Driving experience-led growth through tech-driven end-user insights and analytics

Customer experience (CX) has become a key factor in determining the success of an enterprise, particularly in the era of online sales. Businesses have discovered the importance of delivering personalized experiences, at scale, if they wish to create long term customer value and distinguish themselves from the competition. Essentially, CX has become a driver of profitable and sustainable business growth.

To explore the importance of experience-led-growth and the pivotal role that it can play in generating profits, Experience Makers – an initiative presented by CNBC TV18 and Adobe – brought together a clique of renowned business leaders, including Prativa Mohapatra, VP & MD, Adobe India, A. Balasubramanian, MD & CEO, Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC; Vijay Chandok, MD & CEO, ICICI Securities and Suresh Badami, Deputy MD, HDFC Life Insurance, to discuss their trysts with the theme ‘Experience Led Growth’.

Insurance, as a product, has some scope for delivering CX at the time of buying. However, the experience that counts the most comes when the claim gets passed, which could be decades after the initial purchase. Suresh Badami recounted how HDFC Life’s journey to enhanced CX began way before the pandemic, when it was actually put to the test. “For us, it has always been about building trust for the end customer. We worked towards creating value propositions, ensuring transparency of the products, and various other aspects,” he shared. As a result, the company was able to gain considerable market share during the pandemic because of the trust that it had built over the years and the digital capability to deliver on it. He went on to narrate how over a period of time, with the help of platforms like Adobe’s Experience Maker, the company came closer to delivering the exact right solutions to the end customer.

In the broking industry, which is hyper-competitive and showcases a seamless, end-to-end digital journey for customers, the CX context is completely different from most others. Vijay Chandok explained, “Our customers are also using extremely customer-centric shopping portals and there is a tendency to expect the same experience from their stockbroker, despite the fact that we are actually a highly regulated industry with complex products. Today, with data, analytics and the use of technology to deliver a UIUX that makes the whole process really seamless, we set our perspective from the point of view of the customer and not the product. We aim to support a customer’s journey with the right products at the right moment.” Vijay Chandok also talked about how using technology has helped the company to rein in excessive risk-taking behavior of customers or alert them to a risk they are unknowingly taking, by providing customized content nudges, at the right time, on a real time basis.

The mutual fund industry has evolved in terms of its digital adoption, by both asset management companies and their customers. Explaining how CX enhancing interfaces are useful in the mutual fund space, A. Balasubramanian remarked, “Thanks to Adobe, we got the entire customer interface on one platform. This gave us the ability to analyze and respond with a clearer view of our customers' behavior and expectations. Further, although customer behavior varies from investor to investor, our platform enables us to analyze their individual behavior and then provide customized communication and solutions.” He narrated how the platform enabled his company to provide useful insights, which are customized to the client’s investing persona; these could drive action and enhance experiences, without pushing customers or overloading them with information.

Prativa Mohapatra explained that Adobe’s ability to service its diverse spectrum of clients, which in turn cater to their customers on a one-on-one basis, becomes possible because the fuel for creating AI is data. “All customer-facing organizations typically sit on storehouses of rich data,” she said. “While models that are relevant for each enterprise could differ, our AI engines learn about our customers and their customers through the data that they provide us. So, simply having the right data platform with robust, clean and complete customer data enables our technology to create the right personas for end users.” She went on to talk about the constraints that enterprises face while transitioning to an experience-led interface. These included organizational silos, fragmented data, the absence of technology platforms for customer experiences and lastly, the absence of the right culture.

Beyond being ‘the pdf people’, Adobe is now increasingly renowned for its Experience Cloud – a comprehensive set of digital experience tools that enables enterprises to give their customers what they want, exactly when, and how they need it. It is powered by the Adobe Experience Platform, which rests on pillars of content and commerce, data and analytics and customer journeys, driven by AI, which leads predictive analysis of what customers want. All this enables efficient and seamless delivery of exceptional CX, supporting companies in their efforts to improve profitability and, more importantly, gain customer loyalty.

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