Kitewheel’s recent report, The State of the Customer Journey, 2021, is based on an analysis of more than a billion data points from the past year. The high-level perspective from that quantity of data alone is fascinating so we sat down with Kitewheel’s CEO, Mark Smith, to talk about the macro and micro findings and to check-in on some of Kitewheels more recent announcements. You can download the report here.
Full transcript of our conversation below.
TheCustomer
Hi this is Mike Giambattista with TheCustomer and I’m grateful to be talking again with Mark Smith who is the CEO of Kitewheel – you’ll know him from past conversations but we were talking about actually a really significant offering that kite wheel had just announced at the time and we’ll talk about that a little bit more but Mark, thanks for joining me.
Mark Smith
Mike it’s a real pleasure good to see you again.
TheCustomer
Llikewise. So Kitewheel just released a report called the State of Customer Journey 2021 and I’ve been through it and I’m fascinated by some of the highlights because i guess it covers customer centricity in some really interesting ways. But my question – i guess maybe my first question out of many, many about the report really has to do with how you defined customer centricity because the term has become so ubiquitous that it’s almost meaningless to so many people – so what were some of the criteria you were looking for to determine an organization’s customer readiness?
Mark Smith
Yeah no it’s a great point Mike, and uh you know this is uh just say a little bit about the report You know this is I think our sixth or seventh year that we’ve put this report out it’s um it’s based on our data well it’s really our customers’ data that we aggregate up and anonymize and find the trends of what’s really happening what real journeys organizations are running. But in terms of assessing them on customer centricity I think key thing is just two big areas and so many organizations – so many software companies are so focused on the technical side of it that there’s a whole organizational side.
There’s these two big categories of being ready to be customer-centric and we would always lead with that organizational piece. You know, is the organization ready – is it even trying to become customer-centric. I had a great conversation just a couple of weeks ago. Actually one of the largest banks here in the US totally reorganizing around a new central chief customer experience officer.
TheCustomer
No kidding – that’s actually big news!
Mark Smith
Oh huge! Massive reorganization and it but it’s what’s required to get this stuff right and it’s really exciting to see large organizations going down that route and they’re extracting they’re still going to have the different product line teams and the different kind of functional teams within the bank but there’s good the coordination. Interaction with customers is going to be centralized so those product lines will maybe control content and have some say over the offers but whether that offer gets made um is now being centralized and controlled by this the experience office as a way of bringing together all of the different tracks so that the customer doesn’t get bombarded the customer doesn’t get the wrong thing just because one product line has got a target this month that they need to meet. But things are tied together and the right stuff is communicated to customers and the right experience delivered to customers and so that organizational piece seeing that the customer needs to be the center. And the focus for the business is probably on the organizational side, the number one thing that we look for sure with the companies that we work for.
TheCustomer
So i’m thinking of the colossal change management that must be taking place over there and all of the friction and all of the barrier breaking and you know and you and I both know the \large-scale banking industry is a very slow industry to move, so i think what you’re talking about is a huge, huge deal. If and when that company ever gets named publicly and you have some insight, I would love to know more about the mechanics of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it because because that is the universal problem that I think most enterprises face when trying to implement CX.
Mark Smith
You’re absolutely right Mike. That is the problem. This is the challenge that really has to be solved. The technical stuff’s not really that difficult – it’s much more how you want to use the technology to that governs success. Now to look at the other half of the answer to your question is that there is a technical side in terms of organizations. You have to you know these things that need to go in lockstep. You make an organizational change, you need the technology to support it. Next step organizational, next step technology and so the things we look for to match that centricity is an omni-channel capability so truly you can do things in different channels according to the customer’s desire you’re not stuck communicating only in single channels because the channels can work together.
There’s a realization that you have to go realtime – that’s the other big thing that we’re looking for to kind of classify an organization as ready is if you’re not acting in real time the customer’s gonna leave you behind they’re looking for real-time answers and so being able to communicate and do the right thing in realtime is a key thing. And then focusing on the individual, there’s a whole bunch of confusion in the market with this word personalization.
TheCustomer
Oh my gosh – yes um let’s dedicate an entire new conversation to that because we’re going to have to. And I think I have a feeling you and I are aligned exactly on that.
Mark Smith
Yeah, and then planning – that’s the other big thing. There’s a lot of talk about it being the customer’s journey and following the customer and we 100% support. That’s absolutely right. You know the organization that wraps around the customer and gives the customer what they’re looking for and helps them it’s great but an organization has to have a plan as well. Don’t just do everything the customer says – you’ve got to plan out the experience you want to deliver. The customer is not always going to follow it but you need to you know, nudge them and you need to be in control of that experience and that’s the other big thing we look for is organizations ready to do that planning and bring it to life.
TheCustomer
So before we get too much further here, I just want to mention that there’s a link to the State of the Customer Journey 2021 just below this video so you should download it that takes you right to Kitewheel’s site.
So, I was fascinated by many things, but it notes in the report that you’ve got more than 10 billion interactions to draw from in just the past year alone.Talk to us about some of the bigger shifts and surprises you found as that data was analyzed.
Mark Smith
Yeah so I think probably the number one – it’s not a big surprise but a really strong trend was how much how much of those interactions were shifted to journeys that were focused on retention and engagement of existing customers.
Okay, we have we have five big use case areas where we see our customers build journeys and we analyze our data in in those groups and there’s always been a fair balance between you know retention engagement and new customer acquisition and customer service cx type journeys but last year – and i say it’s not totally surprising because kind of for obvious reasons given the lockdown & pandemic – organizations really switched their efforts and their focus into this retention and customer care type of journey because that was the key thing and has been the key thing for the last 18 months. The world has changed and everybody and the leading thinkers and the leading organizations are making that switch and taking care of customers and so a lot that. Something like 90 percent of all the interactions we tracked last year were in journeys that were focused on that retention and engagement.
TheCustomer
Wow, so you’re saying historically there was kind of parity between the five different kinds of journeys and now it’s that every way. That that’s actually a huge deal
Mark Smith
So it’s a huge swing of focus across industries. So we saw the same thing in lots of different industries. The other big new trend was how healthcare has really got the customer journey bug. Healthcare has been a very small sector for us historically but last year came on huge.
Now some of our clients, that’s again, pandemic-driven in the the move to digital in the healthcare space – with telemedicine, let alone just support processes. But also the move in the pharmaceutical sector to start doing a better job of engaging multi-channel with customers and you know, moving from tv ads to much more individualized interactions with customers using digital channels was a big thing. And so healthcare is certainly the fastest growing and relatively new sector for us and I think it’s kind of interesting to see how how suddenly they’ve got going in this whole CX customer journey area and are now just as getting just as sophisticated.
So, one of the interesting things that’s in the report is, this year for the first time we’ve analyzed the complexity of the rules in the journey so just you know how sophisticated are organizations being in terms of how much data they pull in to make the right decision in real time for the customer. And healthcare are really right up there just behind financial services in terms of that sophistication and they’ve kind of jumped straight into that slot so way ahead of retail, telco, utilities in terms of just decision complexity.
TheCustomer
Interesting because they’re fairly new to the CX game overall as a sector. Yeah, so they jumped in with both feet. So you’ve kind of segued into the question I wasn’t sure i was going to ask this – but you know you’ve mentioned certain categories that that moved quickly into retention and are doing fairly sophisticated work with journey analysis, but what about the other side of that? What are the laggards, if we can not necessarily name names. But you know if there are sectors that are doing well, who needs to step it up?
Mark Smith
So that’s an interesting question I’m not sure the answer, Mike, is really sort of particularly tied to certain industries. Okay, we see good and bad in in all industries right. I think it’s a bit more kind of individually tied to the organizations particularly in 2020 those that succeeded versus those who failed.
I think the biggest things were they already underway. Okay, organizations that were already underway with a customer centricity or a digital transformation, a direct-to-consumer transformation – those organizations were so much better placed than those that were the laggards and kind of held back from that investment. Those people were kind of cool, you know there’s an expression in England for that I’m not going to use, but those folks were caught kind of standing still and the ones that were already underway were able to move particularly those who have also moved to agile. So, some of our customers, you know, essentially turned on a dime to build totally new journeys within a few days. Not the sort of old-world of product push and acquisition and move to care and nurture journey. Some of our retailers moved into this care and nurture space so quickly. We helped another of our clients – a big energy company who had terrible trouble with their customer service function – a lot of it offshore and was essentially closed down overnight. They needed to move all of their customer care online you know over a weekend and basically because of the realtime nature of their journey, kind of thinking we’re able to match that and do a reasonably good job of keeping those customers supported.
And organizations that were still traditional had a really hard time. Now of course, certain industries last year really suffered and so you know we saw really tough times in the travel hospitality which, you know, that was not their fault at all.
TheCustomer
You know, they didn’t have a customer to map! You talk about the companies that were already kind of moving through their digital transformation. I’d love to know what the hallmarks for that kind of digital transformation maturity were. And again that’s probably too deep in the weeds for this conversation, but you’re in a unique position to see that, where I think that kind of understanding – if it can be made generic enough to be public – would be invaluable to so many other companies out there that are trying to figure out what do they do – what does digital transformation mean, and what do they need to do to kind of accelerate that? And again you’re probably in a place to see that just because of what you do for a living.
Mark Smith
Yeah, I think that’s right, Mike. And it would make for a great deeper conversation. We do have a maturity model, it’s also available on our website. It’s this kind of five-step process that we recommend, to take organizations into a world where they’re really managing the journey for the customer and doing the right thing and there’s a set of key steps to get there.
TheCustomer
I’ll go through it myself just because I’m curious but maybe we can we can get another conversation on the schedule. All right, I wanted to touch on the on something I mentioned a little earlier during our prior conversation. Kitewheel had just announced something that I don’t think had been done prior in the industry, which was, you’re releasing a set of essentially pre-made journeys. If i can probably misspeak here a little bit, that were geared towards small to medium-sized businesses, which traditionally are locked out of sophisticated journey analysis just due to cost. So that happened pretty much right in the middle of lockdown but I’m interested to hear what the response has been to that announcement, to that offering even since the pandemic seems to be opening up back to some sort of normalcy.
Mark Smith
Yeah, so the response has been fantastic and the best thing is it really has done what we hoped which was open up to a whole set of new more mid-tier organizations. The fact that they can get going, the technology is there to help them. So we’ve had a just huge amount of interest in the offering in all sorts of industries and definitely spreading out into some new industries. It’s really encouraging to see how much of a bounce-back kind of thing. We’ve got travel and retail companies in big numbers, kind of coming into this area that had been those sectors obviously have been pretty quiet, but they’re definitely kind of bouncing back.
The proposition seems to have got a lot of attention. We’ve seen some similar similarly worded things appearing on other vendors websites already. Similar ideas of packaging journeys up which is you know always a little bit bittersweet to see, right.
TheCustomer
Right. In a sense you’re being “honored” but then in another sense maybe not.
Mark Smith
But the big thing that we’re seeing with these clients – it comes back to this organizational thing. Okay, we’ve got these things packaged up now that the implementation is much easier -but is the organization ready to do it? You know that is still the key question and you know, we’re here to help them and we do. But very quickly the conversation goes to yeah well okay this is what we can do, this is what the journey will do – is everybody ready on your side?
Where are the problems going to come when these silos start getting broken down? And so very quickly, we go into those same conversations that we’re used to having with the very large companies as they’re starting at that point and moving our way. Some of these companies have got the journey kind of buzz and now it’s forcing them to realize, “ah we’ve got some organizational stuff to do here”.
TheCustomer
Right, you know this is going to cause some internal friction, as you were saying earlier, that even in a mid-size organization you’ve got to work around that. So those aren’t easy tasks. So I’ll just say anecdotally, after you made that announcement several months ago, I happened to be in a conversation with one of your competitors and I just thought that the response to your announcement was interesting. It was essentially, and I’m paraphrasing badly here, but basically they were saying “You know, I’ve been telling my company we should have been doing this for years”. It’s a great idea and so the market response doesn’t surprise me. It seems like it’s just a really, really smart way to proceed. So the other thing I wanted to mention too is, in a separate conversation, I’m talking to somebody who is a known quantity in the CX world, but what he looks for as point number one in any engagement is organizational readiness and he looks at it from the standpoint of, do you have complete C-suite buy-in? And his take on that is, if you don’t, then talk to me after you do because otherwise I’m just wasting your time. So yeah big stuff there.
Mark Smith
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more and that’s going right back to the stop of the call, Mike. At this bank it’s a C-level position that’s instigating this change and that’s maybe something we’ve talked about on previous calls. But that is a typical factor in a lot of our large company work. It’s a CEO initiative or certainly a board-level initiative to drive this. It has to be, because it has to come top-down. Absolutely, otherwise the those barriers won’t be broken down and the collaboration won’t happen.
TheCustomer
With all that, Mark, it’s such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for fitting me into your schedule. You mentioned earlier it’s the last day of the quarter So I know you’re crazy but I look forward to doing this again. There’s so much we could be talking about and I, for one, will be paying close attention to Kitewheel. Thanks a million.
Mark Smith
That’s great, Mike. Thanks very much – thanks for having me.
