How to Gain a Competitive Edge

Join us for a transformative workshop where we delve into the art of Intelligent Orchestration to elevate customer experiences (CX). We will share a recent study on the ways market leaders balance of technology, data, and operational investments to mature their organizations and accelerate growth. Participants will gain insights into overcoming common barriers and how to align their organization towards a customer-centric approach.

Transcription:

Kelly Slothower (00:10):
Oh, there's those lights. Got it. You hear me? Okay? Yeah. Awesome. Well, if you're in the right place, it means that you're here to gain a competitive advantage, and I'm here to help tell you how. My name is Kelly Slothower. I lead the CX and CRM practice at Cognizant, which is a $20 billion tech advisory company. But today I'm going to talk about a lot of things, tech being just one of those things. Will you check my timer? Thank you. So if you know anything about customer experience, that customer experience drives business value. Is anybody here trying to attract new customers? Yeah. Okay. A lot of you. Okay, great. Anyone trying to increase and deepen relationships with customers so that they're using more of your products? Couple. Yeah. How about increasing your customer retention? Anyone trying to prevent churn? Yes. Okay. And how about reducing cost to serve? This is a hot topic today. Anybody trying to reduce cost to serve? Yes. Okay. I forgot to mention, this is a workshop up, so I'm going to need participation. And actually later you're going to have to do a little working session on your tables. So there will be a little bit of some math later. So I'm warning you in advance. You're going to have to add. Okay.

(01:52):
Let's see. And so one of the things I wanted to call out here, this is from our study, but we did find that in terms of attracting new customers through referrals after a great customer experience, that banking skews to being a multiplier there. And so your industry is fueled by people giving great referrals. And that means you have to have great experiences. So when I think about customer experience as a human, what I want it to feel like is what's on top here. I want it to be super easy, but everyone in this room that's doing CX knows it's way more complex than that, right? It feels like this is actually a single line. It's probably has a lot of tentacles also. But what we are trying to achieve is at the top there.

(02:45):
So when we think about as Cognizant what we believe, we believe that growth is going to come from organizations who can align people, process, tech, and data in an ecosystem that's dynamic. If you think about the world, it's moving very, very fast. Tech is evolving, customer expectations are evolving, and that is all moving very rapidly and it's never going to get slower. It's only going to get faster. Things are being adopted much more quickly. And so when I think about the dynamic ecosystem, customer experience is not a one-stop effort. It has to be continuous improvement towards something dynamic because it's going to continue to evolve.

(03:35):
So if you read the session notes, you know that I'm going to give you results of a survey. And so we partnered with Forrester to do a survey and I started my career as a researcher. So I'm going to do the methodology slide just to anchor you in what we did. So over here is our sample. You'll notice that it skews, I've called out that it skews banking and financial services. It also skews North America. It skews large companies, which are classified as 5 billion and above, and it also skews D plus in terms of title. And our sample is 769 decision makers inside of these companies. Questions on the method before we dive in?

(04:27):
No. Okay. And I should mention at the end of this session, at the end of the week, we're going to send out this as the full white paper for you. So you'll have all of the data from us, and I'll include this methodology slide. I know that's everyone's favorite. Okay, so six slides in. I haven't said AI yet, so I have to do that, right? That's what conferences are about today is ai. So we're going to talk about the topic of intelligent orchestration. And so let's start with the definition. The definition of intelligent orchestration is that we have a strategy that's enabled by technology, and that technology is leveraging data and AI to inform and automate across these interoperable applications to create a dynamic experience. And we say dynamic experience, we mean something that morphs with the customer needs as they go through their journey. So this is the definition that we're working with today. A so the way that we broke down intelligent orchestration is in these four categories, strategy, which is really about leadership, advocacy and empowering the organization to surround a customer. Obsession data is really about getting real time context to whoever's interacting with the customer. Technology is my favorite topic, but technology is about rationalizing and incorporating innovation. That is the hot topics today are AI, automation, cognition, and learning. And then operations is how you're efficiently and effectively bringing things together across to support the entire customer journey. So these are the four sections.

(06:21):
Any questions about the four? You're about to be quizzed. Okay, so what we did, there was a lot of questions. It was like a 20 minute long survey. So there was like 150 questions. And so I've bowed it down or summarized them into these 10 questions, and that's what you're going to find on your sheets in the middle of the table. Because I thought, wouldn't it be fun for you to evaluate your own maturity before I give you the context of everybody else's answers? So go ahead and take a sheet there in the center of the table. And if you'll notice there's a one to five scale. One means it does not describe my company at all, and five means it describes my company very well. So one is low and five is high. So you're going to use a one to five scale and rate your company the best of your knowledge on these 10 items. And I recognize we're at the digital banking summit, and I could have done this digitally, but I wanted you to have a handout. I wanted you to have an archive, some asset to take home with you.

(08:31):
So I promised math. So there is a summation bar at the bottom. So it should be total out of 50 points. Total possible 50 points. Anybody need a little bit more time to add you? All good? Okay. The hardest part of the day. Now I'm going to ask you to do an average, an average of 10. And I know I'm talking to bankers. This is statistics though. So in order to calculate the average, I want you to put a decimal place between the number that you have on your page. So if you have 35, make it 3.5. I'm a little snarky. Okay. Does everyone have a number? Yeah. Okay, let's do some participation. Now, what was the hardest thing to assess in this survey strategy? Yeah, tell me more about that. It's hard

Audience Member 1 (10:13):
Getting especially strategy, customer full next day.

Kelly Slothower (10:35):
Yeah. So we're talking up here about having full alignment and then it's suddenly vanishing and having that full alignment, how hard that is to maintain because priorities shift and you are not sure if yesterday is the same as today. It's very hard thing to do. Yes. Others? What were some other hard things to assess? Data.

Audience Member 2 (11:04):
Sorry. Data. Yeah. And it is, there's a lot of data out there and how do I pull it together so I can use it? I guess that's where the challenge I thought was is we have it, but doesn't mean that I have access to do things with the data.

Kelly Slothower (11:22):
Yes. So we find data falls into a couple challenges. Is it siloed, meaning that you're not sure it's true or that there's no single source for it or it's there, but you can't activate it because sitting in some warehouse and it's all sort of scattered and you need to aggregate it to some sort of meaningful data point? Yes. Strategy and data. I would argue that data is probably the biggest barrier for most companies in terms of maturing to intelligent orchestration. And I find it interesting to start talking about AI before we haven't talked about data because you can't really do great AI without having a great knowledge management, without training it, without giving it the data that it needs. So yell out some of your scores. Anybody proud of their score? Write to yell it out.

Audience Member 3 (12:12):
2.9.

Kelly Slothower (12:13):
2.9, great. Yep. Anybody ready? Anybody else?

(12:21):
What was that? 2.6? You guys are honest in this room. I like this room. Yeah, those are real numbers right there. Anybody else who thinks they have high number 2.9? 2.9 is high. Yeah, 2.6 might be low. Is that what we're saying? And no one else is ready to share. Okay, well you can keep it to yourself. But when you go back to your organization, this is sort of your agenda for things that you need to work on. And so take note of where you're weak and where you could use some help in your organizations and figure out what's preventing progress of data or strategy and why you can't commit to things. And maybe it's not in writing, things like that that will help you then mature your organization toward something more mature. So do you want to know where you stand? So earlier in this room, however many of you were here earlier, Susan Fogarty was one of our panelists.

(13:28):
Susan Fogarty Jacks was one of our panelists, and she said her credit union anchors outside of banking and financial services for their benchmarks. And I thought that was interesting because you start to get insular myopic in terms of how you're evaluating success. And she's using hospitality companies to evaluate how good their customer experience is. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. And the reason I'm talking about this is because our data set was beyond banking and financial services. And so these are the three tiers, if you will, of where we saw people falling. And of course we couldn't validate them for their honesty on this survey, but you'll see the reason I had to do an average is because the average is at the top of the screen here. So we put it into three categories, laggards, which is anything under 3.4 or those that didn't do the calculations. Anything under 34 intermediates, anything between 3.5 to 3.8 and liter, anything 3.9 and above. And you can see the distribution here is 34% laggards, 52% intermediates, and 14% leaders. And I put in the boxes next to it how the banking, financial services and insurance industry skews. And you can see it just sort of all collapses into the middle. You have less leaders and you have less laggards in your industry. So everyone's kind of falling in the middle. And what does that mean?

(15:16):
It means you're at parody. It's what? Say again. We're not very competitive. Not very competitive. And so when I look at this, I was actually hoping that I have a lot more leaders in the room and maybe next year I'll do the survey again and next year we'll get a higher number here. But I think there's a lot to acknowledge in your industry that doesn't allow you to lead. And so one of the things that I have found is that there is some barriers and there's some unique barriers in the financial services industry. But before I go through that, let me deep dive a little bit on each one of these. So leaders, they're very coordinated and very vocal about the CX agenda that the leadership has and that enables them to bring all of the capabilities together that they need. Intermediaries, they're proficient, but there's inconsistency in the coordination of all of their efforts. And then laggards, they're sort of thrown in the dark a little bit scattershot, it feels like they're not aligned at the top of the organization in the way that others are. And so they have a hard time deliberately coordinating and getting momentum behind things and sticking with it.

(16:38):
So to do a little bit more of a deep dive here, you can see in strategy that the leaders are really differentiating because they're aligned. I would call leaders a very customer obsessed organization where they put customers first and what they're doing is very closely tying those metrics to business outcomes. So they see the financial value of making the customer the center, and they can talk about it in a comprehensive way across the organization. They're also aligning their business decisions and where they're investing into CX because they want to optimize things even further and they're always bringing data forward. I talk about data. I grew up in it. I have a stats degree, but I haven't used in a very long time, but I geek out on data because there's so much you can do with it. And I started thinking my bank knows exactly where I am today.

(17:40):
They know exactly what I'm doing, how much I'm spending while I'm here, how long I'm going to stay when I'm flying home of the credit card I use to book it all. And they don't use that. And that's because there's a compliance issue for that, right? Someone told me when you know the data, you have to protect the data. And I see that that is a challenge, but I also think there's carve out so you can start doing, they're not risky to show the value of how you use data and create data literacy inside of your organizations to know when to use data and how to use it in a responsible way. You compare that to laggards, there's still siloed. There's not really metrics being used. Everything kind of comes ad hoc, maybe fly by night when things pivot. They're not able to make business decisions on customer data and they're not really using it. So there's a big variety of how people are mature in this industry or not. So let's talk a little bit more about these barriers.

(18:52):
So this is just banking and financial services. I thought you probably only care more about the industry here on these slides, but look at this number. When I said I agree with you about data, there's data to show it. And so one of the toughest things is to get the data necessary to achieve your agenda. 70%. In fact, it's the highest top two box also, which means 30 42% of companies put that in the top two box of things that they're struggling with. Does this feel right to you? We had one person mention data. Is data a challenge for all of you? Yeah, I see a lot of heads nodding. Yeah. The next thing also mentioned in the room was leadership, attention support and buy-in for necessary investments and attention. You might be fleeting. So it's that real support and what people are actually doing for you. Breaking down technology. You can't do this until you can't do tech, until you have these other two things ready. And then alignment around priorities and processes and then aligning around CX priorities and bringing the organization together, which stems a lot from these first couple. So then when we think about execution in the banking and financial sector, 54% say this is converting the strategy to execution. The primary challenge is the security risk and concerns. Can anybody share some of the things they've heard about why they can't do cx that's security related?

(20:48):
Somebody in the back.

Audience Member 4 (20:52):
I would just say the difficulty in sharing PII and that sort of thing makes it really difficult in terms of connecting with partners and things like that because we're always at risk if we share any information. So I think that's the biggest challenge from a CX perspective

Kelly Slothower (21:09):
For sure. And there's ways around that sort of blinding that through a number or something that protects it a little bit more behind the scenes. But there's still a pivot table you have to worry about somewhere in the ecosystem, right? But yeah, I think there's a higher standard being asked of you all in this industry than there is in other industries. And I think it's fair to acknowledge that, but you can't let that stop you. You have to keep finding ways to bring data to the forefront and challenge people in finding ways to use things that are not, but that are helpful.

(21:47):
So if you knew, for example, the number one reason people were calling is password reset, you could automate a function for that without having to divulge anybody's PII in that. So there's a lot of things you can do that are going to help make things efficient just right off the top because I promise you, if you don't figure out how to get past some of these, there's disruptors waiting in their wings to take some of your customers because this is what stops people from being loyal. They see it and the benchmark has been set from other experiences.

(22:29):
Anybody have any good experience at the conference so far? Isn't this hotel amazing? The amount of service that they offer when they, you say where is something they're like actually walking you to see it visually, that's a new standard for me. It's a new standard. So now when I ask anybody where something is, I expect them to walk me to it. And so when I talk about customer expectations are constantly evolving, they're constantly being raised by experiences that we have as consumers, experiences we have as Amazon and Chewy and Netflix. Those are all making us want that in other parts of our lives. And from what I can tell this industry is planet safe. And so I want you to keep pushing, keep challenging, get in that leader category, start making change happen. You might be saying, you've thrown so much at us, I don't even know where to start.

(23:27):
You said data, you said strategy. I don't own either one of those things. What am I supposed to do? Okay, I know there's a lot on this slide, but let's just say there's a lot of laggards in the room. I have two data points. So there's a lot of laggards in the room, right under 3.4. So I gave you four different things here to evaluate. And the first thing in strategy, start trying to figure out cross team metrics. So you may have your own metrics, but can you bring one more team with you and do a partnership on metrics? So there's momentum behind working together and breaking down silos. Do you have a 360 degree view of your customer yet? That's kind of table stakes these days. And so if you don't have that, that's where I'd start. Technology, are you investing? Do you have the right tools to be able to do what you want to do?

(24:23):
And then operations, really this is about creating structures and governance and processes across the journey. So maybe you can find moments in the journey that are really important to your bottom line and start looking at those. But if you're a leader, there's still things you need to do, you're not done. Leaders are still evolving too. I said this was a dynamic ecosystem and I mean that they have to keep evolving with customer expectations. So they need to continually be obsessed and tying their data to business outcomes and knowing that if customer sat scores or customer effort scores are going down, they know and can articulate a business impact to that so that you're not just saying, oh, it's going up or down. But the financial value of that in terms of technology, these companies are the ones right now talking about AI and innovation and automation because they're able to show impacts to their business that are driving efficiencies and costs to serve.

(25:31):
And so they have some really great business cases and internally to continue to invest in these kinds of things. So if this is hard to take in, again, the white paper is going to be for you all behind. But if you are focused on do one thing, one thing only. If you're in the laggard category, focus on getting that 360 degree view of your customer. Tell them what data you need, why you need it, and what you're going to do with it. If you're an intermediary, it's about tech in this category. Most of you're in this category. I did not skew the answers, but the intermediaries need to start modernizing their tech stack. Need to start creating interoperability between the technologies and rationalizing because during the pandemic, everyone went crazy and just started implementing software. They need to be more digital and now there's 18 different systems that do the same thing and nobody's rationalized across that. So start getting that together, start figuring that out. And then if you're a leader, get more obsessed. Get more obsessed about your customer and the metrics and building business cases around it.

(26:43):
But whatever you do, do something something. Because if you are here, I don't know, we're in a harbor, so I thought a boat analogy might work. So if you are on this trajectory of slight five degree, course correction is going to end you up in a new place. And so whatever you do, do something because it's going to materially shift where you end up. So in conclusion, you asked how to get a competitive advantage that is intelligently orchestrating your environment so that you can achieve better customer outcomes and grow your business. If you want to follow up here I am. Let's talk questions. I've got the rest of my team here to help answer any questions about data tech, process people, strategy free consulting. Here you go.

Audience Member 5 (27:43):
I have a question with regard to who's accountable for intelligent orchestration. When you think functionally about which leader would wear this hat, where do you see it fitting in?

Kelly Slothower (27:53):
That is a great question. I'll give you my answer and then I want the rest of the team to weigh in. So this is a C-suite problem because the CEO owns the organization coming together. There's very few customer experience officers out there. We had one earlier. A lot of times it sits with the CIO because they're tech focused and they see the interoperability of those things. Marketing also thinks that they own it because they're the one talking to the consumer, but they're talking one way to the customer. I would also say that customer success owns it because they're the only ones interacting with the customers on a human to human basis. So essentially it's, think of it as an octopus CX sits in the center and there's all these tentacles out there, but somebody owns the center channel. And to me that's the CEO you guys want to weigh in.

Audience Member 6 (28:46):
Octopus is perfect

Kelly Slothower (28:49):
Octopus or a spinal cord. Somebody's got to keep the mechanism together.

Audience Member 7 (28:56):
I think there's also this movement towards product ownership nowadays, right? In all the banks that you see. So that is where I think the CIOs are no longer being called CIOs. Increasingly they're being called chief product officers. A friend of us telling me earlier today, I think that's where we should also look at it. That's where the ownership lies and they pull in. There's a lot of orchestration needed from within the organization, how you pull in everybody together, because it's not problem to be solved in a silo. It's a comprehensive problem. So that's how we look at it.

Kelly Slothower (29:26):
Did you say chief transformation office?

Audience Member 7 (29:29):
If you have one.

Kelly Slothower (29:30):
Do you have one? Yeah, yeah,

Audience Member 7 (29:34):
Absolutely.

Audience Member 8 (29:40):
I think Maran, you talked about chief product officer, right?

Kelly Slothower (29:42):
Okay. Product officer, chief product officer. Okay, other? Anybody else want some free advice? Yes.

Audience Member 9 (29:53):
Oh, I thought you did.

Kelly Slothower (29:54):
Oh, what advice would you like?

Audience Member 8 (29:59):
Well, now you put me on the spot.

Kelly Slothower (30:05):
No,

Audience Member 10 (30:08):
So I agree with that. The chief experience or the customer experience officer should be the CEO, which it is in our company, but they're not technology driven. So that's the challenge, is getting somebody young who's a digital native involved. And that's really hard to do. And we're a bank that was founded in 1877 and the CEO is still hand writes all his notes, his calendars. That's the challenge. Yeah. One of the things that we're doing right now, I think I'm too close to you. One of the things we're doing right now is trying to meet in the middle between the CIO and the CMO through a list of requirements. Because if the business brings a list of requirements and technology brings a list of requirements, you can start to prioritize and rank all of those requirements around an agreed upon scoring system. You say, oh, one of the criteria is how much will the impact employee or the customer? And that will help then skew what requirements should be addressed. But it does require conversations and a lot of large legacy corporations are not used to working together. And so we have to find ways the people in this room are responsible for helping those conversations get started. Challenging internally about how you're working with all of the people, process, data tech people that are sitting in different parts of the organization.

Audience Member 11 (31:46):
So I would say the company I work for is probably more the lager. So when you spoke about getting that 360 view, and I'm not necessarily in the position to get that data. I'm in digital. We have data partners that are working on it currently. We know it's a struggle. What can we do in the meantime as that team is building that 360 view so that we can continue to make progress, right? Get that five degree projection.

Kelly Slothower (32:18):
Yes. Yes. I love this question because when I first started, I grew up in marketing. When I first started in a data, I could use somebody's data. I wanted all the data, I want it all, just give it to me, all of it. And then we've got the compliance security risk problem, right? So what I recommend is that you figure out if you had this data point, what you would do with it and frame it in a what if I knew that which portion of my customers were about to switch mortgage companies? What would I do with that information? And so then you start building a business case through the data acquisition that you need. You're welcome.

Audience Member 12 (33:08):
Hey, can I, yeah, maybe to give you a different perspective there. The data lies within your ecosystem very strongly, in fact. So the better way to look into this, what is driving the customer to talk to you? The customer journey. So that could be the good starting point for you. You don't need to go into all your transactional data, so leave that aside. Look into what is customer expecting from you? Where is really customer is trying to reach out to you, trying to get the service from you. That would be a good starting point for you to get the data aligned and rest all will fall in line. Rest all is mostly transactional data and predominantly your product data. So start with customer, what they are expecting that will give you that trajectory. What she's talking about.

Kelly Slothower (33:59):
It's a great point because I grew up in, I did my first job out of college was asking people in malls if they had time for a survey, and I am now on this earth to eliminate surveys. I know I just did one, so ignore that for a minute. But you have all the data that you need sitting in contact center transcripts. It gives me chills of how much data and customer expectation is articulated through frustration and joy and irritation and callbacks. All of that can be analyzed and build your CX strategy agenda for the year. You don't even have to look at all of it, just look at the past six months and just look at things people are frustrated by. You don't have to survey them. They've already told you. Any last questions? You all have been great. Thank you for participating. Thank you for doing math after lunch, and Heather will follow up with the document of this white paper for you and please take your analysis home and start talking about it. Thank you.