20. Have smooth experience in transit
Affluent traveler with kids | From home to boarding plane
START
Morning of travel
1
On route to
airport
2
Arrive at the
airport
3
‘Good to
know’
notification
Needs to check important
travel info and book a car. She
opens her app, sees her
itinerary, books a car. Sees a
reminder of luggage and car
rental insurance benefits.
Also reminded to ensure she
has entered her details for
TSA pre-check.
With time in the car, she
checks her points –she
has amassed loads
from her travel booking.
Arriving at the
airport, she wants
to get the family
quickly through
security. She
checks her app and
sees security fast
track.
Departure area
4
Through security
and in need of a
snack. She gets a
notification with
lounge directions
and remaining visits.
Visiting the lounge
5
At the lounge they
plan activities for
their vacation. They
use the app to
check out offers and
experiences for all
the family.
‘Don’t worry’
notification
A message from the
digital concierge – he
can rearrange plans
at destination
including
taxi/hotel/car rental.
He also reminds them
of travel delay
insurance.
Flight delayed
6
Need to keep the
kids entertained
with wifi for all the
family. Picks up
some treats for
the kids using her
points.
Time to kill
8
END
Depart
9
Keeping kids
entertained
7
Sees that she has
great discounts in
the airport.
There’s time for
some shopping
and a spa
treatment while
the kids are
occupied.
‘Lounge
Directions’
notification
Great, we
have priority
boarding – first
on!
The business landscape is becoming more complex. Technology is changing at a rapid pace. Data and AI are creating altogether new opportunities for relevance and service. Fintechs are launching innovations that address key customer pain points. The benchmarks for consumer expectations are at an all-time high.
And you…chances are you are in the midst of your own digital transformation. Legacy systems. Siloed data. And you’re trying to differentiate yourselves with a superior customer experience. You’re trying to understand how to meet them on their own terms. You’re trying to decide if you should partner with a fintech to get ahead of the digital divide.
Chances are, you are also thinking about how to avoid some kind of disruption.
Since 2005, 40% of S&P 500 companies have gone bankrupt, been acquired, or just ceased to be. Recent studies have told us that up to half the world’s banks will disappear through the cracks opened up by digital disruption of the industry.
So how do you differentiate to retain and grow your customer base?
True differentiation is hard. Deciding how to respond to a threat of disruption is even harder.
Both require getting ahead of the curve to create new value for new and existing customers while you continue to evolve and protect your core. The hard part is in the how.
In this presentation, I’m going to talk about a few secret ingredients for continuously re-imagining your digital customer experience, for today and for the long-term.
Based on my experience working with companies like Verizon, Nike, and Volvo, and now Mastercard…
Approaching the challenge of defining your digital future through the lens of the end-to-end customer experience will help you make smarter decisions around how to evolve and why.
Why do I say that? Growing and sustaining your competitive advantage is quite literally in the hands of your customers. Their perception of value is no longer just about cost, it emerges from the sum of interactions a person has with a product, service, or brand.
And more and more of those interactions are becoming digital.
Digital customer experiences have become a key differentiator
According to Forrester research customer experience (CX) will overtake price when it comes to product differentiation by 2020.
Why? Because positive experiences drive loyalty. If you can provide product and service experiences that are not just on par with competitors, but exceed expectations in some way you will increase the likelihood that a customer:
will keep existing business with the company
will buy additional products and services from the company
will recommend the company to others
As we like to say inside of Mastercard, the ability to deliver a great customer experience, including all of the services you offer around your core business, has been recognized as critical for creating a sustainable competitive advantage.
But let’s be clear: Creating a differentiated and possibly game-changing digital customer experience is not about putting a shiny new mobile app in market, or about launching a single new service.
It’s about creating the conditions for constant evolution of your end-to-end customer experience so you can stay ahead of the competition as well as follow the needs of your customers.
That is the real challenge.
My hope is that you will walk away thinking differently about how this can be tackled and with some practical approaches to take into your organization.
Starting with the end-to-end journey gives you a snapshot of where and how you’re providing value in relation to customer needs today. It starts before your customer has decided to purchase a product and or initiate a relationship (like opening an account) and continues through the moment they break with this relationship, which most companies hope won’t happen for a long time.
With this view, you can:
Uncover moments where things are just broken. You’ve got to fix it or you’re going to start losing customers.
Understand how you can better connect existing digital touch points
Understand underlying technical capabilities needed to better service your customers
Identify where things “could be” digitized to bring new value and ease of doing business
Identify opportunities for evolution or enhancement
Uncover white space opportunities for new product and service innovations
To give you an example, about six years ago Volvo sales were starting to flatline and the CEO decided that they needed to compete in the luxury market, alongside of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, to grow a whole new generation of loyal customers.
And digital, was a big part of their strategy. Not only were they re-designing their cars, to appeal to the affluent customer, but they knew they needed to focus on the end-to-end customer journey.
Volvo wanted to move from a product-centric company focused on selling cars, to a customer centric company who uses digital to serve customers and make cars better.
Now this is an example for how the customer lifecycle journey can inform decisions at the highest level. Six years later, Volvo is finally launching its direct to consumer subscription service.
At Mastercard, we are also using a customer journey approach to solving for how we evolve existing solutions for our customers as well as in defining new ones.
At Mastercard, we are also using a customer journey approach to solving for how we evolve existing solutions for our customers as well as in defining new ones.
One such example, was an effort focused on evolving our travel services. We know that the ability to deliver differentiated travel benefits is important for our customers as well our business. But the landscape has changed. Standard travel benefits alone are no longer enough to capture the needs and expectations of today’s affluent traveler.
As the travel credit industry has matured, once game-changing benefits such as airport lounge access and accelerated rewards have been reduced to a price of admission into the space
The travel industry overall is seeing an influx of new, innovative services looking to solve for critical pain points with AI and deep personalization
What’s more, the traditional mode of distribution through affluent card products has resulted in a substandard consumer experience. There’s a whole list of benefits that come with the card. If a consumer even understands “what” they have. It’s not so easy to find it. If they do find the thing they are looking for, does it deliver on its promise and is it a good experience? All of these questions are questions of consumer experience. And this is the case with almost all card products out there.
So, we set out to see how we could evolve our travel service offering to leap ahead of what’s in the market today. How could we align a collection of discreet travel assets, from booking, to lounge access and insurances, into a digitally integrated service that will differentiate our affluent card products?
At Mastercard, we are trying to create the conditions that enable our teams to uncover underserved jobs to be done that could lead to new products and solutions or enhancements to the end-to-end experience.
One project, was focused on what we refer to in America as gig workers.
A gig worker is: a worker who is paid by task, assignment, or by selling or leasing something on an individual basis.
The “gig economy” in the US is described as an environment in which organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements. The emergence of digital platforms, enabling “gig workers” to find these short-term assignments is the driving force of the economy.
Research told us that 40% of independent workers are expected to exceed 40 percent of the US and European workforce by 2020. They hypothesis was that there was a big opportunity to serve this growing, underserved market with new solutions.
To better understand the possibilities, the team set out on a customer-centric approach to product concept development, and a hunt for the jobs to be done.
This is a view of the timeline of research activities that informed new product ideas.
We have an amazing insights and analytics team who conducted market research on this emerging customer segment.
That research got to general needs and painpoints
Irregular income flow. No pension plans
No (little) benefits enjoyed by traditional workforce
Lack of financial planning
Need for Separation of Business and Personal Accounts
That, led to clear territories to focus on in a co-creation workshop
Co-creation is where you can get to a level of understanding that helps you design a product
Understand and validate the journey and jobs to be done
Understand the most critical pain points and commonalities are across types of gig workers
Get insights into actual behaviors: what they’re actually doing
Uncover emotional jobs to be done
In the co-creation sessions, the team was able to go deeper into the territories and validate the most critical jobs to be done, and one of those was Money management.
Overall, money management of gig workers lacks focus.
Income and expense tracking is not streamlined.
Inconsistency makes financial planning a challenge.
It also revealed some emotional aspects of a gig worker:
Tension between freedom and flexibility vs lack of structure
As they are a company of one, they miss the community/co-worker part
Considered themselves as small business owners:
All of this led to the product concept and early prototypes, which we then took out for more testing.
It also further uncovered the complexity and inspired solutions by how they manage the complexity (multiple streams of income, high volatility, complex logistics, scheduling and cancellations) today.
My final case study is going to focus on our approach to helping teams get to early prototypes, grounded in consumer needs, more quickly.
I love this case because it's not a story of bringing a shiny new product idea to life. It's about optimizing something already in the market.
Sometimes innovations are about those small optimizations that can have a tremendous impact on your business.
More recently our Debit team started looking at how to improve the consumer experience in ecommerce to drive adoption and usage.
Debit is the payment method of choice for a large number of consumers in Europe, but the experience online is vastly unpredictable. It’s not easy to know if a merchant accepts debit. Or even whether a bank has made their debit cards ecommerce enabled. With this kind of uncertainty, there was a big opportunity to provide greater clarity and confidence in the way consumers used debit.
Many people choose to use debit because it feels safe and easy to use
Keeps them from overspending or building up large debts
Allows them to spend their money without having to borrow
Makes it easy to monitor money going in and out because it is paid for immediately
On the other hand, consumers also hesitate to use debit because it doesn’t always feel like the smartest way to pay
Need to have the funds available for the purchase before purchasing
Consumers weren’t sure if it was as secure as credit
And rewards points are not available when using debit (key US barrier)
With this kind of tension and uncertainty, there was a big opportunity to provide greater clarity and confidence for consumers when using their debit cards.
After spending time understanding consumer perceptions and needs, we conducted a deep dive into the existing consumer journey.
The goal was to:
Deepen understanding of the consumer experience in ecommerce and how it is enabled today
Identify critical moments, pain points, and unmet needs that would inform ideation
That led us to identify four opportunity areas to improve and/or optimize the debit experience
Onboarding a new card
For people who aren’t in the habit of using debit in ecommerce, how can Mastercard give them a reason to use DMC in ecommerce? (E.g. Getting over security fears, offering incentives)
Becoming Card on File
For people who aren’t aware they can store their debit card on file, how can Mastercard help them understand the benefit of storing their card? (convenience, security, added value)?
Optimizing Checkout
For people who aren’t certain whether to choose debit in checkout… (Can I? Should I? Will it be easy? Why is it better?) How can Mastercard make them feel confident checking out with DMC
Mitigating Cart Abandonment
For people who have had a transaction declined and don’t know why how can Mastercard provide them with transparency so they understand next steps and feel comfortable using DMC in ecommerce again? (E.g. Messaging, notifications)
This work then informed ideation exercises in each one of the territories. From our ideation sessions, we generated 36 raw concepts and ideas which were eventually prioritized based on rigorous criteria and narrowed to 4 concepts to advance into prototyping.
And we created one prototype per week over the course of four weeks.
Now, I’m showing you these prototypes merely for effect. The larger point is that we couldn’t move forward any of these ideas until we had evidence. We needed a tangible representation of the concepts to share with technology to see if it was viable, and put in front of real consumers, to see if was desirable and useful.
A prototype will help you validate if you’re on to a good idea that either solves a real-world problem or truly addresses a consumer need. It also gives you the ability to validate early on if this thing can actually be built.