5. Customer Touchpoint Technology

Winning over customer requires businesses to know better about customer. Larger the business spread, more important is to have a single view of customer to every business unit. Platform should provide faster communication to developers for the feedback and quick response, utilizing continuous delivery of changes. Platform should enable organisations to create consumer personas that can be utilized across organization to deliver personalized services. Today we operate in silos across most of the verticals. Leave aside different group companies (like Retail, Jio etc.), within one group company itself, people have different views and data of same customer (e.g., in JioMoney and Jio Telco), and they treat the customer in a disparate way. Verticals in organisations operate in silos with negligible collaboration amongst each other which results in multiple personas of the same customer. This severely impacts the overall customer experience and increases the cost of customer acquisition.

Organizations need to break and bridge information and customer silos and strive to create a unified customer persona across all channels and all verticals to take maximum advantage of the diversity and reach and provide customer with clear and consistent messaging across all touchpoints.

The customer touchpoint journey follows the five broad areas:

5.1 Single view of customer

The Single Customer View (SCV) is the process of cleansing, matching, merging and de-duplicating fragments of data, across multiple databases and from different verticals, bringing them together to form a single source of truth. The actual data may still reside in multiple databases across verticals, however, SCV provides a one view of customer across all touchpoints. In more advanced implementations, SCV presents the most relevant view of the customer from vertical/unit perspective.

In many scenarios, a Single Customer View doesn’t have to be singular. A company might operate several separate brands and each one could require its own SCV. Similarly, the SCV you need for the marketing team might be different to that needed for a logistics team. Whatever its purpose, it provides a trustworthy and accurate base for your targeting, communications, for personalization and for accurate and efficient strategies.

Statistics for customer touchpoints

Incomplete picture of customer expectation carries a heavy price with significant percentage of customers walking away from companies that –

On the other side of the coin customers indicate that a company’s active and intelligent engagement with them encourages desirable behaviour

Statistics for customer touchpoints

5.1.1 Customer point of view

Customer data is collected across channel which helps to create a uniform customer persona across products. Data collected from multiple sources enables organisation to grow, retain, engage and attract more customers.

Broadly organization needs to collect the following types of customer data:

As the organizations mature, they are able to derive the contextual customer information more accurately. It is important for organizations to put right tools and systems in place up front to ensure that all the three customer data types are available to business stakeholders. Every single touch point that customer directly or indirectly uses is a source of Customer Data and must be captured and ingested into the overall Single Customer View. Whether it is shopping in physical retail, speaking to call centre executive or listening to online music service, organizations needs to ensure that customer persona is getting updated and enriched.

5.1.2 Customer Lifetime Value

In marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV or often CLTV), lifetime customer value (LCV), or life-time value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. The cost of acquiring a new customer is almost four times the cost of retaining a customer hence it is of utmost importance that the true value of customer is realized. Customer Lifetime Value defines the financial value of each customer – and this information can answer some strategic questions and be applied to a number of use cases.

  • What’s a lead worth? Most CMOs really don’t know and even fewer CEOs know. When you have a definitive CLV and understand your lead-to-customer conversion rate you know exactly how much a lead is worth, and how much you should be willing to spend on new leads. Marketers who fail to understand their CLV are almost certainly either under spending or overspending in marketing acquisition costs (i.e. cost per lead) and probably also failing to spend the correct amount to keep and grow (existing) customers.

  • Are all customers equal? In the infamous words of Peppers & Rogers, “some customers are more equal than others.” Let’s not kid ourselves, its good business strategy to treat different customers differently. By segmenting customers according to margin or profit, smart businesses can deliver higher levels of service to more profitable customers and keep those customers longer. CLV also supports sensitivity analysis so that marketers can explicitly state the financial impact if the company is able to decrease customer churn by a given amount. Once you have a baseline measurement, you can devise CLV growth strategies that can be compared and prioritized against other competing sales objectives.

  • What’s the customer potential? By segmenting customers according to CLV and CLV Potential, marketers can apply more relevant campaigns for more predictable results. For example, identifying customers who reside in both a high CLV segment and a low customer-share segment suggest the greatest untapped potential and upside revenue opportunity. Customer segmentation also permits more personalized, timely and contextual campaigns to increase customer share and CLV – and increasing CLV in most segments by even a few percentage points can have a material effect on both top line revenues and bottom line earnings.

Most businesses measure customer profit, but that’s a historical metric. CLV is a predictive analytic that forecasts future value.

5.1.5 References for further study

5.1.5.1 Websites

5.1.5.2 Books and Papers

5.2 Content Strategy

5.2.1 Content definition

Content in this context refers to any and every thing that is created in an organisation and is meant for consumption by the end consumer. Content is distributed to users across channel to influence user decision. Content driven by data analytics that is personalized to cater to user specific needs and tastes facilitates lead nurturing. User data gathered from multiple models is used to predict user behaviour and categorize them into categories which helps to target user specific offers and campaigns. This not only increase the probability of lead conversion but also increase customer engagement.

We get information from companies all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (people also call it spam?). Relevant content presented together with proper marketing is what makes the difference between a happy customer and spammed one. That’s why content marketing is so intriguing and relevant in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages being sent per person per day.

Content strategy, delves deeper into the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” It seeks to manage content as a strategic asset across the entirety of the organization. In fact, content strategist Scott Abel wonderfully states it as one of his company’s main missions: “Your content is your most valuable business asset. Let us show you how to manage it efficiently and effectively.”

5.2.1 Content strategy elements

5.2.1 Segment and Identify audience

This ideally is done as part of the marketing activity of segmentation, targeting, using other tools. Data insights gives an accurate and real time view of this information about the present customers and their churn. ALso, it shares the content consumption pattern.

5.2.3 Content display

Select, Acquire and present the content to user as per the defined rules. This control and ease of connecting to the end consumer at granular level should be available as part of the platform.

5.2.4 Promotion and Monetization

Platform should enable creation of packages for the content being offered to customer, and promote new content that is relevant to customer to drive consumption.

5.2.5 Localization

Content presentation, as per various local languages is critical to stay relevant in local areas. THis should work out as central database for internationalization and evolve over time.

5.2.6 Discovery

Content across products should be discoverable and hence driving consumption. A common service across to store and provide search, recommendation for the content across organization can be a most important piece of Uniform View of customer from customer point of view.

5.2.8 Shared knowledge

For large organizations who are into multiple lines of business, creating a uniform view of products for customers requires to share various databases, content information across without compromising on the ownership of data and other regulatory aspects.

5.3 Personalization

Personalization is causing a shift across the landscape of consumer-facing brands. Already brands that create personalized experiences by integrating advanced digital technologies and proprietary data for customers are seeing revenue increase by 6% to 10%, which is two to three times faster than those that don’t. As a result, personalization leaders stand to capture a disproportionate share of category profits in the new age of individualized brands while slow movers will lose customers, share, and profits. Over the next five years in three sectors alone—retail, health care, and financial services—personalization will push a revenue shift of some $800 billion to the 15% of companies that get it right.

5.4 CD for Mobile

5.4.1 Continuous delivery for mobile

Mobile consumers are demanding more apps than ever before. McKinsey & Company predicts that app-related revenues will reach $70 billion by end of 2017, with 268 billion downloads. The demand for mobile services of every kind is insatiable. Apps now reign supreme and are the new point of access to Web-based programs such as Facebook, Google Apps, Amazon, Dropbox, and LinkedIn. Consumers want more than daily functional updates to their apps – including user experience and user interfaces – and without interruption to service. Some companies update their apps as many as tens of thousands of times daily, all in real time and without interruption.

Mobile experiences are now guided by context, especially with respect to mobile moments – specific moments in time at which “contextual enhancements” improve the user experience by pushing the right content at the right time.

Enterprise field mobility is also more important than ever, with tablets consistently replacing any other way of receiving real-time data from around the world. Mobile apps powered by analytics are not a one-way street. Rather, data fidelity also depends on continuous input from the field, which is analyzed and then pushed to appropriate users, whether in a local plant or around the world.

  • Technology fragmentation. The continuing proliferation of different mobile devices, and the rapid fragmentation of the market for management tools and operating systems, both act to adversely impact DevOps’ ability to keep pace with mobile app releases.
  • Back-end systems. Mobile app development inevitably drives changes to an enterprise’s back-end systems, requiring better collaboration between mobile and traditional development and operations teams.
  • Releases and updates. Mobile brings challenges in releasing and updating apps. Unlike the web environment, users must actively download updates. Not every user will, and rollbacks are usually not an option.
  • Instrumentation. For mobile apps, instrumentation can sometimes be poor, and the visibility of production use low. This will hinder continuous delivery – one of the core DevOps principles.

PLANNING A CONTINUOUS DELIVERY CHAIN FOR MOBILE

The special characteristics of mobile apps outlined above mean that several parts of your continuous delivery chain need to be designed differently in order to handle mobile.

Specifically, the following parts of the pipeline require extra attention in order to handle mobile software delivery:

  • Testing. Testing should be a part of any continuous delivery chain. But with mobile, your testing needs become more complex. For one, because you have to test for so many different hardware and software environments, testing needs to be as automated as possible in order to minimize the possibility of delays that could hinder continuous delivery. For another, you should consider breaking your automated testing into two stages. The first stage should occur early in the pipeline and involve testing on simulated mobile devices, since those tests run faster. But in order to guarantee quality, real-device testing should occur before software is deployed.
  • Multiple code branches. In order to support so many different types of mobile devices and apps that can be native, web-based, or a combination of the two, you’ll likely need to maintain multiple code branches, especially early in the pipeline.
  • Agile development frameworks. Any continuous delivery pipeline should be designed with agility in mind. But with mobile development, agility is especially important. That’s because a mobile app that is native today may be refactored to run as a web or hybrid app tomorrow. In order to have the flexibility to migrate to a new type of development framework, you need a highly agile delivery chain.
  • Automated deployment. Any continuous delivery pipeline should automate the deployment process, too. But here again, with mobile, the priority of automated deployment is especially high. You can’t rely on users, admins or anyone else to apply updates manually as part of your mobile app delivery.

5.4.2 What is Continuous Integration

It means merging of all the work done individually by developers to integration branch. This can happen multiple times a day. This need to go through static code checks, review, analysis to qualify for being available to next state of automated testing and hence deployment.

CI is – have we build it the right way? Hope we have not broken anything?

This is also covered in earlier sections for Delivery Infrastructure sections as well in greater detail.

5.4.3 Continuous Delivery / Deployment tools

It is an engineering approach which integrates CI as well. Team should be able to deliver software in small increments and fast enough, like weekly cycles. Software released should be reliable. It needs to be therefore tested well, reviewed well and gone through some iterations of system testing before going live.

CD is – did we build the right thing? will our customers face any issue?

5.4.3.1 Platforms for CD

5.4.3.2 AppStore Automation

5.4.3.3 Distribution

5.4.3.4 Testing Devices for app

5.4.3.5 Cloud CI

5.4.3.6 Checks and balances in CI pipeline

  • Maximize Developer feedback
    • Unit Test Coverage
    • Review comments response time
    • Automated tests for sanity
  • Maximize User delight
    • app Store rating
    • NPS Score
    • Bug Limit
    • Limit # of critical bugs on production
  • Visual dashboards to track testing / CI progress

A quick capture of the given commit, where it has failed in the pipeline gives required ownership in team and hence encourage self-improvement process in teams. This should be visible to the teams and affected stakeholders.

  • Testing automation to support CI

Automation for testing at every step and heavily to be done in earlier stages, to accelerate the continuous delivery. As discussed in Pivotal forums for Agile implementation, requirement defined in morning should be converted to shippable release by evening. It is not possible without automation and established pipeline across various stages / environments.

5.5 Channel Redirect

5.5.1 Redirections

5.5.1.1 Redirection to different channel

This about ensuring that if user gets redirected to different channel like from one place of consumption of content to another, it should be seamless. A very simple example here would be it should require user to sign-up once again if user interacts with a new platform. Same applies to subscription experience and customer support.

To implement this, the platform support to provide these as common service helps to create a faster application creation and deployment.

5.5.1.2 Engaging with multiple channels for same service

Another example here from real world would be primarily driven by design aspects of this experience. If we take bank, which provides user an option to go online and fill form and than visit a bank. What is the experience that this customer gets at bank, following are the questions which should be answered and it is w.r.t. involvement of two channels to get things done :

  • Is the branch that is being offered is near to the customer’s location?
  • Is branch asking for all the information that is provided already by customer?
  • Is it creating perceivable difference in service provided versus traditional way by way of saving time, providing more information etc.

5.5.2 Design for redirection

Platform should be easily reachable for desired information by application to ensure customer has seamless experience with organization and generates value.

5.5.2.1 Example Case study

How Alibaba did it right -

Tech giant Alibaba is known for being an e-commerce leader (the company had almost 450 million active buyers on its sites in the last quarter of 2016), but the company’s operations also include social media, e-payments, location services, and video and mobile offerings. Alibaba uses the data collected from billions of transactions across its platforms to create a variety of personalized experiences for customers.

For example, the company offers:

  • Tools that enable merchants to tailor storefronts and products to individual customers
  • Personalized search results, offers, and product recommendations
  • Personalized newsfeeds, display ads, product reviews, and user-generated content to keep shoppers engaged
  • Personalized sales experiences, with instant chat connections between sellers and buyers
  • A mobile app, Miao Street, that lets merchants’ physical stores send personalized offers to customers who are in or near the store
  • Personalized offers from stores and restaurants for users of Alipay, the payment app of sister company Ant Financial Services

Ant Financial, an Alibaba-affiliated company, has built a user base of 500 million consumers, 80% of whom were involved in two or more “consumption scenarios” in 2015 that focused on products and services from Alibaba and Ant Financial. Ant Financial aims to serve 2 billion customers globally in ten years.