The morning session of the second day of Customer Expo 2018 came to an end with ideas on Experience and Design Innovation shared by executives from National Customer Experience Marketing, Allianz Partners, Budweiser, and Prudential Financial.
Andrew George, Associate Director of National Customer Experience Marketing, discussed how his company has harnessed data to map out journey paths to enhance relationship with donors. In 2017, Canadian Red Cross invested in a behavioral marketing platform called Pointillist. With this platform, the company has managed to assimilate three main information sources: web, email, and CRM. This has lead to the creation of 11 million unique customer profiles. This enables the company to see the donor lifecycle at all stages, discover events leading to conversions or pain points, and to streamline personal customer experience.
George Li, Senior Associate Director at Budweiser, discussed how his company has replaced text-to-win with innovative geotargeting and retail hook strategies without losing value. The brand launched Budweiser Rewards in 2018, which enables customers to earn points via purchases and activities. Li said that the program became the company’s primary retail hook and redefined how it creates retail programs. Budweiser Rewards supports traditional key retailer programs but has also enabled new retailer programs such as points promotions, custom consumer journeys, and licensing partner integrations. Additionally, Budweiser created sweepstakes to make the program drive more customer engagement.
Allianz Partners representatives Dragan Yerkic, Director of Quality Assurance, and Nate Ford, Speech Analytics Analyst, emphasized how important speech is in current customer engagement strategies and how companies should utilize speech analysis techniques for driving loyalty. The main purpose of these techniques is to conduct deep dive analysis, verbatim identification, and directional population size determination. Ford shared that the company also implemented the Targeted Accent Coaching program. He pointed out that Allianz Partners is a global company, and his branch chooses to utilize associates from different regions to align with the brand. Hence, it is important to be able to objectively identify associates with a way of speaking that might interfere with the customer experience.
Lastly, Prudential Financial executives Lesley Hubbard, UX Design Manager, and John Consigli, Director of Digital Products & Customer Experience, spoke about the consistent, disruptive three-day sprint strategy their company has implemented for creating engagement among customers. The strategy is comprised of five different stages, which are Understand, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test. All stages are executed in three days with various actions to achieve goals.