Modern business challenges require modern metrics
As the region continues its return to economic stability, the employee experience will play a larger part in corporate strategy. Mobile, virtual agents, live chat, and social media platforms will all need to be used to ensure that employees can connect with customers however and whenever customers want to connect. Chatbots will play an invaluable role in preserving human ingenuity for the issues that require it, thereby enhancing both customer and employee experiences.
When workflows are digitised to this extent, it becomes easier to track every element of the experience. What were customers doing just prior to a sale? What did they do afterwards? How often are they using the product or service? Capturing this information can allow digital businesses to derive other metrics, such as the probability of subscription renewals.
All industries will see a change in standard metrics.
Modern business challenges require modern metrics. With the right information at their fingertips, regional innovators can rise from the pandemic ashes stronger than ever. Not only will they be more resilient when the next crisis comes along, but they will thrive in the interim through digital operating models that connect people, data, and processes together in an experience ecosystem powered by real-time insights.
The experience economy was not created by invention. It emerged as a response to circumstances. A more demanding consumer base of digital natives; a workforce comprised of those same consumers, who expect flexibility and empowerment; and a pandemic that dialled these factors up to unprecedented intensity. But make no mistake, regional businesses can meet these challenges by becoming more digital and allowing data to guide them to better experiences and more beneficial outcomes.
Emirates Flight Catering created an online ecommerce portal to deliver its food to ground-based consumers.
Across the region, the pandemic forced digital experiments and feasibility studies to be quick-marched into live service. Beyond the remote-work tools and other collaboration platforms used for business continuity, enterprises made lemonade out of COVID’s lemons, taking the necessity of cloud migration and turning it into a series of positives. They streamlined operations, they reinvented business models, and they produced rich new digital experiences for customers and employees.
As the pandemic took hold, examples of hard-hit industries reinventing themselves permeated the region. Emirates Flight Catering, faced with an idle workforce and possible layoffs, created an online ecommerce portal to deliver its food to ground-based consumers’ doors. The new brand, called FoodCraft, kept employees employed and allowed Emirates Flight Catering to wait out the economic storm.
Success in the next phase of the digital journey will require greater business agility. New digital operating models require new metrics that capture events such as renewals, customer-engagement outcomes, and adoption. Our ability to succeed will depend on three factors: understanding the customer, making life convenient for them, and making them feel like we understand them as an individual.
Success in the next phase of the digital journey will require greater business agility.
In the BFSI sector, institutions are in possession of vast stores of historical, personal, and transactional information they can use to understand behaviour and predict the volumes and outcomes of future transactions. They have the scale to build service models that automate the mundane and free up employees to take care of more complex customer queries.
And they have the means to deliver these services through multiple channels — social, voice, app, and more. This means more convenience for customers. The information can also be used to personalise experiences, which will allow tellers and investment advisors to suggest other products that are relevant and useful. This further enhances the experience for the customer and builds brand loyalty.
All industries will see a change in standard metrics. Information about new customers, their engagements and their transactions should be unified across touchpoints and channels — instore, app, social, and the rest. A sale is revenue, no matter where it took place or how.
Institutions are in possession of vast stores of historical, personal, and transactional information they can use to understand behaviour.
And to individualise the customer experience and keep it consistent, all non-sale engagements need to be captured, even and perhaps especially if they did not lead to a purchase. Monthly active users on apps, engagement scores from surveys, renewal rates, adoption rates, and gross and net retention rates — these are the lines on today’s scorecards.
With the right information regional innovators can rise from the pandemic stronger than before, becoming more resilient when the next crisis comes along.
