Understanding the trade-offs of bringing value to your customers
We’re brining you an episode, full of extremely valuable information on another CX-transforming concept – Decision-as-a-Service. The conversation with our guest focuses on the key steps of the DaaS implementation process, and sheds more light on another framework we’ve discussed prior – jobs-to-be-done, as well as meta jobs, executed by staff members.
Graham Hill is a management consultant, Interim and Director with over 30 years of experience directing business transformation projects. He designs, develops, delivers and operates complex marketing and customer experience management projects for major corporate clients in finance, telco and high-tech among others. Currently, Graham acts as an Associate Director at Optima Partners. Talk to Graham on LinkedIn.
How do you help customers implement data, as well as decision-as-a-service? Sharing the steps of the implementation process and discovering the WHYs.
Data is available during all those interactions with customers, and that helps them to guide them through the journeys. And obviously to create more value for them and for you as a company, because you need to be always trading off the value to the customer and the value to the company. That’s what this DaaS gives us. It’s a way that we can help the company and customers make better decisions using data decision support and automation.
Wrap data in interactions to create value. It’s a three-phase process. The first phase looks at how you understand the customer, because if we don’t understand the customer, we’re going to be doing things without being effective. It’s about understanding your business opportunities when you understand the customer. And then there’s a phase around actually delivering and deploying the solutions that bring those things together.
HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND THE CUSTOMER?
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Identify partners, part of the ecosystem the customer is currently using
Customers reach out to others in order to help them get those jobs done. To give you an example, let’s assume you’re a retail finance organisation, and you’re interested in the mortgage process you’re providing. Your job is to provide mortgages, services, and products that are associated with managing one’s home. To start that, you first need to look at the ecosystem that the customer uses as part of the process. Identify and look at the different partners in the ecosystem, and choose the ones that will create a better proposition for the customer.
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Identify customers’ jobs-to-be-done
Identifying jobs-to-be-done and through engagement and interaction – how each customer measures success, depending on their desired outcomes, gives the foundations to understand how to construct a better experience for the customer.
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Construct better customer journeys
The flow of interactions the customer has with the company forms the customer’s journey. Customer journeys result from interacting with the company, and the outcome of their attempt to get their jobs done. One way to create a journey is to map all past interactions between the company and the customer. Another way is to use data analytics to create various outcomes, and tailor the journey so it fits the desired outcome for each customer.
IDENTIFY BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
Once we have the journey mapped, the next phase is to identify key events in that journey from the company’s perspective, and the key triggers from the customer’s perspective. The opportunity arises when both the customer’s and the company’s jobs-to-be-done align. Once the key triggers are identified, then follow the improvement which might influence customer behaviour. For that, we need the right data to identify the prerequisites and the exact moment when a trigger occurs. Next, we inform the customer. To support the decision, we need to have the appropriate tools. That might include communications, marketing, a video tutorial. Some of these support tools can be automated. Simplifying and automating takes away the burden, hence improving the effectiveness of the organisation.
DESIGNING APPROPRIATE INTERVENTIONS
Once the triggers are identified, defined and improved, next follows designing appropriate interventions, which is the heart of decisioning as a service. What data do we need to identify the trigger and how do we carry out processing? We need to be looking at what are the right solutions to take to the customer. Is it a piece of marketing communication? Is it a sales prompt? In some cases, do they need anything at all? Our business rules about how we carry out these interactions, including the critical point, which will become a thing later about how do we do what we might call air traffic control.
What we find is that typically 20% of the customers would normally be targeted by 80% of the communications. Customers who have the most money have the most engagement with you, hence they have the most opportunities to tell you what they need to have managed.
DELIVER & DEPLOY: CLOSE-THE-LOOP
We find that it’s good to have a team that does the business design of decisions and decision support. There’s going to be a technical team that implements the technology to deliver solutions, meaning implementing the designs of the triggers, the next best actions in those solutions.
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