson, principal analyst at Forrester Research and guest speaker at the Appway Sphere 2015.

• For additional resources including white papers, webinars, brochures and factsheets, visit www.appway.com/resources

Client Company Joint Joint

Service

Insi

de

Ou

t Ou

tside

In

Self

About Appway

Appway builds software for today, and innovates for the

technology of the future. With over ten years of industry

experience, Appway guides the leading financial institutions,

both big and small, as they build sustainable and scalable

solutions that quickly adapt to changing conditions.

Headquartered in Switzerland with offices around the globe,

Appway’s award-winning software suite serves over 420,000

users worldwide. More than 225 institutions rely on Appway

to improve internal efficiencies, engage customers across all

channels, and keep ahead of regulations.

About Appway Platform

The Appway Platform gives organizations the power to

develop and operate scalable business applications as they

reinvent for the Digital Age. With its seamless orchestration of

people and systems, the comprehensive platform coordinates

processes in a unified digital workspace. The Appway Platform

also delivers key business insights, promoting collective

intelligence and inspiring companies to turn their visions into

running solutions.

appway.com

Copyright ©2016 Appway AG. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be

reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission of

the copyright owner.

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Master Customer Experience Excellence - APPWAY · PDF fileMaster Customer Experience Excellence ... airline tickets online or using a ticketing machine at a ... Service Joint Self