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Why Healthcare Must View Customer Experience as a Product

Drugs and devices matter less. Today’s patients look at care as an experience.

Leading organizations are no longer viewing customer experience as an add-on, but instead as a core product, and the healthcare industry has been slow to adapt. In an earlier article, I introduced execution-based barriers in delivering a winning customer experience. The first of those barriers are not viewing experience for any customer – B2B, patient, consumer, etc. – as a core product. Most companies that are not digitally native are guilty of this. They have locked themselves into how they operate or what they manufacture.

“They have gone beyond customer-centric and are customer-experience-centric.

If you ask the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, or health systems what their core products are, they will tell you drugs, plans, and care delivery, respectively. This is reinforced by their categorical descriptors, and that’s what their customers, investors, and the larger healthcare community want from them; pharma = drugs, payers = plans, providers = care. Now step outside of healthcare and consider everyone’s favorite “best company” for example, Amazon. Are they in the retail, logistics, or media business? The answer: it doesn’t matter. They build products around experiences. They have gone beyond customer-centric and are customer-experience-centric.

This Isn’t Another Sloppy Amazon Reference.

No one wants to read another naïve article about what healthcare can learn from Amazon, Uber, or Netflix. I want to make sure I bring this down into a very specific insight that all healthcare organizations can act upon: manage customer experiences as core products. The reason everyone raves about the experiences with the winning, digitally native brands is that each micro-moment is a product. Micro-experiences such as sign-up, sign-on, payment, and search are managed as discrete products with product teams of these famed digital brands.

Healthcare Organizations Are Already Skilled in This.

Most healthcare organizations have developed well-structured businesses around what they view as their core product. Insurers have a head of Medicare Advantage plans.  Health systems have a head of neurosciences. Life sciences companies have a head of Diabetes Care. And they also have multiple product managers that report up to these leaders. While easier-said-than-done, these organizations need to deploy that same model to experiences, and declare experiences and supporting micro-experiences as products.

Equally important is how healthcare companies deploy product management teams. As new products become mature, scaled products, the product management teams behind them need to adjust.  For healthcare leaders that haven’t kept tabs on modern product development, it has changed dramatically in recent years, as my colleague Tony Fross summarized.

Blending New Products With Legacy Products Is the Trick

Value from legacy products isn’t going away. Hospitals always need to treat sick people, pharma companies always need to invest in the next life-changing drug, and the opportunity to create new payment products seems endless. However, there is a difference between creating value and winning. All things equal, companies that focus on delivering great customer experiences within their competitive sets will be winners in the future.

Let’s take a quick look at the following three examples of healthcare organizations that are treating the customer experience as a core product:

  1. Pill Pack: It’s not the world’s first pharmacy, nor the first one to leverage digital. What has accelerated its success is that the entire operation is centered around customer experience. Yes, the drugs themselves and logistics are critical, but they are wrapped-around an experience-first “product”.
  2. Oscar Health: It’s nearly impossible to separate legal and regulatory policy from an insurance company’s performance. That said, Oscar Health has gone from 15,000 members in 2014 to 257,000 members in 2019 – even though its plan pricing and network coverage are nearly the same as established players, and even has fewer insurance products to pick from. Oscar’s rapid growth and continued expansion is based primarily around being “a health insurance company centered around the patient.” They even jokingly claim, “We didn’t create Oscar because we liked health insurance.”
  3. Geisinger Medical Center: Not all best-in-class examples are start-ups. Geisinger’s money-back guarantee is a great example of putting the customer experience first. Over the past three years, the organization has refunded between $200,000 to $400,000. Roughly the cost of three billboards for a year. Yet, it rallies employees to ensure they are putting the patient experience first. Patients feel like they are treated as people,     not objectives, and are more empowered and less anxious, which is unfortunately often the opposite in most hospitals.  The “money-back guarantee” is one of many examples where Geisinger is treating customer experience as a core product, and why it’s one of the most admired health systems in the US.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

When it comes to executing a customer experience strategy, healthcare organizations need to acquire new skills and expertise. Most health organizations have proven product management teams, sometimes called service lines or brand teams, but still maintain a highly focused approach to innovating and managing products. The critical shift is recognizing that customer experience is a product and should receive the same treatment, structure, and incentives as a legacy core product. Just as it’s being done in the companies transforming the world of healthcare as we know it today.

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Experience and Innovation Trends: What to Expect in 2020

Simplicity makes a comeback, as companies scurry to connect with customers and employees.

It’s no secret to us (or any of our clients) that advancements in experience and innovation are moving faster than almost every other aspect of business. In fact, spending on experience technologies jumped nearly 8 percent this year to $508 billion, and experts expect it to grow another 8.2 percent in the year ahead.

As companies raise the experience bar, we’re seeing major shifts in the way customers and employees interact with brands. If people can’t see a reason one brand stands out over another, they move on. In a world of practically limitless options, there’s always another choice.

Here are four ways we expect to see more companies – both B2B and B2C – shake up their approach to developing, launching and implementing better experiences.

1. Experience becomes the product, and vice versa.

It’s getting harder to differentiate an experience from a product and a product from an experience. Digitally native companies–especially those with a direct relationship to their customers – have led the way.

While it may be hard to define the “product” from a company like Uber, Spotify or Airbnb, these companies are monetizing experience. They understand that it is their primary commodity.

That means more complex experiences and a broader offering of products. It’s no surprise to companies in Silicon Valley, where companies like Slack, Glassdoor and PayPal have dedicated “product” teams versus “experience” teams. Legacy companies, including Adobe and Capital One, are also adopting this approach.

2. Jobs become talent incubators.

Unemployment rates, currently at a 50-year-low, are expected to stay that way in the year ahead, turning up the pressure on employers who are increasingly desperate to find new workers. That means making even more significant changes in the employee value proposition, especially to attract Gen Z and Centennials. Unlike older workers, these younger people favor purpose-driven employers, with 60 percent saying they believe brands should speak up about social issues. They want to work for companies that align with their own values and expect employers to adapt to and support their changing interests and lifestyles.

They don’t see their first job as merely a paycheck but as a stepping-stone. To win these young workers over, employers need to position themselves as enablers of a career path, whether they are a professional services firm, a tech startup or a fast-food brand. And they need to do so regardless of whether their workers stay with them or not.

“To win these young workers over, employers need to position themselves as enablers of a career path.”

Starbucks led this trend back in 2015, announcing free tuition at Arizona State University’s online program. The company, which had already offered two years of free classes, expanded it to cover four years, offering an undergraduate degree to full and part-time workers.

McDonald’s is taking steps in this direction with a “Where You Want To Be” Campaign, a concerted effort to help employees connect the skills they learn on the job with education, tuition assistance and career tools to take the next step in their professional journey.

McDonald’s developed the program by analyzing generational segments, zeroing in on the soft skills and industries that matter most to these young workers, which include arts and entertainment, technology, entrepreneurship and healthcare, as well as restaurants and food service. It teamed up with five influencers aligned to each industry, offering a few employees once-in-a-lifetime first-hand work experience.

It’s all part of a larger “Archways to Opportunity” program, which offers a suite of career development services, funds and tools designed to help restaurant employees identify potential career paths and chart a course of action to pursue them.

3. Companies build CX portfolios.

Increasingly, we see companies like Bose take steps to formalize the customer-experience role. They’re adding operational complexities to several internal initiatives, managing broad portfolios of customer-experience moves. That includes moving from idea to concept to prototype to scale, but also fixing what’s broken, getting up to par and trying to become “best in class.” Mature companies can manage this broad portfolio by creating experience and innovation organizations.

As they begin to manage these portfolios better, they’re also bearing down on CX measurement. The more companies spend, the more the burden of proof rises. Mature organizations have built-in processes that calculate customer experiences’ contribution to business and brand results, such as increased consumer satisfaction or better conversion rates.

But many companies still get stuck measuring across multiple channels. It’s not enough to know how well an e-commerce site does. Companies are striving for metrics that encompass the success of the full experience. Marketing tools like Adobe are already working on holistic measurements, but we expect the year ahead to bring new players to the field.

4. Simplified design makes a comeback.

With their attention pulled in so many different directions, people are craving more focus. That means simplicity has a higher perceived value. As a result, we expect to see more products and services that streamline experiences and choices.

Some of our favorite examples include Spotify’s Wrapped and Netflix’s updated approach to recommendations and categorization. Shopify is a leader too, with its one-click ordering, chat-based commerce and AR tools. Essentially, the future looks exciting and inspiring for those who adapt and pretty deadly for those who don’t.

Want to learn more about how experience and innovation can transform your business? Hear from our team about why experience matters here or get in touch today. 

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FINAL THOUGHTS

As companies continue to find new and better ways to develop high-impact customer experiences, they need to come to terms with fast-rising customer and employee expectations. Measuring the entire portfolio of experiences becomes more important.

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Brand & Activation: What to Expect in 2020

The most relevant brands are humanizing the way they treat customers, emphasizing privacy and empathy.

When it comes to spotting marketing trends, it’s easy to get distracted by the buzziest tech developments. But in our field of work, guiding the world’s leading brands to avenues of uncommon growth, there’s a higher likelihood that the most important trends aren’t brand new.

“In our field of work, guiding the world’s leading brands to avenues of uncommon growth, there’s a higher likelihood that the most important trends aren’t brand new.”

They’re ideas that sound familiar – the importance of customer experience, for example, or brand purpose – that are undergoing new and powerful changes.

And yes, staying on top of the latest technologies and trends like TikTok and VSCO girls certainly matters. But not as much as paying attention to these five developing – and seismic – shifts. Let’s take a closer look:

1. Digital experience makes way for humans.

For years now, the emerging importance of customer experience has driven big investments in digital technology. AI now powers everything from chatbots to voice activations to CRM machines. But to be truly regenerative – creating experiences that aren’t just satisfying, but also drive revenue – we’re seeing a movement to experiences that are deliberately human.

We’re not saying that the tech-stack trends of the last two decades are going away. And certainly, some of the least human brands continue to dominate our Brand Relevance Index® (BRI) – good luck ever connecting with a live person at Netflix or Amazon. (Sorry, Alexa, you don’t count.)

But in an era when intuitive and personalized digital experiences are expected, the pendulum is swinging back. Some of the fastest-growing brands rely on genuine warmth. When customers return a purchase to companies like Bombas, UNTUCKit and Casper, ultra-enthusiastic specialists artfully turn what might be a negative conversation into a rewarding experience. Zappos continues to set the gold standard here, training associates for four full weeks before letting them take a call. And B2B companies are making these changes, too.

It comes as no surprise that some of these brands are also the most digitally disruptive. Stitch Fix, an online personal stylist subscription service, may excel because its wardrobe selection choices are driven by some of the best AI out there. But it continues to grow because of the personal relationship customers develop with their stylists, fix after fix. This year, we’ll see brands think less about creating efficient experiences and more about injecting them with warmth.

2. Consumers have learned the difference between privacy and security–and are ready to hold brands accountable.

While concerns about security breaches and data privacy have been around for ages, mainstream consumers have mostly had their heads in the sand. But between Facebook’s ongoing fall from grace and legislative efforts to put data in the hands of consumers, outrage is entering the mainstream. It’s so top of mind that it’s the focus of Apple’s latest marketing efforts. “These are private things, personal things,” the ads say. “And they should belong to you, simple as that.” As people increasingly view tech companies as villains, we expect more companies to go on the offensive, convincing consumers that they are one of the good guys.

In this year’s BRI research, we talked to people about this issue specifically for the first time. On the measure of “I trust this brand to act responsibly with my data,” financial brands scored far better than tech companies. Fidelity, Turbo Tax, USAA, Vanguard and Visa led the list. Except for Apple and Android, which ranked in the top 20 by this measure, tech–including Amazon–scored poorly. And (no shocker here) Facebook came in dead last, followed by Twitter.

3. Think you’ve got brand purpose? Better ask Gen Z.

A funny thing has happened in the last five years, as companies rushed into purpose-based marketing. Gen Z (kids born between 1997 and 2012) are coming of age. And this problem-solving group is more fiercely committed to changing the world than their millennial older brothers and sisters.

New research shows that 90% are fed up with the negativity in the U.S., and are taking that millennial “OK, Boomer” thinking to the next level. They expect companies to help, if not take the lead. Some 83% consider a company’s purpose before deciding to work there, and 72% before making a purchase. Among their top concerns? Protecting the environment, racial and gender equality, LGBTQ rights and gun safety. Their heroes are peers like environmentalist Greta Thunberg and gun-safety advocate Emma Gonzales.

They favor brands that take bold stands on these issues, like Levi Strauss & Co. and Dick’s Sporting Goods for controversial positions on gun control, American Eagle’s Aerie for unretouched, inclusive marketing and Marvel for its diverse superheroes. Companies that continue to play it safe with purpose risk losing this vital audience.

4. Power for your people.

Making sure employees are engaged and supported at work is important to the success of any enterprise. Employees who trust their employer are far more likely to act in ways that help the company grow and prosper. But the world is watching, and 78% of people say that the single best measure of a company is how it treats its employees.

Employees demand more, too. In new research on trust, 67% expect prospective employers will join them in taking action on societal issues. And 71% of employees believe it is critically important for their CEO to respond to challenging times. Prophet’s recent research on how companies are powering transformation from the inside out confirms this.

More than a third of the companies surveyed are actively developing ways to retrain and reskill their workforce, and 33% already have a roadmap for making sure their corporate culture and growth plans focus on people. This all means more than firing high-level execs who misbehave. It requires managing organizational culture to drive digital transformation. And it calls for more planning, more flexibility and more empowerment for employees.

5. Hello, joy. We missed you.

As we head into an election year that promises to be even more toxic than 2016, people need relief. Scientists say 40% of America is already demonstrably stressed-out by current events, and 73% are worried about fake news being used as a weapon.

Smart brands will respond by offering moments of lightness, laughter and escape. Joy already powers some companies. Among those that soar on our “Makes me happy” measure in the BRI are Disney, Spotify and Hershey’s, with Pixar in first place. (Trust us: Frozen 2, Soul and Onward will be among the year’s most beloved movies.)

The ability to inspire people to be their best, happiest selves is more valuable in cynical times. The most inspiring brands in our Index – including LEGO, Pinterest, Etsy, Fitbit and TED – succeed by leveraging their inspiration to create communities. These people become the brand, uplifting one another in ways that are fun, authentic and rewarding. We predict many companies will borrow some of their tactics, striving to connect people in ways that make them feel better in challenging times.

We expect this urge to spread joy and connection to show up not just in messages, but in ambitious digital and IRL experiences. Think of it as a modern approach to what Coke tried to do, back in 1971, another deeply troubled period in the U.S. In their own way, we think many brands will try and remind us that joy is the real thing. And we’ll drink to that.

Want to up to date on 2020 trends? Read through our Brand Relevance Index® (BRI) for a better look at how 2019 stacked up or get in touch today. 

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Brands can become relentlessly relevant only by understanding that their audiences are always changing. Concerns that have seemed trendy or on the fringe can abruptly become mainstream, requiring fast responses from brands. Purpose, privacy, empathy and joy are important examples, and can help brands get closer to today’s consumers.

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Social Media Employee Advocacy

Employees like sharing work stories. Social efforts support employer branding and increase worker engagement.

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Tapping into the power of an engaged
social workforce

The use of employees to advocate on behalf of their brand is nothing new, but a combination of market forces and growing comfort with social business has created a tipping point for the growth of formalized Employee Advocacy programs. In Ed Terpening’s latest report, he surveyed brand leaders, employees and consumers to understand employee advocacy. His research uncovered motivations for companies investing in employee advocacy programs; what motivates employees to share information about their workplace; and what employee-driven content resonates most with customers.

Key Findings

  • 90% of brands surveyed are already pursuing or have plans to pursue some form of employee advocacy
  • Consumer response to employee posts often outperform traditional digital advertising results
  • 21% of consumers report “liking” employee posts – a far higher engagement rate than the average social ad
  • Employee advocacy drives employee engagement. When employees are asked how they felt after sharing work-related content, the leading response was “I feel more connected and enthusiastic about the company I work for”
  • Employee advocacy supports employment branding. When asked which employee-shared content consumers found most relevant, recruiting rose to the top
  • Interestingly, European consumers are less likely to be interested in a connection’s posts about work and European employees are less likely to share work-related content.
  • Europeans have a stronger preference for keeping work and home life separate: 44% of Europeans cited this as a reason for not sharing work-related content, compared to only 23% of North American

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The Key Elements For Building a Content Strategy

Our framework forces brands to think only of the customer, and which single archetype best serves them.

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By focusing more on the executional arms of content development and content marketing instead of a holistic content strategy, organizations can end up producing large volumes of content without a clear purpose or sense of direction. In addition, the different departments that deploy content can end up producing material with differing (and often competing) objectives. With limited resources and digital real estate for engaging customers, it’s crucial that the entire organization work off a single, coherent content strategy that explicitly states who the brand’s customer is, what is the major need or problem they have, and how the brand will fulfill that need using content.

Through our research, we found that companies with successful content strategies had clarity around what they wanted the content to do for their customers and strong criteria for what they would and wouldn’t publish. Our methodology for narrowing this focus for companies to choose one of five major content strategy archetypes:

  • Content as Presence
  • Content as a Window
  • Content as Currency
  • Content as Community
  • Content as Support

Key Findings

This report helps companies decide which archetype is best suited to help them deliver on a customer’s need while also meeting a business goal. It then walks through the sequence of steps that build upon this archetype to create a formalized strategy that minimizes content waste, aligns multiple teams around a common vision and helps them deliver on a unified customer experience.

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Five Ways to Design Impactful Experiences in Financial Services

Our research shows that brands should prioritize changes that focus on growth, agility and holistic perspectives.

Historically, product and price were the go-to levers for financial services leaders looking to drive growth, however, the importance placed on experience innovation today means it is now the most critical area of investment. Strategic and thoughtful experience design addresses the evolving expectations of digital-first customers, the increasing complexity of channels and business models and the growing reserves of untapped data across financial services relationships.

The industry is already taking notice. As uncovered in Altimeter’s State of Digital Transformation report, two-thirds of financial services organizations say ensuring a more consistent experience across touchpoints is a top internal priority, compared to just over half across other industries. But less than half of financial services organizations have taken the crucial step of mapping the end-to-end customer journey.

Designing effective experiences requires following a deliberate process that balances external and internal considerations, and creative analytical approaches. Over the course of working with hundreds of financial services clients around the world, we’ve found that the companies who best capture opportunities in experience innovation exemplify five key principles:

  1. They are human-centric
  2. They are growth-oriented
  3. They are operator-obsessed
  4. They bring a holistic perspective
  5. And they are designed for agility

The 5 Key Principles Required For Experience Innovation

Let’s dive deeper into what these principles look like in action:

Human-centric

In the past, financial services companies might have designed customer experiences from the inside out, building a profitable experience first and then finding a market for it. But experiences today must start with the needs of the people for whom they are designed – whether mass affluent consumers, high-net-worth individuals, captive agents, branch employees or independent advisors.

Established financial services firms can learn from newer players who have adopted a human-centric mindset to design for latent needs. Ellvest, for example, is an investment company that recognized most providers cater to a definitively male audience and saw an opportunity to build a brand designed for female investors’ unmet needs such as clearer access to female advisors, and a broader range of investment strategies. Ellvest has designed experiences that directly address these challenges, from providing tailored recommendations based on gender-specific salary curves to including larger retirement targets for longer female life expectancies. Taking a human-first approach has positioned Ellvest to capitalize on significant economic opportunity, given that women are expected to hold $72 trillion of private wealth by 2020.

Growth-oriented

While better catering to customer needs and behaviors, experience investments must drive business growth. In financial services especially, legacy business models can hinder brands from moving quickly enough to capitalize on growth opportunities to get access to new revenue sources and untapped customer data.

One way in which incumbent brands can better shift to market dynamics and customer needs is through strategic partnerships or purchases to get access to new platforms and technology, rather than building entirely in-house.

AXA recently partnered with insurtech company, Slice, to offer on-demand cyber insurance to small businesses – specifically, taking a policy normally sold with a $5-$10 million limit, and bringing it down to $250,000 to $3 million. The platform, powered by Slice, allows small business customers to purchase comprehensive coverage in a matter of minutes, submit the first notice of loss through claims bots and offers insightful data to help SMBs understand their cyber risk exposure. Customers also see an individualized dashboard with an overall cyber risk assessment and scores along with benchmark scores of their industry peers across each risk category. By partnering with an emerging player, AXA was able to bring the first-in-kind product to market in just three short months – delivering unique value to a new customer base while growing the business and tapping into new data.

Operator-obsessed

Experiences must be designed as much for the people and operators responsible for delivering them – employees, agents, call center reps, front-end developers or data scientists — as for the end-user, keeping feasibility of implementation and management top-of-mind.

When Prophet redesigned the treasury management experience for a large US bank, we took operators’ considerations into account throughout – understanding the business context, technical constraints and needs of the users responsible for serving the target clients. Through key use cases for both operators and clients, we designed and delivered a reimagined digital treasury management experience that followed an ideal journey with a responsive and mobile-first interface.

Holistic Perspective

While considering the needs of internal operators, financial services companies must also ensure organizational silos don’t lead to fractured ownership of experiences. Ultimately, financial services customers don’t care about organizational complexity; they just want solutions that consistently meet their needs across channels and touchpoints. Part of addressing internal challenges well means taking a holistic perspective to experience design.

The largest legacy banks in the US recognized this opportunity when they partnered to create Zelle, a peer-to-peer payments platform that integrates directly into existing banking apps. Eliminating the need to leave the secure environment of users’ personal banking apps, Zelle enables seamless money transfer through a single, trusted experience. Beyond successfully collaborating across internal groups—analytics, IT, marketing, and more — to bring this to market, these brands managed to break down competitive siloes to create greater value for the end-user.

“Ultimately, financial services customers don’t care about organizational complexity; they just want solutions.”

The result? Last year alone, users moved $119 billion through Zelle – nearly double the $62 billion moved through Venmo, which requires users to connect their bank account with the external app. And the holistic nature of the experience only continues to improve, with the number of participating regional banks increasing by over a third in early 2019.

Designed for Agility

Perhaps the most obvious difference between legacy financial services companies and their younger, fast-growing competitors is the rate at which they can move and adjust. Yet even the largest financial services firms can design experiences adaptable to rapidly evolving customer expectations and market conditions.

For example, Chase invested in new tools and processes to move with greater agility when launching experiences. The strategy included adopting an open API store and micro-services in its digital development, capitalizing on the rich data of its 47 million digital customers and implementing Scrum work processes. Chase’s agile design process led to the complete overhaul of its online and mobile experience in just 18 months.

Designing for agility should not be confused with the “move fast, break things” mantra of many Silicon Valley digital disruptors. In legacy financial services businesses, breaking things is not an option. Chase’s agile transformation has only improved its operating efficiencies, achieving a 99% straight-through processes rate on more than $5 trillion daily wholesale payments and lowering the cost per check deposits by 94% through digital transactions.

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As legacy financial services brands continue to focus on building experiences that allow them to challenge and surpass their disruptive competitors, these five principles can serve as north-star guides.

If you’d like to learn more about how experience-led innovation can drive growth in your business, please contact us today.

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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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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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FINAL THOUGHTS

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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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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Clive Rohald: Inside the Living Brand Experience

That means focusing on agile and dynamic design systems, and modern representations of brands.

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Clive Rohald, Executive Director and Partner at Prophet, shares what we mean by the term ‘living brand’ and why creative teams today need to move towards more agile, responsive systems. When it comes to design, it isn’t just about a specific color palette, or how the logo looks – it’s more about the interaction and how a brand fulfills a need or gap in your life.

Becoming a living brand is no longer an opportunity, but an obligation in order for brands to stay relevant to consumers. That being said, this strategic shift must not only be made but also maintained in order to remain a relevant brand year after year.

Learn more about how you can start to make this shift in your brand strategy.

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Setting Your Healthcare Business Up for Success

Drugs and devices are important. But holistic solutions bring brand, digital and patient experience in, too.

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How Can You Set Your Healthcare Business Up for Success?

The healthcare industry is continually changing, which makes succeeding hard, so how can your organisation or brands win? Fred Geyer, a Senior Partner at Prophet, shares the importance of bringing digital innovation, patient experience, and brand together in order to create better solutions and cost efficiencies. The relevance of the device or treatment is important, but it’s now about incorporating it effectively into the larger system and creating an experience, that will set winning brands apart.

Learn more about how you can succeed in the healthcare industry, by creating a winning brand.

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Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity

SCOTT DAVIS, JEFF GOURDJI

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Summary

As the industry sits on the edge of disruption, healthcare organizations need to transform to stay relevant.

Healthcare organizations now have both the motive and means to empower, engage, equip and enable consumers. While healthcare organizations have recognized the need to change, they have struggled to get started and sustain the effort. Based on conversations with leading healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Geisinger, Anthem, Aetna, Pfizer, Novartis and more, the book identifies five required shifts organizations can make to better compete in this evolving landscape.

Through case studies and practical examples, Making the Healthcare Shift provides healthcare leaders across the healthcare ecosystem with a playbook to make their organizations more consumer-centric.

“Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play or wherever books are sold.

Highlights

  • Identifies the five shifts healthcare companies need to make to become more consumer-centric.
  • Offers case studies and practical advice on how to make these five shifts become a reality.
  • Reveals how traditional healthcare organizations (payers, providers, pharma companies) can prepare for the changes to come and re-invent how they engage with consumers.
  • Provides practical advice for healthcare leaders across the globe who have the fortitude to transform their organizations to both compete and win in the age of healthcare consumerism.

Endorsements

Andrew Dreyfus
Chief Executive Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts

“The time has come to put the consumer at the center of everything. Scott and Jeff offer a guide to that important change. It’s grounded in consumer relationships that are built on partnership and collaboration”

Kevin Kumler
President of Health Systems, Zocdoc

“Our partners are getting more than the technology we provide – we help healthcare organizations become more digital and agile in nature. Scott and Jeff do a great job providing practical advice on how healthcare organizations can successfully partner with digital health companies.”

David Edelman
Chief Marketing Officer, Aetna

“Living the transformation in health, I know the path is not simple” That is why it is so refreshing to see the learning Scott and Jeff have brought in an extremely useful guide for change.”

Peter Corfield
Chief Commercial Officer, Spire Healthcare, U.K.

“…This book will help healthcare leaders – in any geography – win with consumers in their markets.”

About the Authors

Scott Davis

Scott is the Chief Growth Officer of Prophet, a leading strategic growth firm.  In over 25 years of brand and marketing strategy consulting, he has worked across an array of clients, including, GE, Allstate, Hershey’s, Microsoft, Boeing, Sara Lee, NBC Universal, the NBA, Target, Gulfstream, United Airlines, the City of Chicago. His work in healthcare includes Johnson & Johnson, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Mayo Clinic, Novant Health and an array of provider systems in the US and across the globe. Scott is a frequent guest lecturer at MBA programs across the country and served as an adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Scott is a contributing columnist at forbes.com and is the author of 3 previous books, including The Shift:  The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Leaders.

Jeff Gourdji

Jeff is a Partner and co-leader of the healthcare practice at Prophet.  With over 20 years of leading high-impact marketing & strategy projects, Jeff brings a breadth of experience that comes from working across many industries as a marketing practitioner, management consultant and political strategist. Jeff has worked extensively across the health care value chain across an array of growth challenges.  His current and past clients include Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medicine, Encompass Health, Anthem, Eli Lilly & Company and several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. Jeff is a frequent speaker and writer on healthcare topics and has been published or cited in Becker’s Hospital Review, Modern Healthcare, Medical Marketing & Media (MM&M), PM 360 and the Chicago Tribune. Jeff received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Want to speak to Scott or Jeff about how to become more consumer-centric? Contact us today.

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