Experience 2030: Future-Proofing Your Customer Engagement Strategy

5:56 — Putting Customer at the Center of the Story

The hero of the story is still the same. So if the story’s hero has not changed, how can we not put the customer at the story’s center?

I am a customer-centric evangelist. Without a customer, no business can survive. If you want to future-proof yourself, whether digital transformation or a business, the only way is to be customer-centric. Ask the customer what they want, deliver against their pain point, and you’ll be okay.

If I had to sum this up in a couple of things, I genuinely believe and promote this — value exchange was necessary then. Whether we call it value for money or value for experience, the outcome that we are looking for is at the center of the story.

Personalized — if I am giving data, which will become even more critical with the zero-biggest data policy that is all coming up. In that case, the customer will have the right to stop the organization’s access to my data. As a customer, I can prevent consumer brands from accessing my data. However, with that kind of policy, personalized services will become the center because if they don’t, consumers will have no reason to give you their data. If you can’t deliver personalized experiences, there is no reason for customers to provide you with their data.

The other factor is convenience. How are you making the consumers’ life convenient and easy? If you can’t, you’re just another product, and there will be no loyalty. So, if you want to stand out, put the customer at the center of the story. Understand them and then start answering these questions, and you’re good to proceed.

Here are three steps I keep in mind when doing these exercises: start by asking the customer. I’m shameless enough to go and sit on the other side of the counter, even at the billing desk if required, at the customer service desk, or the concierge. I converse with the consumer to understand what’s happening in their head.

What is the pain point that they’re trying to solve? I love doing that because I learn much more when engaging with them. Not just about what they’re saying but what they’re not saying. More often than ever, consumers don’t understand what they’re looking for, so we need to help them express themselves better.

08:48 — Focus on Providing a Good Service, Not Just the Product

Of course, then the service. Don’t just deliver a product; the era of product is over. We have to provide a good service. Every product solves a pain point – the experience of the service the consumer is searching for. Focus on that and make that the center of the story again. I have nothing against the CIOs, but technology is overrated.

Technology is there, and MoEngage, nothing against you. I love you guys and our work together, but Tech is overrated. Technology is here to solve a problem. Look at everything MoEngage is trying to solve. They’re looking at our pain points and trying to solve them, and that’s what technology has to do.

It has to enable the experience, and we must understand the pain points to convert it into an experience and find the right technologies to help us deliver those experiences. These are some of my favorite stories. I only have the time to go through each of them, but this presentation will be available if you want to take it from the team and go through it. The links are already in there.

The only one I would like to talk about, which is very inspiring for me, is the first one. A rikshaw-wala who was invited for a TedTalk. He’s called Annadurai, and his beautiful story is about how he converted his rickshaw into an experience center.

Many people are talking about how it is fantastic, how simple things matter, and how his entire rickshaw is now an experience center. The one question I get a lot is: How can my organization take this approach?

Three-step approach. Listen and ask, and you shall receive, which means listen to your consumers. Make the organization aware of it and see how they’re responding. The biggest challenge with this kind of thing is taking small steps.

Most organizations respond with – “I need a lot of money for this.” Money is never a problem if you start small. The startups have taught us this very well. It isn’t about money; it’s about the idea. If you have a great idea, you can figure out how to start small and scale from there. So believe in testing and learning.

11:34 — Test & Learn from Your Failures

Start small, and go from there. Most importantly, this journey is not easy. Just like our life, there are going to be enough failures. Be kind to yourself and the organization. Create a culture around yourself so that your team, your people, your bosses, and everybody understands that you will test and learn from failure.

I would call DBS here because DBS runs an Annual Failure Award, which is fascinating. I’ve been diving into that. We also need to start embracing that. We embrace failure because with failures, we now know what not to do. Otherwise, we’ll still keep making the same mistakes again and again.

Lastly, I often get asked how I stay relevant to this approach. How do I ensure I am the kind of person my organization seeks to set up the same three rules?

Keep the right attitude. It is about taking small steps by self-learning. I do a lot of self-learning, I go out and shamelessly ask my boss, I want to learn this. Please see if you can fund it. If they can’t, I try to figure out other ways.

My journey has been full of failures and more so than successes. However, those failures help me understand how to get it right. Even the Einstein story is all about that, where he had 9,999 failures before he got the 10,000th one right.

Embrace failure and ensure that you start small, even for yourself. Everything is a milestone approach. Listen to yourself. Most importantly, understand your passion point and how you want to bring yourself with this journey. This is again, bringing you, the customer, to the center of your story.