In a world where voluminous customer data is improving Customer Experience (CX) through hyper personalization, Thoughtworks curated a panel of experts in India to discuss the responsible use of technology for hyper-personalization and its correlation with Employee Experience (EX) and CX.
The panel delved into how enterprises must look within their own organizations and adopt a people-centric approach to achieve even better EX – translating into better CX. The panelists also touched upon the importance of various data-breach prevention methods that would maintain customer data privacy and earn customer trust.
“Digital-native customers have higher expectations of personalized service recommendations through hyper personalization,” said Ramani Siva Prakash T, product manager for the Customer Experience and Product and Design service line at Thoughtworks. He discussed how data can be leveraged to understand cognitive behavior allowing enterprises to provide customized services using system-generated predictive intelligence to improve CX.
Davnit Singh, the domain specialist for Financial Services at Thoughtworks, urged financial service providers to hasten their digital technology adoption to augment their services to cater to digital-native customers. “Banks who are digitizing their customer and employee-facing processes are able to optimize their cost, capital expenditure and at the same time better CX,” he pointed out.
“Customer focus has moved from products to contextual experiences,” observes Preetisudha Pandab, domain specialist for Retail at Thoughtworks. “It is non-negotiable that enterprises provide their customers with transparency, control and value. Also while customer privacy is valuable, any trade-off in privacy needs to be fair to the customer,” she adds.
According to a KPMG survey, there is a deep disconnect between corporate data practices and consumer expectations – about 86 percent of the general population in the US say data privacy is a growing concern. Of those surveyed, 68 percent said the level of data collection by companies is of concern. Interestingly, 70 percent of the surveyed business leaders said their companies have increased the collection of consumer personal data over 2021.
“Enterprises require hyper personalization to determine products for their customer, its pricing and to design the CX,” says Sathish Viswanathan, head of social impact at Thoughtworks. However, he also points out that businesses should ethically and responsibly use the data so as not to erode customer trust through avoidable data breaches.
“Care must be taken to weed out algorithmic biases, such as higher prices for those who use high-end PCs or customers being denied loans and having to pay higher interest rates depending on their geographical location. These are cases of hyper personalization gone wrong and such biases creep in through the data being used. Attention must be paid to data quality, which is often higher when sourced directly by enterprises than from third-party sources,” he added.
The panelists observed that employees should be at the core of any enterprise digital transformation. A successful digital transformation requires targeted focus to reenergize the people and have a shared vision. Employees must have customer-focus, be data-driven, risk-taking, agile and continuously learn.
Here is a summary of the key takeaways from the panel discussion:
Enterprises today can provide better CX through hyper personalization
Enterprises must adopt a people-centric approach to achieve better EX which translates into better CX
Enterprise digital transformation should aim to make teams more agile, improve performance and instill an innovative mindset in employees
Data breach prevention methods can enable better customer data privacy and earn customer trust
Care must be taken to weed out algorithmic biases by assuring higher data quality
Businesses must be ethical on how the customer data is being used and are responsible for not eroding customer trust due to data breaches
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.
