How to build trusted relationships through digital engagement

Pan­el
EA – Ed Alford, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer, New Look 
FH – Faisal Hus­sain, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer and chief dig­i­tal offi­cer, Metro Bank 
LJ – Leigh Jones, senior busi­ness con­sul­tant (EMEA), Twilio 
DK – Daniel Kor­nitzer, chief busi­ness devel­op­ment offi­cer, Paysafe Group

Giv­en the pan­dem­ic and all that has hap­pened over the past cou­ple of years, why is it so impor­tant to engage cus­tomers dig­i­tal­ly?

LJ: As a soci­ety, and as organ­i­sa­tions, we’ve gone through a tur­bu­lent time over the last few years. So, the land­scape has changed. Organ­i­sa­tions have moved an awful lot faster on their dig­i­tal strat­e­gy… now, we’re sud­den­ly see­ing them tak­ing a step back, look­ing at their infra­struc­ture and ask­ing ‘how are cus­tomers engag­ing with us?’

DK: Dig­i­tal engage­ment is impor­tant because the way con­sumers inter­act with mer­chants, with banks, with fin­techs, has rad­i­cal­ly changed. The ques­tion is, ‘how do we elic­it con­sumer loy­al­ty when we only see them once a quar­ter?’ The answer is to cre­ate con­sumer loy­al­ty by deliv­er­ing val­ue, solv­ing a prob­lem for the con­sumer and giv­ing them back time. Cus­tomers are tech­nol­o­gy-agnos­tic – they only care about the ben­e­fits.

How can you ensure you’re engag­ing cus­tomers as effec­tive­ly through online chan­nels as you do via tra­di­tion­al chan­nels?

FH: We call it ‘bricks and clicks,’ in terms of how we bal­ance the two, because every­body knows that great cus­tomer ser­vice on the high street is face to face and it is about trust. For us, the hard­est part is to offer a dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ty, but try and retain the high street cus­tomer ser­vice.

EA: To be the best omnichan­nel retail­er, I think you’ve got to build the best dig­i­tal cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. When I engage with any­body who’s buy­ing our prod­uct, the thing they’re always say­ing is: make it eas­i­er. I would like to cre­ate the same expe­ri­ence for our cus­tomers if they go into our stores as when they’re online and in their own house. We’re test­ing fit ana­lyt­ics to allow cus­tomers to effec­tive­ly cre­ate a [dig­i­tal] chang­ing room in their house.

How does dig­i­tal engage­ment impact rev­enue and cus­tomer reten­tion?

EA: Peo­ple want to be part of your pur­pose and actu­al­ly enjoy shop­ping with you, and that helps with life­time val­ue. The thing we’re doing next is to try and get our senior design­ers into the meta­verse talk­ing to cus­tomers at the begin­ning of the design process, so that we can use that as an engage­ment plat­form at that stage. So, by the time it gets to [the] autumn-win­ter [fash­ion sea­son]… cus­tomers know what we’re bring­ing out and have been part of it.

FH: For us, the rela­tion­ship is that we could be part of key life moments for peo­ple. There’s a big dif­fer­ence between some­one com­ing in for an over­draft, ver­sus get­ting their first mort­gage. Whether dig­i­tal can do that com­plete­ly on its own is one of the puz­zles I’ve got to solve, tech­nol­o­gy-wise.

Accord­ing to Twilio research, 95% of com­pa­nies say they are trans­par­ent about how they use data, but only 62% of cus­tomers agree. Why the dis­con­nect?

LJ: [We also found that only] 52% of cus­tomers feel some­what or very high trust with the com­pa­nies they engage with, so that’s incred­i­bly low. We found that [organ­i­sa­tions] are not serv­ing them per­son­al­ly.

Fun­da­men­tal­ly, human inter­ac­tions and what con­sumers expect have not changed for hun­dreds of years. What has changed is the man­ner in which we’re engag­ing with them.  Dig­i­tal offers so many new oppor­tu­ni­ties for engage­ment, but that needs to be per­son­al to have that key moment.

DK: As tech­nol­o­gy providers, it behoves us to reas­sure con­sumers. There are exam­ples where trust is a real game chang­er, [like] cashier-less stores such as Ama­zon Go. Say I picked [up] two choco­late bars in the store, but my bill comes in and shows three choco­late bars… they make it easy to just swipe on that item and say I’m chal­leng­ing this. It’s impor­tant to make that user expe­ri­ence extreme­ly pleas­ant and seam­less.

How can busi­ness­es build trust, par­tic­u­lar­ly around data, through dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion?

FH: The more dig­i­tal we become, the more auto­mat­ed we become, the more in-cloud we become, we’re one step removed from where [cus­tomers’] data is sit­ting. So, I’d like to see some­thing more, prob­a­bly on the tech­nol­o­gy agen­da, to be able to talk about the cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­i­ty [of keep­ing data safe].

LJ: It’s a per­son­al con­tract as well between the con­sumer and the organ­i­sa­tion. So, I may be more open to shar­ing more of my infor­ma­tion with an organ­i­sa­tion that I feel is trust­ed, but also deliv­ers on that per­son­al­i­sa­tion. So not just pop­ping my name at the top of an email, but real­ly under­stand­ing me as a per­son.

DK: If you build the world’s best weapons, you don’t have some stu­dents oper­at­ing them, you need per­son­nel that knows how to [use] them, and it’s the same with tech­nol­o­gy; you need pros.

Per­son­al­i­sa­tion can pro­vide great dig­i­tal engage­ment, but com­pa­nies often think they’re doing it bet­ter than they are. How can they get it right?

DK: Con­sumers used to have a very spe­cial rela­tion­ship with mom-and-pop stores where you knew the own­er. And with the rise of ecom­merce giants, we’ve gained economies of scale, but we’ve lost that touch. AI has the poten­tial to inject that lev­el of per­son­al­i­sa­tion, but the ques­tion is, ‘how do we achieve that with­out being intru­sive?’ We need to focus on con­sumer pref­er­ence and rel­e­vance.

EA: It’s not just a case of giv­ing the AI on the data and then it auto gen­er­ates [a com­mu­ni­ca­tion], there are actu­al­ly humans at the end of it, who sit down and talk through that cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. We add the art and the sci­ence before we then push things out.

FH: We’ve got to be rel­e­vant, oth­er­wise we’d become annoy­ing as organ­i­sa­tions. And then there is the human over­lay [to say], we are think­ing about you. And then it is a con­scious deci­sion to mar­ket this to you at this point, because one: we think it’s rel­e­vant, and two: we think it’s use­ful for you. 

What are your hopes for the future of dig­i­tal engage­ment?

LJ: The most impor­tant ele­ment is a human-cen­tric approach. [For exam­ple,] we have our con­tact cen­tre agents, they’re doing a ter­rif­ic job [and it’s] incred­i­bly chal­leng­ing with the amount of peo­ple that are avail­able at the moment. And we need to make sure that we serve them well, so they can serve our cus­tomers.

FH: Tech­nol­o­gy is evolv­ing real­ly, real­ly fast. It’s get­ting ever­more clever, ever­more com­plex. So, we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to keep serv­ing the cus­tomers well. I would like to see more forums where tech­nol­o­gists get to dis­cuss the respon­si­bil­i­ties that they’re now grow­ing into.

EA: I want to build cool, fun expe­ri­ences for our cus­tomers, and my hope for dig­i­tal is that the feed­back we get actu­al­ly gets the cus­tomers and the organ­i­sa­tion clos­er, so that you can always be respon­sive.

For more infor­ma­tion, please vis­it twilio.com