Customer Journeys, Next Best Actions, Personalisation – what’s the value?

In my previous article I shared my thinking about some of the universal truths in Customer Engagement and my belief that Elegance, Relevance and Empathy are at the heart of how we can increase value for customers and members and pull through more value for our Brand. I’m not claiming an epiphany just reflecting the experiences that Pega customers are very happy to tell the world about, not least in front of audiences of thousands at Pegaworld, our annual customer event (June 11 to 13 2023 in Las Vegas).

This is not a plug for Pegaworld. It’s more that I find other people’s stories so compelling and I want to share some of the ideas about value that major brands think about. You may find some of them useful.

We spend a lot of time talking about next best product, next best offer, next best action but really what will differentiate us is the next best experience. (Maya Angelou again!) Of the four “next bests” only Experience is customer or member centric and this is why it is uniquely placed as a value driver for a brand. Imagine if you could be confident that your provider knew you well enough to anticipate your needs, engage you proactively as you were considering a service or information request or contemplating a purchase and if they got it wrong, could react to your response and pivot in the moment. How valued would you feel and how much more value would you be prepared to share with them?

Customers and members who experience this greater relevance and empathy coupled with the agility to turn interactions into conversations, regardless of channel, value their relationship with brands who deliver it much more. The consequence is they advocate more, spend more, remain with you for longer and cost less to service across their lifecycle.

I promised a few examples that may provoke your thinking so here goes.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia generate 10x more leads by engaging in this way. Their agents actioned 95% of those leads and they converted 3x more than before. Think about the virtuous value circle they created. By engaging at the right time with relevance and empathy the customers were more interested, the colleagues more motivated. The elegance of their solution makes it easy for colleagues to engage the customers and their success rates encouraged them to make more connections. A value based relationship established between customer, colleague and enterprise is a strong foundation for success and CBA have a 12 point lead in NPS ahead of their nearest competitor!

At Pegaworld 2022 Wells Fargo publicly challenged themselves to reduce their current effort (40 people, 90 days) to introduce a new end to end customer conversation (journey?) to 1 person taking 3 days. I’m confident they’ll be back (June 11-13 2023 Las Vegas) to confirm they did this. Think about the talent they have freed up to drive further growth across their channels and lines of business!

NatWest Group increased balance retention by 20% and increased their response rates by 6x, achieving?this with 35% fewer impressions. Think about the financial impact of this combination and the customer feeling when some of that irrelevant banner and social media advertising disappeared!

There are more – we have more than 150 Brands working with us trying to achieve results like this, many sharing their success stories openly. (You know where!)