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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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FINAL THOUGHTS

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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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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VIDEO

Clive Rohald: Inside the Living Brand Experience

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

2 min

Summary

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.

VIDEO

Setting Your Healthcare Business Up for Success

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

3 min

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.

BOOK

Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity

SCOTT DAVIS, JEFF GOURDJI

Buy Now

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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The B2B Moments That Matter

What happens in those first 90 days matters more than you realize.

Customer Experience is increasingly at the center of the conversation around growth. While it has rapidly become a competitive advantage and focus of investment for retail and consumer products businesses, B2B organizations have been more reticent to jump in. Unsure of where to start, how to measure impact, and the challenge of aligning complex organizations, B2B businesses have tended to take a narrower, more opportunistic view of their customer experience.

From our view working with some of the world’s strongest B2B brands, we’ve seen a different approach- and these B2B growth leaders have found a way to balance long-term CX strategy with short-term wins and proven impact. These leaders have done this with a relentless focus on the ‘moments that matter’ to their customers.  We define these moments as the intersection of a company’s distinct capabilities with an important decision and perception of the customer.

“These are decisions about how to make a strategic shift with new needs and requirements, what the universe of solutions to their challenges could look like and how to implement it into their complex business.”

Note, we’re not simply talking about the buying decision. These are decisions about how to make a strategic shift with new needs and requirements, what the universe of solutions to their challenges could look like and how to implement it into their complex business.

B2B businesses often focus their commercial efforts on the actual buying decision, relying on a strong sales force and product engineers to win the deal.  There is no question, that the actual buying decision is critical.

3 B2B Customer Experience Moments That Matter

Let’s take a look at the other ‘moments’ of the B2B customer experience to understand where organic growth largely comes from.

1. Strategic Re-Definition

In the B2B customer experience, particularly for industrial and technology businesses, this part of the journey is too often untapped and misses significant growth opportunities.  This step of the process is often invisible.  The customer is looking to make a pivot: from a traditional approach to a new one to address an opportunity or threat in their market.  They’re looking for ideas and approaches.  These are often driven by top-down strategy and pursued by cross-functional teams.  These ‘moments’ can take months, even years, to take shape.  However, disproportionate growth happens when you’re the partner there to help your customer make this transition.

Look at Alcoa, the global aluminum supplier, who did exactly this with the Ford F-150 lightweight truck.  Ford knew they needed to significantly reduce the weight and carbon footprint of this truck but were unsure of the technical design and operational implications of such a shift.  They needed unconventional thinking and they needed it early before truck design even begins.  Rather than focusing solely on the existing aluminum applications in Ford vehicles (think wheels, bumpers, and engine blocks), Alcoa stayed close to Ford’s upstream advanced engineering teams and was able to work with them on very early-stage testing to go to an aluminum-intensive vehicle.  The collaborative approach led to the development of the world’s first aluminum truck built at scale and a significant growth source for Alcoa.

2. Shaping the Customer’s Consideration Set

This is the step in the journey where customers have a clearly stated ambition and defined set of requirements, but they have not precisely determined how to pursue it.  While the ambition is clear, they are actively looking at alternative approaches to get to the end result.  They’re looking for a thought partner to show them a better solution or perhaps a better way to do business.

An approach to this moment played out in recent years in the world of agriculture.  When growers were looking for smarter, more effective ways to maximize their yield, a global seed provider was there to help them think differently about their alternatives.  Growers needed more than seed, they needed the confidence of how to manage their business over the full year to optimize their yield.  We helped this global seed company bring advanced technology solutions and insight to growers that helped them approach the planning, planting, growing, and harvesting seasons differently with more precision and personalization. This led to dramatic improvements in yields and risk management and helped this business shift how their business was seen- from quality seed provider to business partner.

3. Delivering in the “first 90 days”

From industrial products to technology and business services, perhaps the most critical moment is what we call the “first 90 days” from selection to implementation.  The actual length of time varies by market, but invariably we have seen this play out across markets and it is a big determinant of future growth.  When the first 90 days go well, your B2B customers are confident. They ask you to do more for them, they invite you in earlier to solve more problems and give you the position of primary supply.  However, too often, we see this part of the journey is siloed, underfunded, and reactive.  This step of the journey goes beyond traditional implementation and setup.  It includes training, communications, a readiness assessment, and on-site transition and technical support.  Too often, companies take a short-sighted view of those as hard costs, not a growth investment.

This isn’t about troubleshooting or retention- this is a growth moment.  For example, when we worked with a leading B2B facilities services business, we saw the correlation between the first 90 days and long-term share of wallet.  The more seamless the first 90 days were, the more services customers added over the next several years.  As a result, this business invested heavily in the implementation and onboarding stage to ensure a uniform rental customer had a great experience which opened up opportunities in janitorial, safety, and document management.  From relationship coordination to communications and syncing up with the customer’s business flow, the companies that do this well significantly outperform their peers on long-term growth. In B2B markets where the inertia and cost of switching providers is high, this can turn into a huge competitive advantage for the businesses that do it well.

How B2B Customer Experience Moments Lead to Growth

Time and time again, from materials to software to business services, these are the moments that we see driving disproportionate growth.  So, what does the process look like to get started?  When we look at B2B growth leaders, here’s how they’re approaching it:

Map the full journey from the customer’s perspective.

It’s critical to look at their complete journey, not just where they have touchpoints with you.  Then, through research and analytics, determine what matters most to them, where pain points are most significant, and where your business has capabilities it can exploit.

Define your CX principles and strategy.

Rather than going after fixes and quick wins, start with an aligned vision of the type of experience your business can and will deliver.  Define the principles that will become a signature for working with your business, and the strategy to tie all of the moves and important initiatives together.

Sequence the strategy with chain-link moves.

As you envision the future state experience and the strategy to get there, think about how you’ll establish momentum and the sequence of moves to get there.  CX strategy is never done, it requires waves of interdependent initiatives and agility to fully execute.

Include everyone.

Particularly in B2B organizations, CX includes virtually everyone.  Sales, Marketing, Technology, R&D, Engineering, Operations, Service, and Finance should all have a shared understanding of the customer journey and their role in bringing the enhanced experience strategy to life.  Engage each group early, get their perspectives and ideas, and ensure they have a seat at the table when it comes time to prioritize and design the future state.

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We believe there is no stronger, more sustainable growth opportunity available to B2B businesses than CX.  These hypotheses on the moments that matter and what they could mean in your category offer a good starting point for your business.

Learn how Prophet helps companies across the globe to create memorable, unique customer experiences.

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5 Fundamental Customer Experience Shifts Companies Need to Make

Rising consumer expectations means companies need to rethink what they mean by customer-centricity.

Evolved companies aren’t customer-centric. They’re 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 innovation. Amazon may have set the pace, but across every industry–from Lemonade in insurance to Coupa in procurement software to Veeva in pharmaceutical salesforce automation–companies are changing, and customers are responding.

Of course, everyone knows customer experience is important, and these days, it’s a mandate in every boardroom. Business leaders are realizing that memorable and engaging experiences aren’t just the key to growth, they’re the currency of the future.

But very few are doing it well. Spending money on experience and making it work are two different things. And as consumer expectations continue to rise, it’s harder for those offering merely ordinary experiences to catch up.

Challenges of Delivering Seamless Customer Experiences

While many companies are solving experience problems in blended digital and physical environments that delight customers in new ways, that complexity is challenging. Companies are scrambling to keep experiences consistent and on message across channels, markets and lines of business. And while messaging was once clearly under the control of marketing, the responsibility for experience, which now requires help from many disciplines, is diffuse, owned and driven by different departments.

Consumers, of course, don’t care about how complex or hard it is to deliver a stellar experience. They just know a few of their favorite brands that make it work every time, solving their problems and offering consistent ease of use—and the ones that fall short.

“Evolved companies aren’t customer-centric. They’re customer experience-centric.”

Exceptional experiences can only come from those using a holistic approach. Organizations must make philosophical and structural changes to truly be in the “business of experience.”
As many of those who have tried it know engaging contextual experiences don’t invent themselves. It takes a thoughtful reconsideration of the way employees collaborate with each other, capture data, set priorities, make decisions and measure success.

5 Fundamental Customer Experience Shifts Companies Need to Make

1. Experience for Its Own Sake to Bottom-Line Outcomes

Designing a magical, frictionless experience for its own sake is pointless. As companies get into the business of experience, they understand that the real objective is business impact, such as boosting revenue or increasing customer lifetime value. Clear business goals must precede design. Prophet partnered with an international life insurance company to build a CX playbook rooted in measurable business outcomes. After launching several rapid pilots—and seeing a real impact in conversion rates—the organization rallied around this new way of operating. The proof was in the metrics.

2. Brand Engagement to True Customer Obsession

Instead of thinking about customers at each touchpoint, genuinely understanding them calls for a much bigger picture. What worries them? What are their tensions? Their hopes? This holistic picture is essential and sometimes leads to big (and uncomfortable) realizations, such as the need to change the business model. This is how disrupters such as Casper, Lyft and Netflix have been able to become such disruptive forces in (and beyond) their industries; they became obsessed with unmet customer needs in their lives—not just how those customers interact with brands.

3. Brand as a Passive Voice in Experience to Experience Paying Off the Brand Promise

Branding is no longer just an element of experience; it has to drive it. The best experiences envelop customers, proving the brand’s value by offering something deeply personal. And conversely, poor–or even average–experiences undo that promise. After all, customers value brands more for the experiences they create than the promises they make.

4. Fragmented Touchpoints to Pervasive Digital-Powered Execution

In a world where customers leave digital breadcrumbs everywhere, running a business of separate islands —advertising here, in-store experience there– no longer works. Consumers have high expectations of consistency. When a furniture retailer asked us to reimagine its omnichannel experience, we put ourselves in the shoes of consumers, recognizing that the customer bounces back and forth between in-store and online constantly. We designed digital and retail touchpoints offering customers a consistent and personalized experience at every step of their buying journey.

5. Ad-Hoc Change Efforts to Change with Accountability

Initially, baby steps are required. But there soon needs to be a greater commitment, changing the way companies operate and collaborate. It calls for drafting the right technology roadmap and connecting decision-making to the best data. Moving along this curve requires conscious and vocal commitment from leadership.

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Experience Is The Face of Business Strategy

Experience is where the brand promise is either paid off or destroyed. At the same time, it is a way of building value that competitors can’t easily copy. The brand is the anchor that drives experience design, putting something in the marketplace that leaves an indelible impression in the mind of the customer.

Evolved enterprises understand that they are, at heart, experience-driven. They know the key ingredients are more than what the customer sees, and also take into account brand and operational models. And they strive to have these components work together, all reorienting the company to be in the business of experience.

Learn how Prophet can help your company become the customer-experience-driven enterprise that it needs to be.

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