Seven Habits of Highly Effective Information Enabled, AI Powered Business – #1 Customer and Customer Experience First

The number one habit of the highly effective Data Enabled, AI Powered Business should be Customer and Customer Experience first.   Who are my customers, what are their needs, how will I serve them should be a fundamental pillar of any business strategy. 

It is often said that great companies are ‘customer led’, but in my experience great companies are the ones that develop products and services ahead of their customers actually ‘wanting them’, to satisfy their unmet needs!  Then I hear Digital, Tech and Data teams telling me ‘The Business Doesn’t know what it wants….’.   In that case you’re failing to provide them the Information they need.  I deliberately use the word, Information, not Data, for it is Data with Context (aka Information) which is the bare minimum we need to provide to people and systems to drive understanding and Decisions.

Steve Jobs famously said, ‘My Customers Will Know What They Want When I Show It To Them!’  Most of us don’t have the inspirational Marketing genius of Jobs, but once we create Information about Customers, we can hope to emulate him.

• Data is central to understanding your customers.  Once we have added context we create Information about our Customers:  What motivates them; What their needs are; and what they are inclined to buy (and for how much). 
• The great companies combine all the data they must predict the needs of their customers and designs products and services that meets those future needs. 

Customer Experience - It needs to be about Customer not Cost

The brutal fact is that much of what has been delivered as Customer First in most organisations has been a thinly veiled cost reduction exercise.  The creation of a ‘Digital Experience’ including web-sites, Apps, and Chat Bots have been used to move the work and cost of servicing the customer from the organisation (Public Sector, Health organisations are just as guilty as Commercial organisations) to the Customer.  I describe the experience of many Apps as ‘Lipstick on a Pig’.   Without great data and information, available in real time, the customer experience for most is very poor. 

 There can be positive benefits for the Customer, better choice, more repeatable service and faster resolution. That requires you to bring together the full set of capabilities of the seven habits.  But it’s worth it.  Companies like Octopus Energy in UK and Klarna in Finance show that you can deliver fabulous customer experience if you get the Data/Information and AI right.  Their customer service, which rarely requires a human is often the best service a customer can get.

Know your customer - To better serve them

 If we are talking about serving customers you will be talking about Value and contribution to the top and bottom line of the business, something which is scarily absent from the conversations of many Digital, Tech and Data Leaders, and yet critical to engaging and maintaining the support of the CEO, CFO and other business leaders.  As the custodians of all of the Data the organisation has about its customers and the market, we probably know as much about our customers in the ‘back office’ as the people serving them in Marketing, Sales and Service.  We need to bring that together to drive success.  The advent of Large Language Models and so-called Generative AI, like Claude and ChatGPT, takes that even further.  We combine our data with publicly available data, with AI capabilities to deliver amazing Information and Insight about our Customers and their needs.

Banks and regulated industries have regulators imposing "Know Your Customer (KYC)" processes on them. KYC is known as a due diligence process financial companies use to verify customer identity and assess and monitor customer risk and ensures a customer is who they say they are. The reality is this is critical for every commercial and not for profit enterprise. We need to know our customers and the Data we collect on them is how we know them! 

We will see later, in Habit 5, how by combining Data from KYC type processes and Marketing, we can deliver ‘Compliance by Design’.

Data Drives Marketing and the entire business value chain

 Great Marketing is central to the best companies.  Data driven Marketing has been established for some time, but the best stand out through not just marketing powered by Data, Analytics and AI, but that knowledge of the customer feeding through the entire product/service development, delivery, sales and support lifecycle.

 That seems obvious, but few companies have truly embedded this into their corporate DNA to make a strategic differentiating capability.  Through my Doctoral research I have focused on ‘Resource Based Theory’ (RBT), which focuses on the capabilities that businesses and organisations use to create sustained competitive advantage. 

• ·RBT identifies truly differentiating capabilities if they are Valuable, Rare, Inimitable (difficult to copy) and organisationally embedded (VRIO).

 The companies that use Data, Analytics and AI not just as a capability but make the use of Data to transform their understanding of the needs of Customers and make that central to their DNA for Marketing and Product Development, Sales and Service are consistently winners in the market, with Amazon being the outstanding example!

Critically Amazon uses all that data and combines it with constantly evaluated ‘Leading KPIs’ to help.  Input Metrics driven by working backwards from the Customer Experience were (and are) used to help Amazon drive its business forwards.

1.     Better Customer Experience leads to more traffic

2.     More traffic attracts more sellers seeking those buyers

3.     More sellers leads to wider selection

4.     Wider selection enhances customer experience, completing the circle

5.     The cycle drives growth, which in turn lowers cost structure

6.     Lower costs lead to lower prices, improving customer experience, and the flywheel spins faster

DECISIONING - The best possible interaction with your customer, any time, any place, anywhere

To build on the Customer and Customer Experience First habit and understand where data is critical, apart from KYC we should focus on the key elements of the journey our customer has with us.

• How they find us, how they become a customer, how they buy, how they are supported and how they might choose to extend their relationship and/or unfortunately choose to longer use our products or services.
• We want to personalise all those journeys, interactions, offers and actions as much as possible to delight our customers – something we can only do with data about the customer. And if we don’t yet know them, we must be able to very quickly associate their needs and desires with a customer (segment) we already know to make the experience as personalised as possible, as fast as possible!

The management of this process is known as (omni/multi-channel) ‘decisioning’ which is set of activities which enable orchestration across all the fragmented complexities of the channels you operate (stores, email, SMS, Social, TV etc), CRM, digital, marketing and advertising capabilities and makes them smarter – largely through DATA. 

• Decisioning harnesses the value of all your customer data enabling you to influence every customer interaction to be more relevant and specific to that customer in that moment. 

·       It orchestrates the interaction experience making the customer journeys feel better connected and less fragmented. That’s all the customer related activities from marketing, sales and customer service, across all the interactions points and 7x24x365 anytime throughout the year.

• Most importantly, decisioning and next-best-action capabilities enables you to execute a customer first strategy across every customer touchpoint and moment of truth, putting your customers at the heart of your business and effectively engaging them, every time!
• To all of this we can add chatbots/intelligent agents that are data and machine learning powered capabilities to help you to better manage your interactions with customers. (I can’t do justice to them here – they will be a whole other Blog)

Suffice to say as a data leader who understood marketing, sales, service (and finance) working in a major multi-national telco it was me who led the transformation of marketing, sales, and service using data driven decisioning, as I had the best view of the overall customer journey than any other member of the senior leadership team!

Using your Data to manage Google and Facebook, rather than Vice Versa

Steve Jobs was famous for his attention to detail and the desire to deliver ‘beautiful products’, but he was the last of the old school marketeers, who worked on gut-instinct and experience! Going forward, marketing is all about what you know about your customers. The front end of this is a process we need to understand that one of the critical elements of a modern marketing organisation, and typically its largest expenditure is ‘Performance marketing’.

• This is a form of digital marketing where businesses only pay marketing service providers after their business objectives have been met or when specific actions have been taken, such as a click, sale, or lead. In other words, it is performance-based marketing.
• Performance marketing works when advertisers connect with either agencies or publishers to design and place advertisements for their company on any number of performance marketing channels — social media, search engines, videos, embedded web content, and more. Instead of paying for an advertisement in the traditional way, these advertisers pay based on how well their ad performs, by measuring number of clicks, impressions, shares, or sales.

When you understand this, you understand why the Digital Advertising market is dominated by Google and Facebook.  As a Data Leader you need to help the business take back control!

• The reality for many businesses is they outsource their Marketing to an Agency and the Agency is then largely dictated to by Google and Facebook where and when your Ad spend is invested.
• The smart organisations create their own Performance Marketing teams and have disintermediated Marketing Agencies and are using their own data and data Science capabilities to allow them to better manage and orchestrate the Digital spend with Google and Facebook.

Put the Customer First

The customers of Information and AI are those people who serve your customers, as well as the end Customer themselves.  If you put Customers and Customer Experience First you can be sure that you will be delivering the proverbial ‘win:win’ outcomes and doing the best to serve the needs of the business.  Don’t cut corners in the search for ‘cost savings’, you will deliver inferior outcomes and that will ‘cost’ the organisation more!