What the new digital playing field looks like

Rapid shifts to mobile, rich content, social media and, critically, ecosystem platforms which intermediate the buyer/seller relationship give consumers significantly more knowledge and price transparency which translates to more power in the buying experience.

"Rapid [tech-driven] shifts in the buyer/seller relationship have empowered consumers with significantly more knowledge and price transparency."
Darren Abbruzzese, GM, Data, ANZ

That means if companies are going to stand apart they must do something different.

Organisations can innovate on product features which may for a brief period of time provide a point of difference but new features are often quickly copied by competitors reaffirming, levelling the playing field – but still leaving companies with greater internal complexity to manage.

To standout and succeed in the digital age organisations need to focus on delivering an intuitive, personalised and seamless customer experience driving stickiness, loyalty and long-term relationships.

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ENGAGING EXPERIENCE

By leveraging data analytics, organisations can develop highly engaging customer experiences as a key way to build a growing and sustainable market share, while avoiding a margin-destroying race to the bottom on price.

Native digital disrupters and ecosystem drivers such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Airbnb and Uber implicitly understand the value of data analytics and employ these to enrich customer experience.

Think of Amazon suggesting items you may like based on your purchase and those of previous customers or Uber’s aggregation of customer demand, traffic conditions and expected travel times to implement ‘surge pricing’ attracting more drivers into the system during busy periods.

These digital leaders treat data as a strategic asset, valuing and leveraging it to improve the user experience, integrating their product seamlessly into their customers’ lives. In doing so, they set a new minimum level of experience customers just expect and for others to match.

DIGITAL NATIVES

The use of data to deliver a personalised experience isn’t limited to digital natives, pre-digital organisations can also capitalise on the unique data they possess.

Southwest Airlines runs speech analytics over their service centre calls to extract a deeper and more meaningful understanding of what their customers need. A major Australian telco analyses searches on their website and sends signals into their call centre router, connecting customers deemed at risk of leaving to crack sales staff.

Opower, a US-based utility company, uses big data to analyse fine-grained customer consumption from smart meters and feeds this back to customers with value-added insights, allowing them to monitor and change their habits to be more energy efficient.

Disney puts big data to great use in their theme parks by combining purchase and ride histories with RFID-enabled wrist bands to direct your favourite action heroes and fairies right to where you are for live, personalised performances.

Most companies these days, digital natives and otherwise, will already be capturing the data they need to develop truly engaging customer experiences. Customer static data, transaction data, website access logs and search strings, product financials and usage patterns are easily sourced from frontline systems.

Further, the technology to bring this data together, model and analyse it for valuable experience-creating opportunities already exists and is readily available in an ever-expanding and maturing array of open source, proprietary and cloud-based solutions.

What is lacking is a top-down led desire for an enduring customer relationship, one than transcends organisational silos, where raw data assets from across the company are brought together to create a defining customer experience proposition.

Darren Abbruzzese is GM, Data at ANZ

A version of this story originally appeared in APAC CIO Outlook Magazine