Future of Customer Experience and Privacy

I was the guest speaker at a luncheon organised by 6Degrees Media on the topic of Customer Identity & The Future of CX. I was asked several questions by the moderator and the participants, two of which were of particular importance, and I would like to share my opinion on them with you.

When aligning personalised customer experience initiatives with privacy and regulation requirements, my advice is to start with a risk assessment under your current risk management framework.

The first question was about the critical steps I recommend organisations take when aligning personalised customer experience initiatives with privacy and regulation requirements. My advice is to start with a risk assessment under your current risk management framework. To do that, you will need to:

• understand the solution you wish to provide
• the type of data you need to collect (e.g., identity, attribute, contextual, behavioural, etc.)
• the jurisdiction in which you will store and process the data
• know the applicable laws and regulatory requirements
• assess your organisation’s risk appetite
• ensure the various business owners are aware of the risks and the possible management strategies

I do believe, meeting your compliance and regulatory requirements – should your organisation choose to do so – is a simple task. There generally is a clear set of checks and balances that need to be in place for the solution to be compliant. What is far harder to manage, is understanding your customers’ perception of the new experience and its impact on the reputation of your organisation. Of particular importance, is also the alignment between the personalised service you wish to provide and the values and ethical guidelines of your organisation. While surveys show that most customers are happy to share a degree of personal data in return for a better experience, they are very mindful of organisations overstepping their boundaries. You are overstepping boundaries if the service you provide goes beyond anticipating your customers’ needs or beyond helping them feel safer or become better.

Communicate the key product features impacting your customers early, and authentically. I also advise you to reframe security conversations into privacy ones.

It is also important to build trust with your customers. To do this, you will need to have a product roadmap in mind and communicate the key steps impacting your customers early, authentically, and with honesty. I also advise you to reframe security conversations into privacy ones, making them more relevant to your customers.

The next question was how differently hyper-personalised CX will look compared to today. I loved this question, as an exciting part of the role I perform is to look into the future and predict what services and solutions our customers will need. I anticipate how our interactions with our customers will change and how we differentiate ourselves in a sector that is constantly disrupted. I touched on several key topics all of which provide the context within which the answer lies. The topics included:

• Identity
• Superapps
• Metaverse

Identity is at the core of hyper-personalised CX. The various data points around attributes, contexts, and behaviours that we collect and monitor, are anchored back to the identity of our customers. It is therefore important to understand what the future of identity could look like. At a high level, there are two types of identity frameworks: centralised and decentralised. Maddie Vagadori has done an amazing job explaining decentralised identity. In Maddie's words, "it allows individuals to manage their own identities. In a decentralized framework, the user receives credentials from a number of issuers (e.g., government, education, employer) and stores them in a?digital wallet. The user presents those credentials to the relevant issuing authority, who then verifies their identity through a blockchain-based ledger that does not store the user’s data". Decentralised identity (and verifiable credentials) will provide customers with a choice of what data they wish to share with who and for how long.?This will impact the type of data organisations can collect from their users.

In a decentralised identity world, customers will choose what data they share with your business

Superapps?like WeChat are also increasing in popularity. According to Gartner's definition; A Superapp is the front end of a platform into which internal developers and third-party providers can publish mini-apps for users to activate as needed. In the new world of Superapps, your organisations' apps or the services they provide may be offered through a Superapp. Think of the payment systems inside WeChat for example. How will this impact the data you collect from, and share with, the provider of the Superapp? How will your third-party risk management framework need to be modified to cater for this scenario? Superapps will present an opportunity and a challenge for several organisations offering B2C-style services. Customers of Superapps will likely use services offered by businesses on the Superapp. On the other hand, Superapps may reduce customer stickiness and the ability for providers to offer hyper-personalised or differentiated services.?

Customers deal with businesses they trust

Metaverse?is becoming increasingly popular. Last week #Microsoft announced the release of Teams Avatars and the ability to hold Teams meetings inside the Metaverse. You can be sure to see a growing number of businesses offering services through the Metaverse. This creates a unique challenge for businesses wishing to offer a personalised service to their customers. Imagine a real-life person who self-identifies as a woman in her 40s. Her Avatar may be that of a young man in his late teens. Now imagine you are a fashion retailer. Do you offer women's or men's clothing to this person? Would you create two separate identities for the customer? Having two unique identities which are linked will help when it comes to payment details and shipping addresses, but how would you then handle a data breach? What if your customer wishes to have her identity in the Metaverse separate from her real-world identity? These are some of the challenges presented by the Metaverse and organisations' CX goals.

No matter what the future may hold, we can be sure of one thing; customers will deal with businesses they trust. What businesses must do to earn and maintain this trust is key to their CX success. It is becoming increasingly cost-efficient to collect and store data. But in our pursuit of hyper-personalised CX,?we must find the right balance between what we collect and the type of service we offer. Surveys show that overstepping boundaries set by customers will lower customer trust and make our businesses come across as "creepy"