Experience Archives - Business Intelligence Info

Tag Archives: Experience

New Customer Experience Needs and Commerce Trends for 2021

February 24, 2021 CRM News and Info

By Jack M. Germain

Feb 24, 2021 5:08 AM PT

As consumers get comfortable with their newfound digital wallets and gift cards, marketers must continue to adapt their strategies to changes in shopping behavior to better finesse the customer experience.

Both consumers and vendors have had non-stop adjustments. Lockdowns and social distancing requirements accelerated the adoption of new technologies. Commerce trends that were on the horizon pre-COVID-19 were suddenly adopted at a brisk pace. Online food ordering, curbside pickup, and BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store) are presenting new challenges to store owners and brand marketers.

Commerce analysts do not see consumers shedding their newfound buying options in the wake of a post-pandemic marketplace. Concerns for health safety, social distancing, and remote working will remain as the center stage in the daily lives of millions of shoppers.

So brands must continue to assess how they can best meet the dramatically changing landscape of commerce. How brands deliver customer experience (CX) will determine where and how consumers continue to shop.

Four trends about customer experience and the new commerce will define 2021 and beyond, according to Jennifer Conklin, sector lead of unified commerce at Capgemini North America. Contactless customer experience, omnichannel shopping, personalization and changing customer journeys, and voice commerce will power the customer experience engine going forward.

“Consumer shopping and spending behavior have significantly shifted since the pandemic began in March 2020. Recent Capgemini research showed that 48 percent of holiday season purchases were for essential items, with consumers prioritizing clothing (36 percent), beauty/personal care products (21 percent), and electrical items (21 percent),” Conklin told CRM Buyer.

As for luxury products, Capgemini research showed that 47 percent of consumers expected a decrease in spend over the holidays while 29 percent predicted an increase in luxury purchases, she noted.

New Normal Sales Tools

Not all analysts are confident that consumers will ever return to brick-and-mortar stores as their primary shopping suppliers. Conklin is sure the four commerce drivers she identified have staying power. Her reasons make sense.

A contactless customer experience is one of the main demands indicated by consumers. Retailers that rolled out simple curbside options during the pandemic will put high-tech BOPIS and curbside offerings in place. Many shoppers still do not want to linger and browse in-store.

Omnichannel shopping has proven its value to shoppers looking for reliable delivery and better pricing options. Merchants who demonstrate that they are able to quickly get products to consumers, resolve issues with customer service, and provide fast delivery and returns will be the ones that thrive.

Personalization and changing customer journeys are the new sales tools. As brands look to understand new customer journeys, they must get creative online to improve engagement and increase customer loyalty, Conklin suggested.

Voice Commerce is the shopping tool just as voice commands are finding new uses in smart homes and electronic gadgets. Retailers will try to figure out how they can use voice to make the customer experience even more engaging.

Safety is still at the forefront of consumer concerns, noted Conklin. Last year, Capgemini research revealed that 77 percent of consumers expect to increase their use of touchless technologies to avoid interactions that require physical contact.

Her company’s research found that 59 percent of consumers prefer to use voice interfaces in public places during the pandemic. Researchers do not expect that percentage to shrink in a post-pandemic era.

“If this is not on merchants’ 2021 digital road maps, it needs to be added,” she urged.

The Journey Counts

To better understand the changing directions of shopping journeys, merchants should inject more effort by adding a personalization element, according to Conklin. This helps the customer feel known and valued as they make their purchasing decisions.

“While there are several degrees of personalization capabilities, merchants can start small by incentivizing customers to create account profiles and fine-tune their segmentation efforts so the organization can reach out to the customer with the right message at the right time,” she offered.

Data also plays an integral role when it comes to the success of personalization and omnichannel efforts. Companies need to ensure they are working with one central view of their customer across the organization from sales, service, marketing, and commerce, Conklin said.

“No matter who in the company is communicating with the customer, they need to have the relevant data at their fingertips to be successful in their role. This is also critical in order to deliver a consistent, seamless experience to the customer across every touchpoint in the customer journey,” she explained.

This data and direct customer feedback can influence product sets as well. That enables retailers to further refine their inventory strategies cross-channel/cross-market, she added.

What’s Ahead

Consumers’ modes of interaction and habits have changed and are continuing to do so as we adapt to the “new normal,” according to Durk Stelter, CRO of Linc, a CX automation platform provider in Sunnyvale, Calif. This year will bring further transition and change to retail. Shoppers’ expectations continue to rise for anywhere, anytime interactions with brands.

“As the fixed boundary between workplace and home has eroded, so has the divide between daytime computer use and leisure time on mobile. Amidst overlapping worlds, digital shopping has become omnipresent and around the clock — shifting among devices and following shoppers around their homes, into their cars, and on their cautious forays into the outside world,” Stelter told CRM Buyer.

These trends will stick for now. However, as stores reopen, the trends will likely evolve, creating more cohesion between the online and in-store experience, suggested Shelly Socol, co-founder of 1R, a digital commerce and retail strategy agency in New York City. The online buying experience will continue to evolve and grow so it is inevitable that the trends will morph.

“However, the trends we are seeing today are ahead of their time due to the pandemic. Both merchants and consumers have progressed by leaps and bounds over the past year, Socol told CRM Buyer.

Merchants have been forced to build more robust shopping experiences and offer high-touch customer service. Consumers, on the other hand, have had to get used to shopping online more often, she described.

“What might have been once foreign and uncomfortable for them has become a standard, and it is likely consumers will not revert back to shopping only in-store even when they are fully open,” predicted the 1R co-founder.

Differing CX Realities

Managing CX is becoming different now for in-store commerce versus e-commerce, according to Capgemini’s Conklin. In-store traffic remains at an all-time low. But e-commerce channels have invested heavily in robust customer experience capabilities.

“Since customers do not want to browse and shop in-store, the online digital experience needs to mimic the in-store experience. This means intuitive navigation, detailed product pages with full imagery, and personalized technology to foster loyalty,” advised Conklin.

Brands and retailers will also start to invest more in immersive technologies to bring products to life and embed this functionality into their sites, she noted. This will enable customers to configure products using a 3D configurator, augmented reality, or virtual photography.

“Once the pandemic subsides, the in-store shopping experience will return and likely be more immersive than ever before. Stores will likely carry less inventory and allocate space to be utilized for unique and engaging experiences such as product demonstrations, classes, spa treatments, cafes, and so much more where customers can spend time in-store,” she predicted.

CX in general has dramatically changed since the pandemic started. Customers expect 24/7 individualized personalization support on everything from pre-purchase information, to order support, returns, and loyalty and membership information, observed Linc’s Stelter.

“The rising degree of difficulty for customer service interactions requires organization-wide responsiveness and flexibility. As brands increasingly turn to automated solutions to help manage the volume of inquiries, the quality of digital-human interactions is crucial,” he said.

Create Seamless Shopping Experiences

A primary consideration is changing how marketers use chatbots, as Stelter sees it. To meet the challenges of 2021, digital interactions must be adaptive and empower the consumer to drive the conversation.

In order to improve their customer experience, merchants need to focus on accessibility, noted Meghan Brophy, retail and e-commerce analyst at Fit Small Business. That is one aspect of online shopping that has been neglected for too long.

“To truly offer a great customer experience, merchants need to make online shopping accessible to all. Simple changes like labeling form fields, adding alt text to images, and not using strikethroughs to show sale prices can make a big difference,” she told CRM Buyer.

More important than ever is for consumers to have a seamless shopping experience. Shoppers are starting and completing buying journeys using a mix of channels, and they all need to work together smoothly, explained Brophy.

For example, a customer might start on a brand’s Instagram page and add items to the cart. Then the customer visits the website later to complete the purchase and picks up the order in-store.

Many options exist for brands to maximize the online customer experience. Helpful and fast customer service is key, in addition to free shipping and easy returns. SMS is also a rising form of communication with consumers and is becoming a must, offered 1R’s Socol.

Brands should also build and utilize flexible landing pages populated with both content and products. These pages can form the foundation for marketing purposes to drive traffic. Brands can create storytelling experiences that complement the website and allow the brand to produce unique content for different target audiences.

Jack%20M.%20Germain New Customer Experience Needs and Commerce Trends for 2021
Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open-source technologies. He is an esteemed reviewer of Linux distros and other open-source software. In addition, Jack extensively covers business technology and privacy issues, as well as developments in e-commerce and consumer electronics. Email Jack.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Buyer

Transform the Patient Experience with the Microsoft Healthcare Bot [VIDEO]

October 1, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

PowerObjects is deeply entrenched in the healthcare industry. Our mission is to advocate for patients through the use of Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Business Applications platform. In recent years, we’ve delivered dozens of digital transformations for healthcare providers big and small. We speak from experience when we say that nothing is more important in this industry than the patient…

Source

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

PowerObjects- Bringing Focus to Dynamics CRM

SugarCRM Adds AI to Sweeten the Customer Experience Pot

September 8, 2020 CRM News and Info

By Jack M. Germain

Sep 8, 2020 5:22 AM PT

SugarCRM last month announced its acquisition of Node Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that leverages customer relationship management data and vast external sources. This marks the fourth acquisition by SugarCRM since the company’s investment by Menlo Park-based Accel-KKR in August 2018.

The three previous acquisitions of Collabspot, Salesfusion, and Corvana are part of SugarCRM’s collective services for two million enterprise users across 120 countries. The newly acquired technology capabilities from Node could be the ultimate solution to the big data problem CRM platforms face — and will fuel Sugar’s time-aware customer experience (CX) platform.

The bolstered technology will usher in the new paradigm of HD-CX — High-Definition Customer Experience — by bringing greater fidelity to CRM. It will also contribute to the platform by automatically forecasting expected outcomes and highlighting previously unforeseen challenges and opportunities.

Time-aware technology is the long-awaited innovation that will hopefully solve the lingering fail point of conventional CRM software. Traditional CRM solutions are great at tracking the current state of customers, according to Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM. The problem is that “current state” is a single point in time — right now, he said.

“Its solutions are lost the moment something changes. Truly insightful facts emerge when you can track how customers engage over time,” Charlton told CRM Buyer.

SugarCRM is the only customer experience platform built on an advanced event stream database that records every change event in the customer journey and then predicts future outcomes, he asserted.

CRM Buyer discussed with Charlton the current state of CRM platforms and how artificial intelligence is key to improved sales, service, and predictability in automated CX.

CRM Buyer: Why does time-aware technology matter to CRM software?

Craig Charlton: Having a full historical view enables time-aware insights, such as the average time that leads spend in each stage of the pipeline, comparing current sales performance to any past period, and knowing when current performance is outside of historical norms.

SugarCRM also extends time-awareness into the future through AI-based predictions. Accurate predictions enable companies to make better business decisions, manage risk, and identify and respond to problems and opportunities more quickly. That gives companies rich insight into the past, present, and future of their customers and customer-facing business processes.

CRM Buyer: How does this time-aware concept differ from other AI-driven CRM platforms?

Charlton: Traditional CRM systems show a funnel, but it is a static view of that funnel. What it does not show you is how that funnel evolves over time, or where and why leads drop out, as well as how long they spend in each section of the funnel.

86836 Craig Charlton SugarCRM Adds AI to Sweeten the Customer Experience Pot

SugarCRM CEO Craig Charlton

With the combination of Node’s AI capabilities with Sugar’s time-aware customer experience platform, companies can achieve an unprecedented view into the past, present, and future of their customers and customer-facing functions. Node’s key differentiator is the accuracy of its predictions.

That accuracy is made possible through model data enrichment. Node augments the data from its customers with people, company, and market data sourced from a variety of public sources. This model data enrichment enables Node to deliver exceptionally accurate predictions, even with limited or incomplete CRM data, and to consider factors in its predictions that aren’t typically represented in CRM data.

CRM Buyer: How does the acquisition of Node fit into the SugarCRM environment?

Charlton: Node’s AI technology helps complete Sugar’s high-definition CX platform we have been honing and are delivering to the mid-market. The value of Node’s full deep learning platform enables Sugar to rapidly build, test, and deliver predictive models in Sugar’s products, each of which can focus on specific use cases that have challenged sales, marketing, and service teams for decades.

CRM Buyer: Is Node a fully-absorbed part of SugarCRM’s business structure or a subsidiary of the company?

Charlton: SugarCRM acquired Node’s AI-as-a-Service platform, and its team of 30 are all joining Sugar. Node’s valuable skills and expertise will help accelerate Sugar’s development plans centered on AI and deep learning.

CRM Buyer: How is Node’s technology able to improve on the inherent inaccuracy of heuristic-based approaches produced by deep-learning logarithms?

Charlton: Deep learning models are limited by the quality and quantity of input data, which historically has been inaccurate or incomplete in real-life CRM implementations. Node’s deep learning models identify signals with up to 81 percent greater accuracy than heuristic-based approaches to deliver the tangible benefits of heightened performance and true predictability.

Node augments data that companies collect about their customers sourced from a wide variety of public sources. Without this model data enrichment, other approaches are limited to the information that a company had the foresight to collect and is biased towards the data the company felt was relevant at the time they implemented their customer systems.

Enriching the model data enables Node to deliver exceptional predictions, even with limited or incomplete customer data, and it will consider factors in its predictions that simply are not represented in the company’s systems. Node will surface answers that the company’s data did not cover and raise questions that the company did not even know it should be asking.

CRM Buyer: What has contributed to SugarCRM’s popularity over other CRM platforms?

Charlton: Sugar’s focus on four key pillars is something we feel passionate about and our customers know it. In fact, Sugar ranked among the highest for customer retention rates of all ranked vendors in the recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) — a metric for assessing customer loyalty for a company’s brand, products or services — is consistently in the mid-90s, which is unheard of for enterprise software.

CRM Buyer: How significant are the four pillars you mentioned?

Charlton: Our four pillars include time-aware with predictive insight (as core to our products, not an add-on), no-touch information management, continuous cloud innovation, and a commitment to our customers.

CRM Buyer: That sounds like in-house marketing jargon. Are these four pillars actually an essentially guiding technology or fancy product description?

Charlton: Here is a bit more about what those pillars mean:

Time-Aware is an innovative feature where SugarCRM leverages a time-aware event stream database that records every change inside the customer journey, enabling companies to rewind the past, understand the present, and predict the future. Predictive AI will be embedded into our products (core not as an add-on) driving improved customer acquisition, expansion, and retention.

No-Touch Information Management enables users to spend less time entering and finding customer information. Instead, they spend more time actually doing high-value work.

CRM Buyer: So how does that translate into a better CRM product?

Charlton: Here is how No-Touch works:

1) We look for every opportunity to automate the collection of data. We search for ways to make it an automatic byproduct of the user working by engaging with customers, using other tools and systems. We want to eliminate the need to copy and paste, or manually enter information.

2) We look for opportunities to process and analyze data automatically to extract insights and next best action guidance. So a user does not have to interact with the system to get it to do something.

3) Finally, No-Touch is about delivering customer information directly to users in-context with what they are doing, so they receive key insights just when they need them.

CRM Buyer: Now what about the other two pillars?

Charlton: Continuous cloud innovation is a feature not available in other platforms. SugarCRM is built to leverage AWS’s cloud computing capabilities. This
means that Sugar’s cloud solutions can innovate at a pace that is unmatched by our competitors while simultaneously providing best-in-class cloud infrastructure. The Sugar platform does this at a very reasonable price.

Besides hosting, we are currently leveraging 34 AWS advanced computing services, and we are growing that number at a rapid rate. These are technologies that proprietary cloud vendors in our industry would have to make prohibitively large investments to match.

Customer commitment is both a continuous product objective and a solemn business commitment. We do what it takes to help our customers create customers
for life. With the highest customer retention of all vendors in Gartner SFA MQ, industry-leading NPS, and rave reviews on G2, our customers tend to agree.

CRM Buyer: How widespread is the use of AI in CRM platforms today?

Charlton: While there are several CRM vendors incorporating AI into their platforms, SugarCRM’s approach is unique in three key ways. I already detailed the
time-awareness feature. The second unique approach is model data enrichment.

Remember what I said about how Node augments the SugarCRM data with
curated data? Competitive solutions rely solely on the more limited information available in their CRM.

By contrast, SugarCRM’s AI performance delivers exceptional predictions, even with limited or incomplete CRM data. It considers factors in its predictions that simply are not represented in the CRM. By embedding AI into our core products, SugarCRM enables customers to avoid the time, cost, and technical expertise required by competitive AI solutions.

When you add all these together, we have a solution that democratizes the power of AI, making unprecedented predictive insight obtainable to all companies, regardless of size, business maturity, or technical sophistication.

Jack%20M.%20Germain SugarCRM Adds AI to Sweeten the Customer Experience Pot
Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open-source technologies. He is an esteemed reviewer of Linux distros and other open-source software. In addition, Jack extensively covers business technology and privacy issues, as well as developments in e-commerce and consumer electronics. Email Jack.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Buyer

User Experience: An Important Aspect of CRM Implementation Projects

August 25, 2020 CRM News and Info

When you choose a new or upgraded CRM (Customer Resource Planning) solution, there are several areas that you investigate carefully. You’ll look at processes, features, and tools; you’ll be concerned with ease of compliance and security capabilities; you’ll want to know about implementation timelines and training; and of course, you’ll be sure to pin down up-front as well as ongoing costs.

But there is another critical area that you must not overlook during your CRM selection and implementation project, and that is user experience.

Your employees, particularly your power users, are going to be using your new CRM solution every day. Their input about the system definitely should be a consideration. Giving your team the tools and processes they need to do their jobs in a way that is intuitive and user friendly will go a long way toward CRM project success.

Here are three questions you can ask to evaluate user experience before implementing a Cloud-based CRM solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365.

ximage asset 300x169.png.pagespeed.ic.1OQ2HnzG7n User Experience: An Important Aspect of CRM Implementation Projects

Are we presenting customer data in the best way?

Optimal presentation means that customer data will be quickly and intuitively accessible when a team member needs it. Users shouldn’t have to scroll up and down forms to enter or update information. Your CRM can be configured to eliminate such scrolling and make information easier to find. Cloud-based CRM solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 have a customizable drag and drop form builder that tailors forms to meet the needs of the user. Ask your users what fields they need to see on their forms.

For instance, team members can use tabs to find the data they need without excessive scrolling. The Accounts entity may have a Summary tab displaying frequently accessed data and additional tabs for locating less regularly required information. Consultation with your users will help you to determine the most optimal configuration of your forms and tabs.

Users can create sections within a tab to group similar data and provide a heading for that group of data. Fields can be added to a section in a one-to-four-column format.

Is our data easily searchable?

The way data is captured and entered will directly affect the ease with which your users can locate it as needed. You can give your team a better user experience and thus ensure increased adoption of the new CRM solution if you make sure to include searchability as a priority.

In addition to reviewing data input forms, canvass users to understand how they interact with the data. Determine what fields they most commonly search, what entities they frequently view, and what subsets of data they typically access.

Consider configuring these Dynamics 365 data searchability features during your implementation project

- The Quick Find feature allows users to input simple queries to locate commonly searched information. Tailor your system’s functionality by setting record return limits, indexing methods, and parameters for displaying data.
- The Global or “Categorized” Search feature gives users the ability to search up to ten entities simultaneously. Depending on user access permissions, they can customize or reconfigure these fields at any time. Modify settings to include desired fields that are returned by the search.

- Views give information about an entity that users can sort or filter. For instance, if you frequently work with contacts in Texas, you can configure a view to filter “State = Texas,” and sort the list as a saved query for future access. System views are available to all users, and from there, personal views can be created for individual users. Personal views can be restricted to individual users and those with whom they wish to share them.

Can navigation be easier and more efficient?

With Dynamics 365s Business Process Flows and Power Automate Flows, your organization can standardize and automate many of your frequently used processes,

- Business process flows furnish a consistent, standardized experience for frequently-used processes. These flows take users through steps and stages defined by your organization in line with your preferred procedures, including any interactions required or recommended for process completion. For instance, in the Lead to Business Opportunity process flow, four stages: Qualify, Develop, Propose, and Close are defined. For each stage, specific steps must be executed before the user is moved along to the next stage. By standardizing your processes, you ensure that your sales team captures all the data necessary to close opportunities.
- Power Automate Flows create automatic procedures in Dynamics 365. For instance, when a subscription service nears its expiration date, an automated process will allow you to clone the customer information and add a new expiration date rather than manually creating a whole new customer file.

To promote CRM optimization and user buy-in, consider the overall user experience. BroadPoint can help you take advantage of the best features Dynamics 365 CRM offers before you begin the implementation process. Contact us today to learn more.

By BroadPoint, www.broadpoint.net

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

TIBCO NOW Connected Experience: Your Content, Your Way

July 31, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

If you’ve attended any virtual conferences this year, you’ve probably wished for something more engaging, more relevant, and more compelling. One promise we can make is that the digital experience at TIBCO NOW will surpass what you think you know about online events.

The TIBCO Connected Experience will feature our channel-based approach, offering around-the-clock content that can be viewed live in your timezone or watched on-demand. Whether you are an early bird or night owl, in Sydney, Paris, or New York, TIBCO NOW will be on, streaming, and ready for you to flip through the channels and select or binge based on your interests and areas of expertise.

The TIBCO Connected Experience will feature a channel-based approach, offering around-the-clock content that can be viewed live in your timezone or watched on-demand. Click To Tweet

With five channels from which to choose, your content options are vast. Here is a look at the different channels we are offering as a part of our global agenda:

Sustainable Innovation: Join the TIBCO executive team and visionary leaders focused on sustaining the pace and impact of innovation. Data is the fuel that powers both commercially-focused and societal challenges. Learn how to build and sustain digital leadership and recognize those that have raised the bar of sustainable innovation to the highest levels. Available for all passes.

Vision & Value: Watch and participate in a series of breakout sessions focused on innovation at its core. TIBCO technology leaders present their latest releases and initiatives, and TIBCO customers from across the world share their applications of TIBCO technologies to propel their data-centric innovation success. Available for all passes.

Innovation Hub: Enjoy sessions on the latest innovations from TIBCO and our premier partners, including lively demo sessions with experts. Connect and engage with peers and have some fun. Available for all passes.

TIBCO NOW+: Go deeper and gain more insight. Explore technology topics with greater depth and immersion with TIBCO experts and industry analysts. Join “Ask Me Anything” forums with TIBCO executive leaders — a unique opportunity to go behind the scenes as never before. Only available to those with Digital Plus or NOW Educate passes.

NOW Educate: Brush up on TIBCO technologies with product knowledge training to foster new skills, learn new products, and prepare for your certification exam. Join two-part deep dive lab sessions to get instructor-led content around select TIBCO products. Only available to those with NOW Educate passes.

TIBCO NOW is a global event, so wherever in the world you are, you’ll enjoy an all-inclusive event experience filled with keynote speakers, TIBCO product announcements, customer success stories, interactive demos, sponsor- and partner-specific content, and insights from TIBCO industry leaders—all with a click of a mouse.

Your agenda and experience are curated by you. Choose the sessions that interest you the most and look for linkages to recommended sessions based on your selections and interests. Consume the content live or on-demand when your schedule best allows.

We have three packages from which to choose: NOW Digital Plus, NOW Educate, or NOW Digital Free. The package you choose will determine which channels, content, and features you will have access to throughout the event.

If you are looking for more immersive content, the NOW Digital Plus package gives you all of the NOW Digital Free content plus:

In-depth product breakouts
Sessions with tips & tricks for many of our most popular tools and solutions
Insights from TIBCO experts and thought-leaders from across our organization as well as top technology analyst firms
The ability to engage with speakers and other attendees through channel chat, question submissions, and session surveys

If you are looking to strengthen your skills and capabilities with TIBCO products, the NOW Educate package gives you all of the tools to build that expertise, including:

All NOW Digital Plus content and features
Product knowledge training to prepare you for certification exams
Deep dive sessions for experienced users of TIBCO Spotfire^®and TIBCO BusinessWorks™
A voucher to become certified in a TIBCO product of your choice (a $ 300 value) + 20% off all additional certifications
A year-long subscription to TIBCO Academy to sharpen your skills (a $ 995 value)

Check out our newly-released global agenda to see when this content is playing in your specific time zone and stay tuned in the coming months for more information about how to create your custom event agenda.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The TIBCO Blog

How Stitch Fix used AI to personalize its online shopping experience

July 6, 2020 Big Data

Online retailers have long lured customers with the ability to browse vast selections of merchandise from home, quickly compare prices and offers, and have goods conveniently delivered to their doorstep. But much of the in-person shopping experience has been lost, not the least of which is trying on clothes to see how they fit, how the colors work with your complexion, and so on.

Companies like Stitch Fix, Wantable, and Trunk Club have attempted to address this problem by hiring professionals to choose clothes based on your custom parameters and ship them out to you. You can try things on, keep what you like, and send back what you don’t. Stitch Fix’s version of this service is called Fixes. Customers get a personalized Style Card with an outfit inspiration. It’s algorithmically driven and helps human style experts match a garment with a particular shopper. Each Fix included a Style Card that showed clothing options to complete outfits based on the various items in a customer’s Fix. Due to popular demand, last year the company began testing a way for shoppers to buy those related items directly from Stitch Fix through a program called Shop Your Looks.

AI is a natural fit for such services, and Stitch Fix has embraced the technology to accelerate and improve Shop Your Looks. On the tech front, this puts the company in direct competition with behemoths Facebook, Amazon, and Google, all of which are aggressively building out AI-powered clothes shopping experiences.

Stitch Fix told VentureBeat that during the Shop Your Looks beta period, “more than one-third of clients who purchased through Shop Your Looks engaged with the feature multiple times, and approximately 60% of clients who purchased through the offering bought two items or more.” It’s been successful enough that the company recently expanded to include an entire shoppable collection using the same underlying technology to personalize outfit and item recommendations as you shop.

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

Stitch Fix data scientists Hilary Parker and Natalia Gardiol explained to VentureBeat in an email interview what drove the company to develop Shop Your Looks; how the team used AI to build it out; and the methods they used, like factorization machines.

In this case study:

Problem: How to expand the scope of its service that matches outfits to online customers using a mix of algorithms and human expertise.
The result is “Shop Your Looks.”
It grew out of an experiment by a small team of Stitch Fix data scientists, then expanded across other units within the company.
The biggest challenge was how to determine what is a “good” outfit, when taste is so subjective and context matters.
Stitch Fix used a combination of human-crafted rules to store, sort, and manipulate data, along with AI models called factorization machines

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

VentureBeat: Did Stitch Fix kind of fall in love with an AI tool or technique, using that as inspiration to make a product using that tool or technique? Or did the company start with a problem or challenge and eventually settle on an AI-powered solution?

Stitch Fix: To create Shop Your Looks, we had to evolve our algorithm capabilities from matching a client with an individual item in a Fix to now matching an entire outfit based on a client’s past purchases and preferences. This is an incredibly complex challenge because it means not only understanding which items go together but also which of these outfits an individual client will actually like. For example, one person may like bold patterns mixed together and another person may prefer a bold top with a more muted bottom.

To help us solve this problem, we took advantage of our existing framework that provides Stylists with item recommendations for a Fix and determined what new information we needed to feed into that framework, and how we could collect it.

First, it’s important to understand how clients currently share information with us:

Style Profile: When a client signs up for Stitch Fix, we receive 90 different data points — from style to price point to size.
Feedback at checkout: 85% of our clients tell us why they are keeping or returning an item. This is incredibly rich data, including details on fit and style — no other retailer gets this level of feedback.
Style Shuffle: an interactive feature within our app and on our website where clients can “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” an image of an item or an outfit. They can do this at any time — so not just when they receive a Fix. So far, we’ve received an incredible 4 billion item ratings from clients.
Personalized request notes to Stylists: Clients give their Stylists specific requests, such as if they are looking for an outfit for an event, or if they’ve seen an item that they really like.

For Shop Your Looks, we supplement this with information about what items go together. The outfits in Style Cards, outfits our Creative Styling Team builds, and outfits we serve to clients in Style Shuffle give us valuable additional insight into a client’s outfit style preferences

VB: How did you go about starting this project? Did you need to hire new talent?

SF: Data science is core to what we do. We have more than 125 data scientists who work across our business, including in recommendation systems, human computation, resource management, inventory management, and apparel design.

Data-driven experimentation is an important part of the team’s culture, so like many initiatives at Stitch Fix, Shop Your Looks was born out of an experiment from a small team of data scientists. As the project grew beyond the initial data collecting phase and into beta testing, the data science team worked with other groups across the business. For example, our Creative Styling Team is tuned in to customer needs and able to recommend looks that are approachable, aspirational, and inspirational.

VB: What was the biggest or most interesting challenge you had to overcome in the process of creating Shop Your Looks?

SF: Creating outfits for clients is a really complex problem because what makes a good outfit is so subjective to each individual. What one person believes is a great outfit, another might not. The toughest part of solving this problem is that an outfit is not a fixed entity — it’s fundamentally contextual. Tackling this problem required gathering new insights, not just about specific items that clients like, but also about how clients reacted to items grouped together.

And because style is so subjective, we had to rethink how we qualified a “good” outfit for our algorithms, since there’s not simply one perfect outfit that exists. Clients have different style preferences, so we believe a “good” outfit is one that a certain set of our clients like, but not necessarily all.

We learn a lot about how clients react to items grouped together when we share outfits with clients and ask them to rate them via Style Shuffle.

VB: What AI tools and techniques does Stitch Fix employ — generally, and for Shop Your Looks?

SF: Shop Your Looks combines AI models and human-crafted rules to store, sort, and manipulate data.

The system is roughly based on a class of AI models called factorization machines and has a few distinct steps. Because generating outfits is complicated, we can’t just create an outfit and call it good. In the first step, we create a pairing model, which is able to predict pairs of items that go well together, such as a pair of shoes and a skirt or a pair of pants and a T-shirt.

We then move on to the next stage — outfit assembly. Here we select a set of items that all come together to form a cohesive outfit (based on the predictions from the pairing model). In this system, we use “outfit templates,” which provide a guideline of what an outfit consists of. For example, one template is tops, pants, shoes, and a bag, and another is a dress, necklace, and shoes.

In the final phase of recommending outfits for Shop Your Looks, there are several factors that come into play. We set an anchor item, which is an item the client kept from a past Fix, which we’d like to build outfits around. The algorithm also has to factor in what inventory is available at any given time. Once that is done, the algorithm develops personalized recommendations tailored to each client’s preferences. Clients can then browse and shop these looks directly from the Shop tab on mobile or desktop. The outfit recommendations refresh throughout the day, so clients can regularly check back for new outfit inspiration.

VB: What did you learn that’s applicable to future AI projects?

SF: We introduced Shop Your Looks to a small number of our clients in the U.S. last year, and throughout this initial beta period we learned a lot about how they interact with the product and how our algorithms performed.

A key tenet of our personalization model is that the more information clients share, the better we are able to personalize their recommendations. We are usually able to adapt the model based on feedback from our clients; however, rules-based systems aren’t generally adaptive. We need the system to learn from client feedback on the outfits it recommends. We’re receiving immensely helpful feedback, from how clients engage with the outfit recommendations and also from a custom-built internal QA system. The model is in its early days, and we are continually adding more information to show clients more highly personalized outfits. For example, while seasonal trends are important overall, recommendations should be customized to a client’s local climate so that clients who experience summer weather earlier than others will start to receive summer items before those in cooler climates.

As we serve more clients, we are receiving an additional data set that strengthens the feedback loop and continues to make our personalization capabilities stronger.

VB: What’s the next AI-related project for Stitch Fix (that you can talk about)?

SF: One of the most interesting aspects of data science at Stitch Fix is the unusual degree to which the algorithms team is engaged with virtually every aspect of the business — from marketing to managing inventory and operations, and of course in helping our Stylists choose items our clients will love.

We believe that when we look to the future, the data science team will still be focused on improving personalization. This could include anything from sizing to predicting your styling needs before you even know you need something.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

June 26, 2020 Sisense

In Managing Up, we give product managers and their teams actionable guidance on how to build, test, and release programs that will delight users and stand the test of time. From development to execution, our industry experts and seasoned pros can help you work smarter, not harder.

Delivering additional value to your customers by providing data-driven insights is a sure-shot way to improve your competitive advantage and monetize your data. It’s not a question of if but when this functionality becomes basic table stakes.

Several steps are required to turn data into revenue and go even further — including creating the right data strategy and identifying data opportunities, building your profit and loss statement and use cases, getting buy-in, finding a partner, implementing and launching, and finally growing post-launch through an iterative innovation process.

Zooming in on design and implementation: Delivering value means combining the right features, KPIs that drive action, and visualizations that tell a compelling story.

In addition, there is an important but oft-overlooked aspect to successful data monetization: user interface (UI) design (or visual design). While UI design is a vast topic, a common challenge when delivering analytics to customers is to create a consistent and seamless experience, since you are embedding a third-party application in your product.

packages CTA banners Product Teams Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Simple UI is good UI

Consistent design is intuitive design. It should be immediately obvious to the user how to accomplish whatever they want to do. Expectations of users today are higher, so you also need a beautiful design that intuitively directs a user to take action.

From a branding standpoint, it should also always be clear to the user that the product is unified: Typography, logo, image styles, brand color schemes, etc., should be reflected across the application (in the core offering and the analytics), just like the rest of the brand’s properties.

When embedding analytics, you are bringing two different applications into one space, so it is critical that your end-user seamlessly experiences both the core product and analytics.

Let’s take a deeper look.

Simple UI Acme Finance Hub 1540x911 1 Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Tip 1: Maintain consistent branding elements

Your brand matters! Consistent visuals resonate more effectively with your audience.

This is no different when you are delivering analytics to your customer. Remove any trace of third-party applications by changing any external logo or text to align to your organization’s brand. Leveraging a drag-and-drop UI-based interface to change the settings makes this process faster and will allow you to get to market rapidly without worrying about custom development.

TIP 1 Sisense Login Screen 1540x839 1 Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Tip 2: Consider visual hierarchy

Colors can convey powerful messages, so it’s crucial they be used mindfully and consistently. It can be unharmonious to have your brand colors be teal and black, for example, and part of your application or the analytics you deliver be yellow and white.

Leverage your corporate brand guidelines, if they exist, to customize the analytic application’s primary brand colors, primary and secondary text colors, etc.

If brand guidelines don’t exist, use easily available color palette selectors (there are tons of options to choose from) to select a color palette. Build your palette with a primary color in mind (usually your main brand color). Most products that are well designed use a visual hierarchy of fonts and color palettes to help ignite the experience.

In the palette, make sure to have a couple of options:

Primary brand color
Highlight or accent color for banners or toolbars
At least two light and two dark colors for contrast between background and texts (dark background, light texts or vice versa)

Once you have the colors, you can add them to “favorites” and make it easier to pick and choose.

TIP 2 SaveColorPaletteToFavorites 1540x677 1 Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

In addition to the application colors, also make sure to change the visualization color palette to match the application brand color palette. You can either use one of the several out-of-the-box color palette options or create a custom visualization palette. Again, you can customize your palette to match your brand colors.

Tip 3: Build branding with typography

Typography is a crucial element that uplifts a design and gives it a personality. Typography is also an important element that should be part of your brand. Typography conveys personality and grabs a user’s attention while establishing the tone of your brand. Certain fonts can also improve scannability, legibility, readability, and even navigation. It’s important that the font or fonts you use are consistent throughout your digital experiences.

Tip 4: Minimize the steps to insights

It’s a fundamental tenet of UI/UX design that the fewer clicks a given action takes, the better. When embedding analytics, be sure to keep actions like filtering, exporting, etc., in one place in the host application so users don’t have to repeat the actions twice.

Think like a user: Would you want to first filter on the host application and then repeat the action again in the embedded analytics? Of course not. A seamless user experience (UX) means that when you do something once, it affects the entire application without you having to repeat steps.

Explore how you can implement these experiences and get inspired in the Sisense Embedded Playground.

Tip 5: Focus on ease of implementation

While good UI design makes a difference, it’s also important to be mindful of the cost, effort, and complexities of implementing seamless and consistent experiences.

Customizations that require developer skills and coding take considerable effort and increase time to market. These are also difficult to maintain over time. For example, upgrades can become a hassle due to backward compatibility issues. Changes to underlying infrastructure can break the code, requiring complex updates.

To avoid such hassles, find an analytics solution that makes rebranding and customization quick and easy. Using a solution that allows you to implement your changes via drag-and-drop, out-of-the-box capabilities that are always up to date with newly released versions helps you avoid some of these larger issues down the line. It also allows you to focus your efforts on data insights and application functionality instead of worrying about code, maintenance, or changes that can break your code.

Delivering standalone analytics solutions

Whether you choose to deliver analytics as a standalone product or service, or you embed them into your application, your analytics product should be an extension of your brand and visual story, and all the tips above remain true.

By white-labeling and customizing the look and feel of your analytic application, you deliver a consistent and great user experience! Sisense is equipped to allow you to put analytics where you need them and make them look and work the way you want. Whether you are creating your own solution from scratch or using ours, keeping these design tenets in mind will help you build an awesome product.

Shruthi Panicker is a Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager with Sisense. She focuses on how Sisense can be leveraged to build successful embedded analytics solutions covering Sisense’s embedding and customization capabilities, developer experience initiative and cloud-native architecture. She holds a BS in Computer Science as well as an MBA and has over a decade of experience in the technology world.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Blog – Sisense

User experience Made Easier With Enhanced Filtering in Dynamics 365!

June 2, 2020 CRM News and Info

Easily Find the information you are looking for

Enhanced filtering in Dynamics 365 makes the user experience easier than ever before. Grids in the UI have been enhanced to show more data on your screen. Columns now have more filtering options including improved date filtering. Tabular data manipulation is now easier with a whole range of advanced grid column filtering capabilities. Some of the new capabilities you will notice are:
• String and numeric fields have operators to filters like: begins with, ends with, and contains data.
• Activity management is vastly improved with a new set of date filters. Absolute (before, after, on, etc.) and relative (last week, next year, older than X months, etc.) filters put powerful slicers at your fingertips.
• Filtering on option set columns is as easy as checking items off a list.
• Lookup columns also have an enhanced inline lookup experience for quick filtering.
• Filtering a grid on columns not present in the view is easy and intuitive with the advanced filtering pane.
• Add multiple filter conditions, including grouping and use of logical operators to create more complex condition expressions.
• Legacy advanced find capabilities like building view filter expressions are now part of the Unified Interface.

Filter activity views by activity type.

xFiltering 1 625x371.png.pagespeed.ic.QYbsbEiNKV User experience Made Easier With Enhanced Filtering in Dynamics 365!

Filter a list by multiple contacts.

xFiltering 2 625x349.png.pagespeed.ic.oJmmX sQFe User experience Made Easier With Enhanced Filtering in Dynamics 365!

Filter activities by different time frames.

xFiltering 3 625x487.png.pagespeed.ic.jU2fxLjjsS User experience Made Easier With Enhanced Filtering in Dynamics 365!

Advanced filters are available from the grid.

xFiltering 4 625x402.png.pagespeed.ic.X3ZTPJoYW3 User experience Made Easier With Enhanced Filtering in Dynamics 365!

To learn more about new filtering options, advanced filtering, and creating a personal view from a filtered list, visit our blog.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Employee Experience Matters In A Work-From-Home World

May 14, 2020 BI News and Info

Tech Unknown | Episode 7 | Season 2

Featuring guests Trish McFarlane and Meg Bear with host Tamara McCleary

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Play

Employee experience has been an overlooked area of corporate development for most organizations. While every department has been concerned with customer experience, the employee counterpart has largely been solely HR’s responsibility. For many, the term “employee engagement” conjures up images of casual Friday, pizza parties, or a ping-pong table in the cafeteria.

That perception is changing, however. Engaged employees are 40% less likely to turn over, 12 times more likely to be brand advocates, and potentially deliver three times more revenue as their less-engaged colleagues. It’s clear that employee experience is an organization-wide concern.

As the current crisis redefines the way we work, keeping employees engaged is even more challenging – and even more crucial to an organization’s success.

It’s time to develop employee experience as a discipline, much as businesses have done with customer experience. We need strategic, technology-enabled employee experience planning that covers the entire employment lifespan, from pre-hire through exit and beyond.

The very nature of work is changing, and social distancing is just one of many factors driving the change. HR can help lead the organization to new ways of supporting employees, boosting productivity, and creating a more agile and flexible workforce.

This episode, our expert guests explore how HR and departmental leaders can support employees through this current crisis, developing programs that will support a continually evolving “new normal.” They dig deep into how technology supports employee experience, but also what new skills, processes, and mindsets are needed to make the most of the technology.

Listen to Learn:

How to better support and engage remote workers
How to engage employees across the employee lifecycle
How emerging trends will affect employee experience
How HR can set a vision for the overall direction of the organization

Need more resources to better support and engage your workforce? Learn more about SAP SuccessFactors.

About our guests:

Trish s2 e7 Employee Experience Matters In A Work From Home World

Trish McFarlane is the CEO, Principal Consultant, and Analyst for H3 HR Advisors. She also writes for the HR Ringleader blog and co-hosts the HR Happy Hour podcast.

“You know, we’ve worried a lot about engagement, but it’s about connection. Because you certainly can’t be engaged if you’re not even connected.” Trish McFarlane

Meg s2 e7 Employee Experience Matters In A Work From Home World

Meg Bear is the SVP of Product, Engineering, Operations at SAP SuccessFactors. She has more than 25 years of experience leading product and engineering teams at technology companies such as Imperva, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Saba. She is a patent holder, change agent, startup advisor, keynote speaker, and a TEDx host.

“The pace of change is accelerating; the engagement of employees is critical…It’s not about skilling up for a single problem. It’s about building resiliency.” Meg Bear

Did you miss our last episode?

Check out our previous episode with guests Tim Crawford, Isaac Sacolick, Andreas Welsch, and Timo Elliott: “The Future of Automation: Intelligent ERP.” Click here to listen.

Episode 7 Transcript

Tamara McCleary: Welcome to Tech Unknown, a podcast to prepare your organization for the tech-centered future of business. I’m Tamara McCleary, CEO of Thulium.

Our big umbrella topic this season is data. We’re digging into how sharing and activating data across the organization can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve experience.

This episode, we’re talking about using data to improve employee experience. Now, everyone’s talking about customer experience these days. And we should be talking about it – in fact, we mention it on at least four episodes of the podcast – however, we also need to take into consideration how our employees feel about their work and the organization they work for.

After all, our employees are ultimately responsible for customer experience. If they’re happy and supported, they’re more apt to pass along these feel-good emotions to your customers. People need work that is meaningful and real and to see their contribution to the whole. If our employees are not engaged in their work, [are] stressed-out, unclear about their individual contribution, and perhaps even feeling alone or abandoned… well, brace yourself for unhappy customers.

Oh, and by-the-way, this isn’t just a touchy-feely soft-skills piece; you knew I’d have to back up my assertions on a podcast devoted to data. Employees who are engaged at work and reporting positive experiences at work are 40% less likely to turn over, 12x more likely to advocate for the brand, and deliver 3x more revenue. How’s that for aligning feelings to the business’ bottom line?!

So, how can your business cultivate excellent employee experience? Well, one way to do it is to empower them. Here’s Candy Wood, my chief of staff at Thulium… Candy, how do you feel about working for Thulium?

Candy Wood: Considering that I’ve been working from home in my pajamas since before it was trendy, I love working for Thulium!

Tamara: Thanks Candy! Can you tell, as a digital agency, we already had a work-from-home workforce, empowering our employees in their choice of work attire? Okay pajamas aside, you can’t solve this problem by simply throwing money at employee experience. As with customer experience, crafting a successful and productive employee experience needs to be approached strategically, as a discipline, with an ongoing plan supported by technology.

Trish McFarlane has spent her entire career helping businesses recruit and retain top talent. She’s currently the CEO and principal consultant at H3 HR, as well as a blogger and keynote speaker. Here’s Trish on what businesses have been missing when they think about employee experience:

Trish McFarlane: For me, it’s really more that holistic look at an organization and the entire employee lifecycle. So much like a human resources leader would be thinking of the entire employee lifecycle, we need to be approaching our technologies and the way that we use them to bolster that with that same lens.

But I think what’s happened is that over the years, once someone’s on board, you know, the shine kind of wears off and we just let them flounder. And I think part of that goes back to, in different organizations, it’s sort of organized differently. And so in many, you know, there is a recruitment team and then there’s a human resources team, and so that hand-off has always been a little bit awkward, you know. Who owns that phase once someone has accepted an offer and not yet become an employee officially on day one? And so, I think, sometimes technology is starting to enhance that gap in a way that makes the person feel connected and valuable, so there’s been a bigger focus on the onboarding.

But overall, as you become an employee, I think organizations are starting to think more about, okay, all of the things that we promised you during your candidate experience, all of that wealth of information, all of those videos, all of the, maybe, you know, job shadowing, job previews, simulations, things like that that used to maybe end once you were sort of signing on the line, those things, because of the technology advancements, are now back, I guess, under the spotlight, if you will. So people who maybe had felt like they were left alone once they were hired are now feeling much more included.

And so, I think, just because people are starting to mention it more, from a technology standpoint, it’s going to gain more importance. And I think that the people who are actually making the solutions will start getting pushback from the customers saying, “Hey, you know, what can we be doing to do a better job of this?”

Tamara: Human resource leaders have always been concerned about employee experience, of course. Keeping people happy and productive is part of the job description. But the way we think about how to create these positive experiences is changing rapidly – just as the nature of work itself is evolving. Here’s Meg Bear, SVP of Product, Engineering, Operations at SAP SuccessFactors:

Meg Bear: Yeah, what we’re observing with most of our HR leaders that we talked to is employee experience is really, really top of mind for them. And in this construct, it comes to a few different things. It comes to the fact that we are now at a place where workers are our digital natives. They’re used to technology, and they have high expectations of what that technology can do. We’re also at a place where globalization has created a broad set of norms that aren’t just local or regional, but they tend to start to be accelerating around the globe. And so what we’re finding is that the employee experience becomes that linchpin that helps make business work. And so if you think about that as an opportunity, one of the things that comes top of mind is you recognize that you can lean on your workers to help you figure out not just how to get the work done today, but to co-create your processes, to co-create your your business objectives, to really maximize every worker’s potential towards the business objectives.

We’ve been working towards this for a while with concepts like strategic HR, but today we recognize that it can’t really be top-down anymore, it has to be bottom-up, culturally. And the way that people want to work is they really want to contribute because we know that when people have autonomy and agency, they are much more engaged. And engaged workers have a bigger impact on business revenue. In fact, engaged workers have at least a three-X impact on revenue for their for their workforce. And so what we’re finding is that taking employee experience and making that a priority creates an opportunity to really compete in this global workforce of change. And so that’s where we’re seeing HR organizations taking this seriously and thinking about how employee engagement can help them serve their customers better and drive better business results.

There are plenty of factors that contribute to a positive experience that fosters employee engagement: benefits, salary, managerial style, corporate culture, whether your dress code includes pajamas… But for Trish, it comes down to one key component: A sense of belonging and being valued.

Trish: Really, for me, the employee experience management is really there to provide that consistent approach to showing a person their worth in your company. The biggest disconnection is when someone is hired and either the role changes before they start, or maybe it’s a little different than what they were told or what they thought they were walking into. So the real value of an employee management experience is that connection that you have to the company because without that, I think that’s where you start seeing turnover starting within the first 90 days when someone just doesn’t quite feel that connection.

From a personal standpoint, I think also there is this sense of belonging that you have to feel. For example, you hear a lot about diversity and inclusion efforts in organizations. This goes back my entire career. So at least 25 years we’ve been talking about this. And that’s all fine because I think it’s getting us to the point we are now. But when I think about your employee experience, it really means that just because you were hired for diverse…the diverse perspective you bring, just because you are included in a team or a group, it doesn’t actually mean you feel like you are belonging to that group.

And so the difference right now with this focus on employee experience from an individual standpoint is you get that sense of belonging. Like, why am I here? How do we make money? What’s my role in helping that along? Or what’s my role in helping care for our customers or our clients? I think that’s what the focus is on now.

So I think that’s why it comes down to you really have to make sure that every single individual feels they understand why they’re there. Because, again, if I’m a manager and I don’t feel that connection, how in the world am I going to help anyone on my team, anyone that you hire for me, to feel that connection? You know, we’ve worried a lot about engagement, and I do feel like maybe that’s the shift. It’s not so much about engagement. It’s about connection. Because you certainly can’t be engaged if you’re not even connected.

Tamara: If we’re going to talk about connection here in early 2020, we must address the elephant in the room.

We would be remiss if we didn’t discuss the global crisis that is reshaping and changing, at least in the near-term, the way that people work. There’s a new norm creating fresh working paradigms. For instance, how can you keep employees connected if they can’t come into the office? The work-from-home, future of work, and the gig economy discussions were already quite the popular topics before the pandemic, but now the reality of a remote workforce is playing a major role in keeping businesses running. Here’s Meg:

Meg: I think we’re we’ve just moved to a whole new definition of what does it mean to work from home, the concept of whether you can work remotely is no longer one about technology enablement. It’s much more about the human side of working from home. And so today we find ourselves in this extreme experiment of everyone working from home and creating a sense of community, and collaboration becomes much more about the human element than about the technology element. So we are lucky to have great video conferencing, grateful for sharing great collaboration tools, an amazing amount of things that you can do remotely and digitally. And so what we’re having to add back are the human pieces. How do you connect with people? How do you understand mood and personality and cultural specifics and what’s happening in a given location? And I think what we’re finding today with our sheltering in place, is that that piece is really coming to the fore. And we’re seeing a lot of great innovation that helps us connect with each other in a way that isn’t just about business but it’s also about the human touch as well.

Tamara: Technology isn’t what keeps remote workers – or even onsite workers – it’s feeling connected and valued. Technology is an exquisite tool we can use to facilitate these human connections and interactions:

Trish: As someone who just has immersed myself in HR technology since I left the practitioner role, I still strongly believe that it’s the people interactions that are much more powerful than the technology can ever be. The technology is really just there to enhance, and enable, and empower the actual people doing the work and making these connections.

So when I think about how technology can able…can enable that, I think it really starts with looking at the various processes, that you’re having people come into your company, that you’re having them join teams, that you’re having them receive feedback or work with your customers, all of those little bits and pieces.

So, for example, it’s as fundamental as using really solid, you know, payroll and benefits technologies that are nuanced in sort of integrating how the people work, who their teams are, who their supervisors are. It also has to have a technology that will sort of allow you to have a unique sort of almost, like, customized approach to your culture. So I don’t mean, like, customized technology, but actually helping you think differently about the interactions, sort of those little micro-interactions within your organization. And I think we need to start looking at features and functions within a certain solution. That’s where you start kind of marrying those up on how that can work.

It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all, and I think, whenever I think back to being an HR leader myself when I was buying technologies, both big and small, I was really just looking for sort of that out-of-the-box solution that was going to solve all my problems. And I think now the narrative is what has changed. And maybe that’s helped by, you know, the industry itself and all of the… all the people that contribute to it. But it’s really now, I think, focused more on as a buyer.

Tamara: I’m seeing clear parallels between how marketers facilitate customer experience and how HR can facilitate positive employee experience. In both cases, it’s about using data to identify touchpoints – points of interaction where you can make a difference. Then it’s using technology to deliver customized experiences to those points of interaction, in a way that feels more human than robotic.

The parallels between marketing and HR don’t stop there. Just as marketers have to think about the entire lifecycle of a customer – from awareness to purchase and beyond – HR leaders have to be mindful of the employee lifecycle. For Trish, that cycle starts before a candidate even considers applying for a job.

Trish: So you might start saying… start by saying, “We’re going to look at our passive candidates. We’re gonna look at the pool of people that we have,” whether that’s maybe in a talent community, or maybe it’s just past applicants that were not selected. Whatever the means, right? So you’re gonna look at them first and you’re gonna say, “Okay, what can we do with the technology? Is there a new process maybe we can put in place to do outreach to them?” you know.

One of the things, I’ll give you an example, that I hear a lot about from a trend perspective this year is the idea of sort of teaching or almost up-skilling potential candidates before they ever become candidates. You know, there are a large number of people that never quite make it into your pipeline all the way, and it’s because maybe they were either self-selected out or just selected out because of the technology because they missed a certain skill or two. Well, those might be very easy to develop if you knew about it. So when you talk about measurement, measuring things like that. What are the skills that we’re consistently seeing our applicants, or passive candidates even, not having? As a company, can we offer, maybe, video content, maybe written content, just to sort of help those people along?

I mentioned active candidates. Same thing there. You can be providing, using your technology, you know, different types of interactions maybe than, as an organization, you’ve ever thought to before just because now you’re freed up. Your processes are streamlined and running more smoothly with the technology so that when they become a new hire, you can then really stop focusing so much on the things you know technology does well like filling out your new-hire paperwork, getting all the forms submitted, getting the payroll started, right?

Those things are sort of pretty easy once you’ve… once you get the person hired, but you can then shift your focus maybe to the areas you’re not thinking about, which is, how do I get someone really integrated into a team? What does that look like, you know? As an HR person for almost 20 years, that was always in the back of my mind when we were hiring people, but I didn’t quite understand or have technology at the time to enable that very easily. Now, when I’m out in the space, I see that technology can absolutely enable some of those communications, those interactions.

And that goes all the way through to, like, the alumni phase, right? So once someone has decided to leave the company or maybe even… maybe they were terminated, and it’s, you know, five years later and they’re the perfect person to come back, whatever the case may be. But it’s about that continuum of information and connection that we didn’t really focus on even five years ago.

Tamara: The changing nature of work is more than an HR issue, of course. These changes are sending shockwaves up and down organizations, through every department. Digital transformation is inextricably tied to the way people work, and how our workflows and processes evolve.

For that reason, Meg says, HR is poised to take a larger leadership role within the organization.

Meg: Yeah, you know, again, I think we’re all in an experimentation phase right now, because of the fact that this has been a dramatic shift. And so a couple of things that I’ve seen happen really well, both here at SAP and in the global HR community, is really HR taking a leadership role in not only helping to redefine processes, as it relates to doing them globally remotely, but also creating structure around both communication and systems and processes and tools. Because what we’re finding is that now that we’re all working remotely, we need a different way to access it. We need a different way to access things that we might have normally done inside the office, and so HR is stepping out in front and helping to define that.

The other thing that they’re doing in a really thoughtful way is bringing forward access to benefits and opportunities that might not have been as top of mind in the past – things like wellness and emotional health. Things like making sure that everybody understands their benefits, their ability to take sick leave, and recognizing that a lot of people have having to shift their working hours and to be able to support their families, to be able to support their children doing distance learning.

So HR has had to step forward in being really flexible about both the policy side and the communication side so that everybody understands what’s available to them, so that managers on the ground are able to really connect with their team and offer them the kind of support that they might not personally be equipped to have to offer, and that they understand what the envelope is for both legal compliance as well as the human-interaction side of being able to support people in this period of transition. And I think what’s interesting about HR taking that lead is that this is an opportunity that the HR community has been looking to provide from the beginning, the ability to have a seat at the table and to really make a difference in business. And so this big shift in what we’re all trying to do to react to this global requirement of sheltering in place has given us our chance to show what we can really offer to an organization. And I think that this is going to be the future where HR will be directly helping to mobilize the workforce for the needs of the business, taking the human piece, taking the operational piece, and bringing them together in a way that really helps people thrive.

What I’m seeing in 2020 – and I expect in 2021 – is that this shift in HR’s role in bringing the human element back to business, but taking a leadership position in change management and transformation for companies overall. Because what we’re finding is HR is exactly the right group to do this to bring both the human element, the technology element, the quantitative element to show what’s happening in the organization. To the business to help them make good decisions, and to help them thrive in this period of change and uncertainty, to create constructs that people get, to create opportunities for people based on these changes, and to help manage the emotional piece of everybody trying to figure out how to compete in what is a very volatile time.

I think this really puts the concept of agility and how we deliver services to the forefront, thinking about not just defining the perfect process, but being able to adapt processes for the needs of the moment. And then to figure out what about those changes are things that really help the business and which things aren’t working. And that’s where you really need to bring feedback back into the mix. Having an opportunity for the voice of every employee to be directly connected to how you improve your business is what’s going to differentiate the opportunities of the near term and the long term.

Tamara: The technology that facilitates all of this, is a platform for human experience management, or HXM. It’s a solution that brings together analytics and workforce planning, talent management, payroll, employee experience – the works. With a comprehensive suite of solutions in place, you can create a positive feedback loop. You can monitor morale, solicit feedback, test new programs and optimize existing ones, and measure how your efforts are working at improving employee engagement.

The remaining obstacle, of course, is making sure employees actually take advantage of the technology to make their voices heard. But Trish feels it’s just a matter of consistency and time.

Trish: Right. And I think, you know what? When you use your technology in a way that just becomes so natural and such a part of their day that they’re not even thinking about it, that’s where you’re really going to see that impact. Because right now, we’re still…we’re still trying to figure out how do we infuse technology. I think if we fast-forward just a few years, things move so fast, I think we’re starting to get there. Because we’re seeing that infusion of technology into our personal home life day today, and so it’s just natural. Now that we get comfortable there, it will be more comfortable in the workplace.

Tamara: Once employees get comfortable with HXM technology, and HR leaders are helping steer the organization from an employee-centered perspective… where are they steering to? What’s the end goal? Here’s Meg with a look at the biggest possible picture.

Meg: Yeah, so people, if you take this to its next logical extension, and you start to think about the fact that the pace of change is accelerating, the engagement of employees is critical. You start to look out to the future and recognize that it’s not about skilling up for a single problem, but it’s about building resiliency.

It’s about building agility into your workforce end-to-end so that you can identify and satisfy and fill skills gaps ongoing to help you compete in your market. And so the way that we’re seeing this kind of show up is really a rethinking all of the pieces that we thought were well understood in how business works and how people progress in their careers. So it used to be you would come in with a certain set of skills, you would progress through a career through a very linear path, and then eventually you would get to your top end of experience and then ultimately retire; we find that that’s not how business works today. Today, people are moving and changing roles very rapidly. And not only are they changing formal jobs, they’re creating much more informal jobs.

They’re working in agile teams, they’re working in small groups that are not only defining the work, but helping to figure out what skills they need to get that work done. And they’re doing this in a much more collaborative way. And so we see that, in the future, work is much more driven by the employee, it’s much more self-organizing. It’s much more collaborative, and it is changing rapidly. And so what we need to think about when we think about technology is bringing that agility into the process flow. So instead of defining something, rolling it out, and then letting it run forever, like we did in the early days of technology, instead, what we’re doing is we’re testing things. We’re getting feedback, we’re co-creating it, we’re evolving it, we’re changing it, and we’re doing it again. So everything that’s part of that thought process of an agile development flow is really starting to be part of how business works, creating the idea that it’s not about making it perfect. But it’s about bringing those feedback loops and constantly having a growth mindset. How can we get better? What can we do better? And how do we as a group evolve and move with that? So it’s a big shift. It’s a big shift in what does it mean to lead an organization, and it’s a huge shift in what kinds of technologies you put in place when you recognize that what you’re really building for is change.

Tamara: Employee experience is more than keeping workers happy in the short-term. It’s even more than increasing productivity, reducing turnover, and boosting revenue – though all of these are byproducts of having engaged employees.

As Meg observed, the ultimate goal of strategic human experience management is to transform the way your employees work – and in the process, the way your organization runs. It’s about creating a work environment that fosters and rewards creativity, agility, and innovation.

HR leaders, now is your time to shine.

Thanks for listening to Tech Unknown. And thanks to my guests Meg Bear and Trish McFarlane. Please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m Tamara McCleary and until next time: Stay sharp, stay curious, and keep exploring the unknown.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Digitalist Magazine

Thinking Differently: Redefining The Automotive Dealership Experience In A Time Of Crisis

May 1, 2020 BI News and Info

Nearly every driver can tell you about the time they went to a car dealership and picked out their first vehicle. It is an extremely personal experience, and dealerships have a special, customer-facing role to play in the automotive value chain.

Dealerships have also been some of the most hard-hit automotive businesses due to the current crisis. With lockdowns in effect across much of the world, consumers are not flocking into show floors. Likewise, an uncertain economic picture is leading to drivers putting their car purchases on hold.

What steps can automotive dealerships take to successfully navigate this crisis? How can they embrace technology to become more resilient in the future? In this blog, we look at some strategies auto dealerships around the world have adopted to survive and prepare for recovery.

Dealerships are adapting

Since social distancing rules and lockdowns have gone into effect, many dealerships have had to rethink their businesses and customer delivery models.

Dealerships around the world are adapting to new guidelines. In the United States, some have closed general-public sales and are selling vehicles by appointments made over the phone or online. Dealers urge sales personnel and customers to appropriately social distance while transactions are completed. In China, staff are checking employees’ and customers’ temperatures before they are allowed onsite.

Others have adopted online marketplaces where customers can purchase vehicles. In Brazil, Renault, which had invested in the industry-leading K-commerce portal, allows customers to have a truly online buying experience. Not only can buyers select and customize a vehicle, they can apply for financing and set up transactions completely online. Such end-to-end dealership experiences neatly comply with some of the most stringent social distancing guidelines.

While much of their sales staff is unable to sell in-person, dealerships in Asia-Pacific are training workers to do so online. Livestreaming car sales presentations – a sales practice commonly associated with online fashion retail – has become very popular in China. These sessions have increased 15X since the start of the crisis.

While ambiguity over the sale of vehicles remains, governments have allowed dealerships to service customers and repair vehicles. To ensure that automotive workers are protected, one dealership in the United States is limiting the number of people that can work on the shop floor at one time to observe CDC guidelines. As testing becomes more widespread, such practices will continue to be adopted around the world.

The future of dealer servicing

The current crisis has accelerated several developments that will fundamentally transform the auto dealership experience. The rise of predictive maintenance and on-demand servicing are just two trends that can harden a dealership to survive future lockdowns.

Predictive maintenance is a discipline that seeks to accurately discern when a part will fail and act before it does. In this framework, sensor-derived data is aggregated and analyzed to find subtle correlations. These hints are rigorously examined to find signs of imminent part failure. Replacing parts before a failure saves customers costs over standard preventative-maintenance procedures.

When married with on-demand servicing, this could lead to a fundamental transformation in how vehicles are serviced. For example, a dealer and car owner could be alerted of an imminent failure from the predictive analytics suite. The owner could then schedule a representative from the dealership to pick up the vehicle. Thereafter, the dealership could replace the failing part, disinfect surfaces, and deliver the vehicle back to the owner. If the repair can be done outside of the shop, the dealer’s representative could simply do it at the owner’s residence. In this way, the vehicle never suffers a catastrophic failure and social distancing is maintained.

Do you have other ideas on how dealerships can prepare for the future? Let me know on Twitter at @mannepalliAswin.

Get to know SAP Transformation Navigator, a self-service tool that helps you chart your digital transformation with SAP S/4HANA. Join our Webinar session on May 4, 2020.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Digitalist Magazine

Tag Archives: Experience

New Customer Experience Needs and Commerce Trends for 2021

New Normal Sales Tools

The Journey Counts

What’s Ahead

Differing CX Realities

Create Seamless Shopping Experiences

Transform the Patient Experience with the Microsoft Healthcare Bot [VIDEO]

SugarCRM Adds AI to Sweeten the Customer Experience Pot

User Experience: An Important Aspect of CRM Implementation Projects

TIBCO NOW Connected Experience: Your Content, Your Way

How Stitch Fix used AI to personalize its online shopping experience

Five Design Tips to Deliver a Seamless Embedded Analytics Experience

Simple UI is good UI

Tip 1: Maintain consistent branding elements

Tip 2: Consider visual hierarchy

Tip 3: Build branding with typography

Tip 4: Minimize the steps to insights

Tip 5: Focus on ease of implementation

Delivering standalone analytics solutions

User experience Made Easier With Enhanced Filtering in Dynamics 365!

Easily Find the information you are looking for

Employee Experience Matters In A Work-From-Home World

Tech Unknown | Episode 7 | Season 2

Featuring guests Trish McFarlane and Meg Bear with host Tamara McCleary

Listen to Learn:

About our guests:

Did you miss our last episode?

Episode 7 Transcript

Thinking Differently: Redefining The Automotive Dealership Experience In A Time Of Crisis

Dealerships are adapting

The future of dealer servicing

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives