Last month IDC Asia/Pacific held its IDC DX Summit and Future Enterprise Awards Asia/Pacific. IDC’s DX Summit and Future Enterprise Awards continue to celebrate the tech-enabled resilience of enterprises, as they navigate through the challenges and disruptions in the digitally changed world. The Future of Customers and Consumers (FoCC), one of the Future Enterprise benchmark categories, highlighted an exciting set of innovative digital transformations that focus on the customer at the center. For enterprises keen on customer experience as a brand differentiator, this discussion provides a glimpse into customer-centric innovations, and offers insights into how others in the global market are delivering on a human-centric, digital-first CX agenda.
The following section features a subset of the final regional entries that best exemplified how these enterprises are creating greater mutual value for their customer, and better growth outcomes for the organization. What differentiated this subset was an emphasis on delivering customers’ desired outcomes, a business-oriented rationale for AI/digital-human augmentation, resonating with the customer’s purpose, delivering on the whole journey experience, and completeness of vision in the solution.
- Data-Driven Customer Intelligence Platform by Bank of China (Hong Kong) Limited (FoCC Category Winner). With the use of AI and predictive machine learning insights, customer interactions are based on a 360-view fed by real-time intelligence on customer intent and delivered across multiple channels. This is carried forward during in journeys and delivered as Next Best Action strategies throughout the whole customer lifecycle. AI-based conversational prompts and tailored “nudges” create natural two-way contextual engagement and progress the customer toward their desired outcome. Key organization strengths were applied intelligence techniques that include structured and unstructured customer data when promoting adoption of new products, personalized pricing recommendations and marketing/product offer creation. Further, lifetime value data has been made accessible across teams – this infrastructure and sharing of customer information is invaluable in delivering a whole journey contextual experience.
- Open Banking OCBC by OCBC. To support Singapore’s national initiative to enhance personal financial literacy and planning the bank pioneered this program to effectively extend wealth conversations beyond high-net-worth individuals, making financial planning accessible to the masses. Journey and capability design began with and were anchored on the customer’s life events, goals, and desired outcomes. Design was also based on specific customer insights from VoC data and journey execution included data privacy and digital consent management processes. This was coupled with aggregated holdings from customers’ selected banks and government agencies, artificial intelligence nudges, curated investment journeys based on individual risk appetite, two-way contextual conversations with their customers, and personalized insights and financial tips. Further by continuing to monitor customer sentiment after rollout the bank there is a clear commitment to driving empathy at scale with predictable conversations while re-imagining the end-to-end digital investment journey.
- LIFE Lab by Shin Kong Life Insurance. The goal to create empathetic customer relationships rings clear in this initiative. The retail service was designed specifically to address the negative stereotype of life insurance’s traditional sales-centered model in Taiwan. The company aims to educate customers on how to make better life plans by recognizing and managing risks. Through creative use of digital discovery spaces, visual elements, and reframing the conversation in the customer’s language, products are introduced in a non-intrusive and low friction manner (without complex technical insurance details). This makes it easy to understand coverages, policy details, and customizable changes are easy to see and follow encouraging customer-initiated adoption. Capabilities such as gamification, scenario planning, and life events-based journeys focus on value for the customer rather than on making a sale. Further, the program strives to maintain transparency, e.g., in premium calculation and factors used to arrive at the premium amounts. A crucial aspect of success can also be attributed to clearly activating the experience strategy not just for the customer but also for internal operations and employees. The company invested in employee experience initiatives such as corresponding tools (e.g., LIFE Lab Plus) and training and enablement to optimize the final customer experience.
Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic forced enterprises to move forward and accelerate their rate of digital transformation. While the above examples are just a small subset of enterprises creating a differentiated experience, the key takeaway is clear – it is not sufficient for enterprises to merely focus on digital transformation, but that needs to include digitally transforming how they engage customers and consumers.
For more information on the Future of Customers and Consumers, please read our white paper, “Cultivating Mutual Trust with Sentiment Measurement”, or our eBook “Delivering Frictionless Engagement with Dynamic and Adaptable Customer Journeys“.
If you would like to learn more about the Future of Customers and Consumers or other IDC’s “Future of X” practices, visit our website.
