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Inside The Experience of Relentlessly Relevant Brands

How hyper-personalization, contextual shifts and intelligent offers are reshaping consumer expectations.

Culture is being re-coded, and people expect very different relationships with brands: more human, immediate, seamless and responsive.

Across every category, from healthcare to household goods, auto to automation, B2B to B2C, the companies that are building the most cohesive businesses—through what we call “dynamic and digital brand experiences”—are expanding their relevance and are growing faster than competitors.

Dynamic brand experiences are the new standard. A company that can functionally integrate around the customer with regard to technology, data, marketing and the customer experience is delivering its product and service not simply as an offer, but as an experience ecosystem: a hyper-contextual, empathetic, cohesive and humanized experience that responds to, learns from and anticipates its customers’ next moves and needs.

What Is a Relentlessly Relevant Brand?

We call them relentlessly relevant brands because they understand that they must prove themselves every day, that they operate within an ecosystem of customers and other brands, and they adapt their behaviors in real-time based on context.

They have both a brain and a heart. They are strategic and emotive, contextual and aware. And they lead with data-informed stories. Customers love these experience ecosystems.

“A relentlessly relevant brand is continuously testing its approach and optimizing it in real-time.”

In the modern brand world, relevance trumps consistency; the brand shifts and adjusts in the quest for individual relevancy, explicitly at the expense of being consistent. A relentlessly relevant brand is continuously testing its approach and optimizing it in real-time.

Here’s a simple metaphor: An individual behaves differently with her spouse, her children, and her colleagues. Each expression is authentic but unique. We each have a personal “code” that allows us to behave differently in different settings but still makes us recognizable across all our relationships.

Key Characteristics of Relentlessly Relevant Brands

Relentlessly relevant brands are already flourishing around us. The easiest way to identify them is by looking for entities that are already exhibiting these key characteristics:

Relentlessly relevant brands are hyper-personalized.

The experiences that brands offer are driven by empathy and are designed to feel personalized to each individual. With a rich data set on returning users, TurboTax makes filing taxes a breeze—with prefilled data and explanations about why tax returns might be different from past years, based on personalized events such as moving, getting married, or having a baby.

Relentlessly relevant brands are contextual.

The brand shifts how it acts, feels, and looks according to the environment in which it operates. With the addition of separate kids, music, and gaming environments, YouTube adapts depending on a user’s context. The YouTube Kids interface, for instance, offers icons instead of text navigation and family-friendly content only.

Relentlessly relevant brands are intelligent.

These brands are in learning mode all the time and use this knowledge to inform how they think, act, and engage with consumers. Netflix learns from its users’ viewing habits not only to offer recommendations on what to binge-watch next, but to actually create original content. The company famously commissioned “House of Cards” because it knew a wealth of users had streamed “The Social Network,” which was directed by “House of Cards” producer/director David Fincher.

Relentlessly relevant brands are continuous.

Infused with a digital pulse, brands maintain ongoing conversations with customers. Marriott’s new Li Yu program helps Chinese tourists traveling outside of China feel at home wherever they go. Through a WeChat program, these tourists can engage with a local concierge who can assist in Chinese with anything from restaurant recommendations to in-room amenities requests.

How to Become a Relentlessly Relevant Brand

Where to start? There is no single journey to becoming a relentlessly relevant brand and engaging customers through dynamic and digital experiences, but there are important features that empower brands to succeed in today’s transforming world:

To make your brand more contextual:

Update brand guidelines and toolkits to support adaptive design elements, data-driven content, and personalized, persona-specific experiences. Wrap core products with value-added services and experiences.

To make your brand more intelligent:

Offer customers opportunities to exchange data for improved service levels. Leverage predictive analytics to create proactive offers. Embed AI and machine learning into your data environment and smart (data-enabled) solutions.

To make your brand more continuous:

Use APIs to create seamless connections with ecosystem partners. Integrate customer data records and provide customer single sign in. Embed product extensions or solution recommendations in customer service and digital assets. Create value-added service layers and platforms for customers to expand customer utility and reward loyalty.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

We are living in an experience economy. Today, we understand that brands are no longer static logos or advertising campaigns, but total, immersive experiences.

For companies to grow, they must evolve from selling, distributing, or communicating to building dynamic brand experiences. To do this, they must be purpose-centered and powered through culture, capabilities and employee engagement.

They must become “humanized” organizations prepared to deliver experiences people remember and love—experiences that matter in both function and emotion, and consider the entire person—the head and heart. Brands no longer just have an opportunity, but they have an obligation to come to life in order to remain relevant and drive profitable growth.

Download Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index® to learn more about the brands that consumers simply can’t live without.

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Turning Small Acquisitions into Big Business Transformations

Integrating the new capabilities, technology and people is important. So is understanding its leaner culture.

You Acquired a Shiny, New Technology Company, Now What?

Mergers and acquisitions help many organizations accelerate digital transformation through the acquisition of new products/services, technology, processes or talent. For example, McDonald’s recently acquired the machine learning start-up Dynamic Yield for $300M to scale their use of machine learning technology and improve the customer experience.

While there is nothing new about large corporations acquiring small specialist products or capabilities; these “digital M&A” deals are often different because:

  1. The acquirer is typically a more traditional business
  2. It’s not a “mega” deal, but more likely a small acquisition of a start-up or growth stage firm with an enterprise value of few hundred-million dollars
  3. The motivation isn’t always about the products or capability but about the brand, culture, ways of working, processes and experiences
  4. The acquisition is being used as a vehicle to accelerate business transformations, though has little in common with the acquirer

The target acquisition company is likely to be less than 10 years old and has “grown up” in the digital age. Its business model, processes and structure are much more likely to look like a “lean startup” business and has never operated outside those principles (e.g., customer-focused, data-driven, empowered decision making, rapid/iterative product development and innovation).

Typical Integration Approaches Will Prevent Maximum Value Capture

The traditional approach to M&A, with its focus on integration and synergies, was designed to extract value from an acquisition, not to enable the transformation of the acquirer (by the digital characteristics or products of the target company). The traditional “victor” approach risks damaging three of the most valuable aspects of digital acquisition: people, customers and growth.

People

The employees of targeted small technology firms have been part of a rapidly growing start-up company with a distinct culture and ways of working. They are committed to the culture and company, and proud of what they have accomplished. Yet, after an acquisition, only 36 percent of founders expect to stay at their company (CBInsights, 2019) and 33 percent of employees will have left within a year (Kim, 2018). This attrition is value destructive in two ways:

  1. These employees are the talent who created, and knew how to operate the value, that was acquired in the company.
  2. The people are often the types of new thinkers and cultural change agents that are key to helping the acquirer pivot into a more digitally-enabled organization.

Describing these differences simply as a culture fit issue understates the challenge. These differences are deeply embedded in processes, organization and behaviors – even technology choices (pretty much the whole business model). A rapid flight immediately caps the value creation potential of the deal by stunting the acquirer’s ability to learn from and be more thoroughly transformed by the new, digitally-centered team.

Customers

The merger or acquisition will undoubtedly result in changes to the customer experience. Sometimes these changes can seem relatively trivial (minor billing changes or web page navigation) while others are more significant (new pricing structures or sales relationships). Big or small, changes in customer experience are magnified in the context of digital acquisitions.

“The traditional “victor” approach risks damaging three of the most valuable aspects of digital acquisition: people, customers and growth.”

These companies have been built from the market back, products of fierce customer obsession and rapid, often daily (or even hourly) updates to products or service experiences. Even the slightest variation, like slowing the release of new updates or adding a new approval layer, can reverberate negatively with customers that have come to expect a more frictionless experience.

If not managed carefully, changes that impact customer experience can cause customers to look for alternatives, taking with them not only revenue but the types of engagement, feedback and insight that are components to driving broader digital transformation.

Growth

When working on “digital” mergers and acquisitions, we find that the primary driver is to drive significant growth. This is atypical to most M&As which tend to be focused on finding cost synergies.

As a result, the post-merger integration that is applied to the acquisition is biased heavily towards the identification and realization of cost synergies in technology, finance and operations. This “traditional” integration methodology was never designed to drive growth, and it certainly was not designed to consider brand, customers and a digital operating model.

Four Integration Actions to Create Value and Ignite Business Transformation

To maximize the full value of your next small digital/technology acquisition, make sure your integration process preserves, and is ultimately transformed by, the full assets of the firm – it’s people, customer relationships and operating models. There are four integration actions that will help you preserve these assets:

Consider Brand and Customer Experience Early and Often

Ensure all functional discussions include conversations around customer impact and set the precedent that customer impact and experience is a priority. Assess how the integration is impacting your customer experience in terms of disruption and potential opportunity from initial deal planning through to deal close. You should leverage your existing customer journey maps to assess the potential impact. Consider creating a standard set of journeys that you can show side by side between yours and the acquired company’s customer journey to define a future consolidated journey.

After the deal close, you may want to discuss details of the acquisition with your largest and most strategically important customers (particularly the key customer of the acquired firm). For your own customers, this provides a great opportunity to discuss what it could mean for them and how they could benefit from the new products or capabilities.

Broaden Your Culture Assessments

Standard culture assessments help businesses understand the broader cultural and ways of working differences between the two organizations, but rarely provide enough insight into how the cultural differences will impact the ways of working. Nor do they place an emphasis on what the acquirer can or should do for the acquired business. You should broaden your culture assessments to identify key processes where digital capabilities are likely to have a high impact such as product development, experience, marketing and sales.

Quickly Integrate New Talent

The most effective ways to integrate the new organization and accelerate your digital journey is to quickly include talent from the acquired digital organization. You can do this in two ways:

  1. Look for individuals who you could move into your existing digital transformation program or team.
  2. Place one of the digital founders into a leadership role within your organization where they will be a significant stakeholder for your digital transformation activities.

You will need to reshape incentives and governance across the enterprise to meet and support the expectations of your new digital-first talent and start to change the behavior of your existing talent. In addition, you will need to help reskill your existing workforce so they can play well with their new digital native colleagues.

Shake Up or Test New Operating Models

Acquiring a new company provides an opportunity to shake up your existing operating model. Examine a few areas of the operating model where characteristics of the acquired business might help you move toward a more evolved digital enterprise. For example:

  • Governance: Does the acquired business have greater delegation in decision making which could help improve agility in certain more innovation driven functions?
  • Product: Is their product development process using customer feedback more effectively to drive higher customer satisfaction?
  • Measurement: Are their KPIs more consistent with digital products, and therefore driving improved performance?
  • Service: Do they have a stronger service and customer first culture which improved customer retention and loyalty?
  • Data: Are decision-making processes based on data or more effective?

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Digital mergers and acquisitions create a specific set of challenges that force us to think differently about our integration methodology. Given the rapidly changing world, and increased emphasis on growth, companies that embed digital transformation principles into their M&A integration process will driver higher returns on future digital M&A.

For more information on capturing greater value in the M&A, please get in touch.

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Experience-Led Transformation: Where to Start & How to Measure Progress

There’s harmony and happiness in the “X frontier.” Here’s how to find it and make it work for your customers.

When Charles Dickens said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” he may have been comparing a typical customer journey map to an ideal state experience.

The Benefits of Experience-Led Transformation

Look around: the “big four” Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all achieved initial critical mass by providing singularly satisfying, consistently outstanding experiences.

The world’s top innovative companies of 2019, such as Meituan Dianping (handles virtually ANY type of booking and delivery in China), Grab (squeezed Uber out of Singapore and broadened into food, travel booking, financial services and now even health insurance service delivery), Stitch Fix (the radically data-driven personal styling at scale fashion business), or Sweetgreen (fast casual, farm to table restaurant chain empire) – are all built on the backs of consistently satisfying experiences, at scale.

These companies move far beyond optimizing customer experience (CX), they are reaching the new “X frontier” – creating a harmonious environment for employee experience (EX) and partner experience (PX) in their respective value chains.

Because of these disruptors, expectations for general experience delivery has been raised everywhere. Sixty-seven percent of customers say standards for good experiences are higher than they’ve ever been; 76 percent expect companies to understand what they need and meet their expectations; and 64 percent find customer experience to be more important than price when it comes to making a purchase. Clearly experience drives customer value creation and loyalty.

We know it pays off for businesses, big time. Experience-driven businesses report between 1.6x – 1.9x higher YoY financial value growth because of improved retention, repeat purchase rates, average order size, and as a result, higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

In a nutshell: the rules have been reset and expectations raised. Experience is critical to success and risk of inaction intensifies– so WHY are so many organizations STILL nowhere close to transforming their approach to experience?

Common Challenges of Transforming Experiences

Two of the biggest challenges we hear from executives are:

  1. CX is a systematic and daunting task that involves every single muscle of the organizational mind, body and soul. Where do I start?
  2. The payoff sounds nice in theory, but how do I know if we are making progress? How do I measure this?

Where to Start with Experience-Led Transformation

There is such a thing as CX maturity. Knowing where your organization is on the maturity curve will help you determine where to start and prioritize battles to fight now vs. later. There are six criteria that typically defines an organization’s CX maturity level:

  • Vision & Strategy: to what degree does the organization (from CEO to frontline) share a CX-centric vision and govern CX with a formal, top-down, enterprise-wide process?
  • People & Culture: to what degree does the focus on CX drive the formal and informal cultural rituals and processes; do CX dedicated teams, cross-functional integration, and on-demand access to formal training exist, and is consistently adopted?
  • Design & Deliver Experiences: to what degree does the organization translate the CX vision to detailed blueprints and use it to manage the day-to-day operations and understand the degree to which the delivery matches the designers’ intention and deliver on the specific customer needs?
  • Segments & Data: to what degree does the organization have clear alignment on the customer segment(s), their priorities, and integrate multiple sources of data to track the holistic customer experience across online and offline channels, and have a clear data integration, live dashboard reporting, socialization & governance process in place?
  • Analytics, Measurements & Continuous Improvements: to what degree does the organization utilize integrated data and advanced analytics to guide continuous decision making, investment prioritization, improvement process and pinpoint ROI?
  • Agile Management: to what degree is the CX management process dynamic, real-time, based on maximizing value capture and is tied to key individual incentives?

The Power of Organizational Alignment

Most organizations are at an “ad-hoc” state, characterized by having siloed functionality and lack of commitment to holistic CX training, no coherent governance process or CX aspirations, limited conceptual journey mapping that treats all customers alike, and reactionary insights meant to describe the past rather than prescribe future actions.

If your organization is at the “ad-hoc” state, aligning leadership on the vision of transforming CX and justifying the investment by creating a case for change is crucial – without leadership alignment and focus businesses prolong the vicious cycle and incur wasteful costs.

“These companies move far beyond optimizing customer experience (CX), they are reaching the new “X frontier” – creating a harmonious environment for employee experience (EX) and partner experience (PX) in their respective value chains.”

Once organizations achieve alignment, the next step prioritizes the most critical use cases (i.e. prioritizing CX investment, reducing churn) and identifies the things standing in the way from delivering against these use cases. Approaching CX in this way ensures that the transformation will have the greatest impact and more importantly allows for the creation of a targeted initiative pipeline to close the gap.

One of our financial service clients wanted to prioritize CX investments to maximize value, and quickly realized the organization achieved greater maturity for data integration and analytics.

They were drinking from the proverbial data fire hose and had the data scientists in place to analyze these disparate types of data; however, they lacked connection to the customer or the business to provide a data-driven way of prioritizing opportunities.

3-Pronged Approach to Transform Customer Experiences

To overcome these challenges, we engineered a three-pronged approach to help transform CX:

  1. Lead with the Customer: fine tuning the segmentation to lend more insights about customers, identifying needs and motivations of highest value customers
  2. Connect to Business Impact: making sure all analytics and data process is empowered and managed so that the results can tie to business impact
  3. Drive Data-Backed Decisions: pointed the insights gained through analytics toward specific business leaders and their KPIs to drive better/more informed decisions

These three areas were then translated into specific work streams with assigned owners from various functions of the organization to can start to create the first wave of quick wins for the CX transformation journey.

How to Track Your Transformation Progress

Once the transformation gets initiated, how do you know if progress is being made?

Big leaps in technology, data, process and governance will register on the maturity assessment itself in a year or two. For less significant improvements a finer odometer needs to be used more frequently – to demonstrate quick wins and proper momentum, testing and learning, or quick course correcting.

A best-in-class B2B CX measuring system includes four components, each with a distinct role to play:

  • Annual Customer Survey: provides a comprehensive view of customers on ongoing topics of interest – a mechanism to track progress over time. Offers an opportunity to test a greater variety of questions and stimuli, including new hypotheses from BU leaders and marketing teams. Typically, CX metrics included in the annual customer survey would include customer satisfaction, NPS, specific touchpoint assessments based on recent experience, and competitive benchmarking.
  • Transactional Survey: provides a more nimble and frequent view of the most critical leading and lagging indicators identified by internal leadership and the annual surveys – all to help drive short- to mid-term decision making. This might be in the form of a website pop up survey right after you finish a transaction and have that experience fresh to mind.
  • In-Depth Customer Research: provides an opportunity to conduct in-depth research (typically qualitative) on specific subjects based on acute or broader strategic questions. Helps generate new ideas and opportunities to track/test in the annual survey efforts. For instance, the sales are down this month in a specific region and leadership is wondering if there are CX mistakes they need to learn from – given the narrow concentration and timely manner of this issue, in depth qual is best chosen over a survey
  • Account Conversations: plays a vital role in identifying account-specific issues and insights through the relationship managers.

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In summary, the elevated importance and urgency of experience-led transformation is widely evidenced both by the success and demise of companies on the two ends of the spectrum. Knowing where to start, and how to measure progress might just help some get started on this crucial transformational journey.

Begin your experience transformation journey.

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The Evolved Healthcare Enterprise: An Intro to the Three Archetypes

Are you a transformer, an invader or creator? The answer can change your growth trajectory.

Recently, it was announced that Amazon will start marketing PillPack pharmacy services to Prime members, and healthcare is watching. Today’s digitally-native organizations are inherently more agile than their decades-old competitors. Companies that think about digital differently are focused on driving growth – not just implementing the latest technology.

Evolved Enterprises: Driving Uncommon Growth

Prophet characterizes these companies as evolved enterprises because they are committed to three fundamentals of our digital age to drive uncommon growth.  These companies are:

  • Customer experience-centric: No matter who their customers are, these companies understand they are in the business of experience and they design their business models explicitly to compete on experience and innovation.
  • Building exceptional brands: Because digital businesses are interactive by definition, customers must have positive associations with your brand, which requires a radically reimagined marketing machine.
  • Mastering demand-generating capabilities: From aligning and deploying the salesforce to be more effective, to designing and curating martech stacks that are relevant and timely, these organizations know how to be efficient and effective with customer interactions.
  • Unleashing the talent of their people: Empowered, autonomous teams at the help organizations operate at the speed of digital. They are fast, flexible and responsive. When grounded in a shared purpose, this freedom unleashes innovation, engages employees and attracts critical talent.

These characteristics have proven to hold true across industries, including healthcare. Many healthcare executives would argue that they are not only true, but most traditional healthcare organizations are lagging behind. Historically, this is largely because healthcare organizations have had a somewhat captured market.

When they were founded, operations were frequently the sole challenge. Whether it was labor-management of a health system, manufacturing and distributing products, underwriting a diverse portfolio of insurance plans, etc., simply getting the work done, was the key challenge. There was a need to be product or service-focused. Digital has changed that, and winning organizations today are customer experience focused (not just customer-focused).

The Three Main Archetypes of Healthcare Consumer-Centricity

In my colleagues Jeff Gourdji and Scott Davis’s latest book, Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity, we see a number of organizations showing promise on their transformation journey. These “transformers” are one archetype of the evolved healthcare enterprises. In the following blog series, we’ll explore the following archetypes of Evolved Healthcare Enterprises that are emerging across the healthcare ecosystem:

Transformers

As mentioned above, these are traditional healthcare organizations seeking to transform and adopt traits of modern Evolved Healthcare Enterprises. These are often companies that fit nicely in the payer, provider, and life sciences sectors Geisinger Health is a great example of a transformer. The Geisinger Medical Center was founded over 100 years ago, as your typical hospital. However, it’s experience-first initiatives such as money-back guarantees and other innovative consumer, clinical, and cost approaches make it an evolved healthcare enterprise in the transformer category.

Creators

These are organizations that start as evolved healthcare enterprises, typically in the last 20 years and are digitally native, and synonymous with start-ups. They sometimes fit within traditional healthcare categories, such as the health insurer, Oscar. Frequently they are creating new sub-categories such as Patients Like Me that provide patient peer groups, helping support each other as well as sharing and discussing a variety of treatment methods that aid in research. Or Exact Sciences and their product Cologuard brings lab testing into the convenience of people’s homes.

Invaders

These are proven evolved enterprises outside of the healthcare industry that are moving in, often grabbing headlines such as Amazon, Apple, and Google. And with good reason, Apple Health Records and its ability to enable more portability of patient medical records is helping to break down EMR silos as patients move through the larger healthcare system. Amazon is now making bonafide medical devices that are HIPAA-compliant. Their “invasion” is quite real and is gaining more momentum every day.

“Companies that think about digital differently are focused on driving growth – not just implementing the latest technology.”

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In the subsequent parts of this series, we will dive deeper into each of these archetypes. We will highlight the inherent strengths  as well as the disadvantages of each archetype. Regardless of whether you’re a transformer, creator, invader, or none of the above, this series will underscore the amount of change we’re seeing in healthcare today as well as the opportunity the healthcare industry has to unlock growth by by embracing the digital age. Change is here, and it’s coming from everywhere.

Learn more about the ever-changing aspects of impactful healthcare customer experiences.

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Leveraging Organizational Culture to Achieve Uncommon Growth

Today’s leaders are beginning to understand that true transformation always requires a cultural change.

2 min

Why is Culture So Important Now?

According to Prophet Partners, Tony Fross and Helen Rosethorn, culture is so important now because in the past 20 years, the way we define and discover value has significantly changed. Organizations founded within this time period are thinking much differently than those founded before; and those more traditionally founded companies are looking for ways to also thrive in the digital era.

Our upcoming study will provide actionable strategies for digital transformation so that organizational leaders can get the outcomes they truly want.

Leveraging Organizational Culture to Power Business Growth

Organizational culture can be a powerful driver of growth in today’s landscape of transformation. But, is your culture helping or hindering your business to achieve its goals? Luckily, we have the secrets to success in our latest global study.

Culture is undoubtedly the most powerful fuel for maintaining a competitive advantage in business today. Our upcoming study by Helen Rosethorn and Tony Fross, both Partners at Prophet, provides processes for building a strong organizational culture.

This study provides insights from discussions with over 50 business leaders and 400 survey participants from across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and China, arming executives with a set of concrete steps to drive high-performing, fit-for-strategy cultures.

In today’s digital age, organizations’ efforts to adapt are ongoing. Now is the time to harness the power of culture and help your organisation achieve uncommon growth.

Download the report.

PODCAST

Healthcare Transformation: How Do We Get There?

On the Healthcare Rap podcast, Jeff Gourdji, co-author of the new book Making the Healthcare Shift, breaks down the 5 necessary shifts for becoming consumer-centric, and how marketing and technology are involved. All that, plus an inside look at launching his book and a shout-out to little moments that make a big difference.

Listen here

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How to Craft the Perfect About Us Page

These days, there are countless ways for consumers to conduct research on a brand. But before social, review sites, and other online directories, a company’s About Us page was really the only digital space that provided insight into its mission and identity.

Mat Zucker, Partner at Prophet, analyzed the About Us pages of some of the world’s top companies and was surprised to find how many fail to deliver real value with the stories they tell there.

In this interview with Zucker, he shares some vital takeaways from his analysis of successful About Us pages. You’ll learn steps for clarifying your brand’s voice and communicating that identity to your audience in the most intentional way possible, using one of the most essential (and undervalued) components of your online presence.

Listen to the podcast.

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Influence Podcast: Making the Healthcare Shift

7 min

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Key Elements of a Next-Generation Digital Marketing Strategy

Get new insights into demand generation, driving digital commerce and optimizing customer experience.

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Six Drivers of Digital Marketing Success

Digital marketing has come a long way from simply putting banner ads on the internet. It has evolved from mass messaging to personalized messaging, and finally to integrated communications in blended physical and digital environments.

In addition to the traditional goals of creating awareness about the brand, marketers can now choose from a new range of goals, ranging from demand generation, driving digital commerce, and optimizing the customer experience of products and services.

In order to deliver on these new goals, marketers need a next-gen digital marketing strategy, one that goes beyond the scope of what marketers could traditionally achieve and harnesses the power and complexity of today’s marketing technology and data platforms.

This report defines the key characteristics of a next-gen strategy, and identifies 6 drivers of its successful implementation to help you evaluate your team’s readiness for the next phase of its digital evolution.

In this report, you will learn:

  • What defines a ‘next-gen’ digital marketing strategy
  • What key factors drive success in this new marketing paradigm
  • How to prioritize the use cases and technologies that are most important to your marketing organization

Download the report below.

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How to Measure Customer Experience in Financial Services

It’s time to listen closely to customers, build better models and look beyond your industry for comparisons.

As customer experience (CX) becomes a central battleground for financial services companies, a number of new questions have been hounding experience leaders, product owners, marketers and operations heads:

  • How do I measure what truly matters across the experience?
  • How might I align a mix of functions, business units and regions behind a unified view of what matters?
  • How might I motivate these groups to coordinate in delivering a superior experience where it matters most?

We have worked with clients across a broad spectrum of measurement sophistication. On the one end, some have spent millions on sophisticated measurement software, only to then struggle with translating their firehose of data into actionable insights. And on the other end, some still rely on a mix of CSV files and manually-generated reports across disparate systems – and struggle with finding meaning across the disjointed, hard-to-compare data.

“In our work, we have sought to make measurement more actionable by defining a unified CX measurement framework.”

We have found that there are five key tenets that can help companies measure CX in ways that provide clarity, improve decision-making, and ultimately drive business impact.

1. Start With What Matters Most To Customers

Leaders at large organizations will know all too well that it’s tempting to only measure interactions and transactions that sit within their domain. Yet, this common mindset produces an incomplete view of what truly matters to customers across their entire journey.

For a large financial institution in North America, we discerned what was meaningful to measure by starting with a customer-led view of what truly mattered to them across their end-to-end experience journey. We used qualitative techniques such as in-depth interviews and ethnographies to reveal pivotal moments across the experience. We then used quantitative research to sharpen our understanding of customer behavior at key moments and clarify how these influenced specific business outcomes.

2. Define a Unified Framework Across Levels and Functions

Most large organizations have multiple CX measurement frameworks, techniques, KPIs, and reporting mechanisms. While each of these might serve the purpose of distinct management levels and functions, they also create multiple and different versions of ‘what truly matters.’ This makes it particularly difficult for cross-functional teams to translate insights into action.

In our work, we have sought to make measurement more actionable by defining a unified CX measurement framework. Such a framework can typically span different management levels and functions while also identifying relationships across key measures that allow a more cohesive view.

With such a framework in place, senior executives, managers and front-line operators can all form a shared narrative about the firm’s CX performance, issues and opportunities. Executives can use high-level KPIs to measure the overall company CX priorities. Managers can use more detailed KPIs to define actionable milestones in service of the overall priority and allocate investments. Front-line operators can leverage a highly detailed subset of metrics to mobilize plans, establish service-level targets and track progress.

3. Build a Better Model with Leading and Lagging Indicators

The process of developing a unified CX measurement framework requires a sharp eye toward identifying the right measures that accurately describe customer impact and eventually business impact. Getting this part right often falls on ensuring we consider a broad range of data (ideally, data related to operational measures, customer sentiment/perception, customer behavioral response, and business outcome) as well as robust econometric models and analytics that connect CX measurement explicitly to financial value.

For example, in developing a model that derived relationships across different CX metrics for a large U.S. financial services firm, our data and analytics team made sure to:

  • Account for time dynamics where observations in one time-period are linked to observations in different time-periods
  • Capture interaction and endogeneity by allowing variables that are jointly determined to ensure estimates account for simultaneity and interaction of variables
  • Measure non-linear relationships and account for diminishing returns to ensure true influence is isolated
  • Control and capture influence of macro-economic changes and shocks that influence the business (e.g., shifts in interest rates or regulatory changes
  • Account for uncertainty based on probability — identifying expected outcome, what’s possible, and likelihood through Monte Carlo simulations

Our analytics team was also able to parse out what leading indicators managers should frequently look at (such as engagement, digital activity) and how these eventually predicted lagging indicators (such as customer acquisition, retention, advocacy) and ultimately financial performance. Most importantly perhaps, the model was translated into a what-if simulator that allowed our client to assess the likely financial impact from a variety of potential CX improvements.

4. Look Within, and Beyond, Your Industry for Comparisons

Competitive benchmarks are useful when trying to understand the areas of the experience to invest in. However, we believe it’s a mistake these days to compare your CX to just your competitors alone. Your customers are certainly going well beyond and comparing it with leaders across multiple categories – and this is especially true in sectors where satisfaction is systemically low.

For example, for a large global insurance provider, our research revealed that their CX scores within a key market in Asia were higher than most of their competitors – especially in parts of the journey that mattered most. However, a closer look also revealed that industry-wide scores in this market were significantly lower than other comparable markets, reflecting a more systemic, sector-wide level of customer dissatisfaction.

Despite temptations of proclaiming that they were providing a “leading experience,” managers at this insurer quickly agreed that they had no appetite for being “the best of the worst.” Instead, they recognized this as a clear opportunity to leap-frog their competitors and newer disruptors by doubling down on their relative strength in CX.

5. Invest Disproportionately in Defining and Developing a Measurement Governance Model

The most sophisticated of measurement strategies can end up failing if they are not accompanied by a governance model to deploy, maintain and ultimately act upon insights that evolve or transform the CX.

In our experience, a successful governance model typically solves for three key questions:

  • What people across what organization/functions will deploy, maintain and act on experience measurement reporting and insights?
  • What management processes will be required to drive systematic deployment, maintenance and actionable CX improvements?
  • What data, technology and interactive tools will be required to acquire, store and provision KPIs at the various levels of fidelity required across the organization

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Ultimately, we believe that in the battle for winning on experience, firms that are able to combine a cogent experience measurement strategy with a robust governance model have a significant leg up. Such firms can see their end-to-end experience through the eyes of their customers. They can spot customer needs and opportunities in areas that matter most.

They can empower the right teams and executives with this insight quickly so they can act in real-time. And when they act, they can use customer insight to go beyond fixing what’s broken and deliver experiences that surprise and delight customers – and may even self-disrupt their model with more transformative innovation.

Learn more about how Prophet can help with customer experience to increase impact on your business.

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REPORT

The State of Digital Transformation 2019

Most transformation efforts continue to focus on modernizing customer touchpoints and enabling infrastructure.

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Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority — but there’s work to be done

Now in its fifth year, our annual “State of Digital Transformation” research continues to document the constantly evolving enterprise. As disruptive technologies and their impact on organizations and markets continue to progress, our research aims to capture the shifts and trends that are shaping modern digital transformation.

In 2019, strategic digital transformation is only becoming more pervasive moving beyond IT to impact competitiveness throughout the organization. Budgets are soaring. The list of disruptive technologies on the radar of stakeholders is expanding. Ownership is moving to the C-Suite and managed by cross-functional, collaborative groups. Customer experience (CX) continues to lead digital transformation investments, but as we observed in 2017, employee experience and organizational culture are also rising in importance to empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.

Digital Transformation as an Enterprise-Wide Movement

This year, it’s clear that digital transformation is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement. Digital transformation is modernizing how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy.

What’s also evident is that there is still much work to do as companies are, by and large, prioritizing technology over grasping the disruptive trends that are influencing markets and, more specifically, customer and employee behaviors and expectations.

The State of Digital Transformation: 5 Key Takeaways

  • A successful digital transformation is an enterprise-wide effort that is best served by a leader with broad organizational purview. For the second year in a row, CIOs are reported as most often owning or sponsoring digital transformation initiatives (28%), with CEOs increasingly playing a leadership role (23%).
  • Market pressures are the leading drivers of digital transformation as most efforts are spurred by growth opportunities (51%) and increased competitive pressure (41%). With high-profile data breach scandals making daily headlines, new regulatory standards like GDPR are also providing impetus for organizations to transform (38%).
  • While there is a growing acknowledgment of the importance of human factors in digital transformation – like employee experience and organizational culture – most transformation efforts continue to focus on modernizing customer touchpoints (54%) and enabling infrastructure (45%). But many organizations are not doing their due diligence when it comes to understanding their customers, with 41% of companies making investments in digital transformation without the guidance of thorough customer research.
  • Organizational buy-in remains a top challenge for those leading digital transformation. The companies we studied report digital transformation is still often perceived as a cost center (28%), and data to prove ROI is hard to come by (29%). Cultural issues also pose notable difficulty, with entrenched viewpoints, resistance to change (26%), and legal and compliance concerns (26%) stymieing progress.
  • Innovation is staking its claim within the organization. Nearly half of respondents report that they are building a culture of innovation, with in-house innovation teams becoming the norm.

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How to Define Your Verbal Branding Strategy

Voice, naming and nomenclature all factor into making choices with the most potential.

In today’s digital, always-on world, words are an increasingly powerful currency for brands to create real-time value and demonstrate relevance.

But finding the right words—and using them effectively—requires rigor and structure. Deploying a thoughtful verbal branding strategy (sometimes called a verbal identity) can help bridge your brand strategy to in-market execution through content, communications and experiences.

From finding the right voice, to building equity in key messages, to creating a methodical approach to portfolio naming, a clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications. Which, when done right, have the power to influence opinion, shift perceptions and ultimately help drive business growth.

Defining Your Verbal Branding Strategy

Strategic Naming

Simply put, names are one of the quickest ways for brands to tell their stories. A great name provides a glimpse into what a brand stands for and gives audiences a preview of the experience to come. And while good names can come from anywhere, the best ones are just as strategic as they are creative. Taking an art and science approach to naming ensures names not only signal a compelling story but also connect back to their strategy.

Before ideating names, it’s important to get strategically grounded by thinking through questions like:

  • What should my new name communicate about my business or product?
  • What should it signal for the future?
  • How will my audiences interact with the name? And where?
  • How can I avoid naming trends to create an enduring, evergreen name?
  • How can my name help me stand out in my category?

And because naming is inherently an emotional, subjective process, it’s key to align on these questions at the outset with all relevant stakeholders and decision-makers and bring them along for what will surely be an iterative process.

Nomenclature

But while most organizations aren’t naming or re-naming their company or hero product every day, almost all organizations are tasked with managing product, service or feature naming.

This is particularly true in today’s world of mergers, acquisitions and rapid innovation, where portfolios across categories have become complex and inconsistent, ultimately creating a confusing customer experience.

Nomenclature, also known as Naming Systems or Naming Architecture, allows brands to create order and hierarchy across their portfolios to provide internal clarity around offerings and how they work together as a whole. This creates a more simplified way for customers to better navigate a brand’s breadth of offerings, ultimately driving choice.

At Prophet, we take a considered, strategic approach to nomenclature that ensures existing portfolio names are optimized and streamlined, while also providing clear systems and constructs for creating new names. This creates efficiencies in naming and managing names internally while providing a system for growing and evolving portfolio names in the future.

Brand Voice

Just like people, brands also have unique personalities, styles and quirks that define their behaviors and relationships. Brand voice is the art of conveying that personality through how its people write and speak.

By using a distinct voice consistently across touchpoints, brands are able to make connections, strengthen relationships and build loyalty and affinity over time. Brand voice can also help you stand out and grab attention in a crowded or commoditized category. But creating a voice isn’t just a creative exercise—it’s also a strategic one. To be truly successful, your voice should be rooted in your brand strategy and organizational DNA, optimized for your industry, and reflective of your customers’ needs and attitudes.

“A clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications.”

But while your voice is a hardworking asset, simplicity and utility are key to successful execution. We recommend avoiding “attribute soup” and boiling your voice down to just 2-3 core components. If you were tasked with writing, say, a piece that must be Trusted, Friendly, Insightful, Bold, and Engaging—would you know where to start? Instead, try to identify the main hallmarks of your voice, and distill them into a persona and 2-3 directive principles that give your writers a clearer understanding of what “right” sounds like.

Messaging

Now, onto messaging. First things first, messaging themes aren’t copy—they guide copy. As high-level communications points, they can be dialed up and down across communications and adapted for different audiences—ensuring a flexible, cohesive expression, rather than a static, repetitive one.

Because messaging should help convey your strategy, your positioning or value proposition should be your starting point for developing your messages. If you don’t have that in place, you can still derive messages by thinking about the intersection between what your brand wants to say, and what your audience wants to hear—leaving room for how you’ll grow and evolve in the near future.

By prioritizing those ideas down to a focused set, you can bolster them with proof points, keywords or phrases that help writers and marketers bring them to life.

It can be easy to see how voice and messaging come to life in high-impact touchpoints like advertising or your website, but it’s equally, if not more important, to use these tools in more functional touchpoints, like customer service call center scripts and chatbots, so that on-strategy voice and messaging becomes an integral part of the entire customer experience.

Finally, don’t forget employee touchpoints. A compelling approach to voice and messaging can go a long way towards shaping internal communications and experiences that keep employees feeling engaged, informed, and inspired to live the brand more fully.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Defining your verbal branding strategy is a critical step in creating your brand expression. Once these assets are defined, make sure to bring them to life through steps like training and global adaptation. Because when done right and put in the hands of your marketers, your verbal branding strategy is a critical asset, connecting the dots between your strategy and expression, and shaping how your audiences perceive, engage with, and choose your brand going forward.

Learn more about using verbal branding to express your brand and business strategy.

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