Musings from WSJ CEO COUNCIL 2019 – Washington DC

This is my 4th time to The Wall Street Journal CEO Council Washington, D.C. The CEO council as the name indicates is a cosy gathering of senior political and policy officials, diplomats, media leaders, and corporate titans at the nexus of industry, government, and power. The event got off to an electric start with both Nancy Pelosi and Jared Kushner taking credit for the $1.3 trillion trade deal between the USA, Canada and Mexico.

Dow Jones Intelligence in collaboration with Tech Mahindra undertook a global thought leadership survey called the Efficacy Index, focusing on 4 key areas:

?       Leveraging data to tailor experiences and address customer needs & expectations

?       Envisioning future customer journeys in collaboration with customers

?       Personalizing sales conversations

?       Delivering high-quality customer service and employee experience

It is confirmed that improving the customer experience and realizing innovation are the highest priorities for senior business leaders - sometimes even ahead of financial priorities like efficiency, growth, and profitability. Data and analytics issues also stood out as the biggest obstacles that organizations face to improving Customer Experience

The goal is to create an interactive bench marking tool, which would allow every senior executive to test their organizations’ performance against those who are leading change today. 

During my session with Edward Roussel – Chief Innovation Officer in Dow Jones on “Investing In the Customer Experience” - A look at how companies are currently navigating digital transformation to transform businesses and to transform the way people live and work.

Let me share an example that touches on many of the insights from the Efficacy Report, on how we have modernized an experience that is fraught with inefficiencies and customer pain points especially one involves working with different parts of a bank and integrating with multiple systems. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning provides agility in transforming and delivering personalized customer experiences.

Getting a loan to buy a home is a cumbersome and time-consuming processes. Can you imagine buying a home sitting on your couch? - that is exactly what we enabled when we worked with a Canadian top bank to enable their customers to apply for a mortgage, in thirty minutes? A true example of going digital.

Now they are able to deliver a completely digitally enabled home buying experience, from a quick calculator to getting instantly per-approved, searching for the right home and easy access to a simplified mortgage application that could be completed in 30 minutes and approved in a day - reducing the mortgage processing time from weeks to days – application to funding in under 4 days.

In order to achieve this, we integrated over 20 different systems & processes and all this in 26 weeks from visioning to production and what companies often forget in driving customer experience transformation is that it is beneficial to the organizations too.

To share some thoughts on how customer experiences are driven by understanding and evolving the customer journey - the central task of improving customer experience because it encompasses every interaction at every touch point across multiple channels. It builds on an understanding of customer expectations by making it easier for customers to achieve their goals – their “jobs to be done” when they engage with your company.

For example, Mad*Pow - a Tech Mahindra company when engaged with Dartmouth-Hitchcock, a large academic medical center. The CEO came to us with this challenge: “Imagine, creating a hospital that doesn’t want you to visit. Not because we don’t care, but because we do.” 

Thus “ImagineCare” was born. We set out to understand the journey of patients managing chronic conditions, from asthma to hypertension, to diabetes and envisioned a completely new experience with patients themselves that would leave them feeling healthy and empowered. 

Via ImagineCare, the patient can take their measures via connected bio-metric devices such as a blood pressure cuff or scale. If any of their measures are out of range, a clinician will call them within 2 minutes! They have access to digital health coaching leveraging Machine Learning and can securely connect with a team of clinicians 24/7. The solution was a value-based-care dream come true and was able to reduce the cost of care by 15% while also achieving 95% satisfaction with patients who also reported feeling not alone for the first time when managing their condition.

Both of these examples bring to life how customer experience transformation can actually benefit all stakeholders, be it the patient, provider, payer or citizen and the community. As we notice from the efficacy index, the critical element is the Data and Insights. There is a tendency to try getting all the data quality right before engaging. It is like boiling an ocean. It’s better to take a use case you want to solve and then work backward to ensure that particular data is good.

 We have also seen significant push back from middle management in the midst of transformation efforts - especially with regard to adopting new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This is both driven by a fear of the unknown and resistance to the way they usually get things done. We leverage cultural change initiatives and behavior change design to overcome these obstacles.

The third and most critical is executive support. Any large transformation objective needs to be on the CEO’s agenda.

- Lakshmanan Chidambaram