Make the most of Pit Stops with the 3Rs

Make the most of Pit Stops with the 3Rs

The global disruption caused by COVID-19 has found a lot of businesses rethinking their business models and given them a pause. The disruption can be turned into a Pit Stop - an opportunity to relook, replan and refresh businesses akin to the motorsports racing team using their pit stops during a competition. I will look at the Pit Stop topic with some of the typical questions along with my take on it - What, Why, How, When and Who should do a pit stop?

What is a Pit Stop?

In Motorsports "a stop at a pit for servicing and refuelling, especially during a race."

A Pit Stop is time and space to relook, replan and refresh the purpose, goals, business model and priorities for your business leading to a re-invigoration of all the stakeholders.

Taking the analogy of personal finance, pit stop is akin to re-balancing your investment portfolio to keep your risk in line with your risk profile. In investment parlance, it is about building a sustainable investment portfolio. Similarly, Pit Stops are about actions or activities to build a sustainable business.

Why a Pit Stop?

Although most businesses set aside time to do a strategic planning (offsite, meetings etc) exercise every year followed/supported by planning and budgeting cycles, these are often done while running the existing business model. Hence, these planning exercises are mostly about incremental growth and extending the status quo.

The pit stop are essential because they help organisations in:

• building a sustainable business in line with your business' purpose
• Re-energizing the business with new ideas and reiterate the purpose

How do you do a Pit Stop? The 3 Rs Approach

There could be several frameworks and approaches based on organisational maturity and current state of the business or industry. A generic approach is what I term the 3 Rs (not related to the 3Rs of education introduced in the 1800s) for organisational renewal, which is a step-by-step sequential approach which builds upon each other and is a continuous cycle.

Step 1: Relook

This is the Analysis phase of the Pit Stop. Thinking back to our analogy of motor sports, relook is based on data generated during the race (with the best race teams, combining this with past race data, competitor behaviour and additional vehicle/driver/environmental insights).

In the case of organisations, it is about reviewing the financial data along with insights and progress on Customer NPS, Employee engagement scores, contribution to society, environment (UNSDGs are a good list of goals lot of good organisations are supporting) and wider stakeholders. These insights need to cascade down the organisations to get everything thinking and contributing to the next step.

Some of the best pivots in the tech industry have come from a fresh look at the business model, customer behaviours and other insights from the previous business model - example mentioned in the Business Insider article include Youtube pivoting from a dating site to its widely successful model today; Instagram from a foursquare-like app to photosharing; Twitter from podcast sharing to microblogging.

Step 2: Replan

This is the Strategy and Planning part of the Pit Stop. Although the business may already have a hypothesis/idea on how to improve and build a sustainable future, the entire workforce taking the time to relook and replan can bring about surprising insights. The replan can be undertaken either with a cascaded down approach or ideas from individual employees or teams being collated up by a central team or a combination of the two.

As mentioned by Daniel Pink in Drive, autonomy, mastery and purpose are essential to motivating individuals. The Autonomy and engagement in involving employees across the organisation can be critical to the success of any organisational renewal (more on purpose in the next step).

I love this story of HUL transformation under Nitin Paranjpe and great use of the A>>R (Ambition greater than Resources) to revitalise the business and refresh the workforce on a new ambition and purpose. The pit stop due to the 2007-2008 financial crisis was the backdrop against which this transformation was run.

Step 3: Refresh

This is the execution phase of the Pit Stop. From the motorsport analogy, this is when the vehicle heads back into the track taking the relook insights, replanned and refreshed to making an impact in the race.

Put Purpose at the Core of your Strategy - this article in the Sep-Oct 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review highlighted that the organisations making purpose the core of their strategy (as opposed to a CSR led paying lip service to it) drove sustainable profitable growth while remaining relevant and building deeper ties with their stakeholders. The article also highlights the role purpose plays in redefining the playing field and reshaping the value proposition.

In my opinion, Purpose should be the lynchpin of any organisational refresh. It is easy to forget purpose as the focus shifts to quarter end closes, regulatory/industry changes and crises but it is key to building loyalty with customers, employees, partners and the wider ecosystem.

Unlike motor sport, in the organisation context - the refresh can be executed on a small subsidiary/region/function, lessons learnt, cross corrections made and rolled out in other parts of the organisation on a phased or big bang approach.

A number of examples of successful strategy refresh is shared in this HBR article. The one which I would like to highlight is the transformation of Danish Oil & Natural Gas into Ørsted -  In ten years, it has transformed from the most fossil fuel intensive utilities in Europe to the most sustainable energy company in the world. A great story about using Purpose to drive your corporate strategy.

When should you take a Pit Stop?

Annually (along with your planning and budgeting cycles) but you may need more frequent considering the pace of change of business. Also, events like COVID which brings a stop to BAU (business as usual) provides a breathing space for forward thinking businesses to take a pit stop.

Who should run Pit Stops?

Like the planning and budgeting cycles which businesses have got used it, Pit Stops are something business can run at the Corporate level, business unit level. It is also a good opportunity for teams and individuals to do Pit Stops of their own - with relook/replan/refresh of purpose, goals and impact (along with alignment with the overall company purpose). Teams with a mission are more collaborative, more engaged and key to a sustainable profitable future.

Conclusion

Although business disruptions and uncertainties caused by pandemics and other crises are a good opportunity for organisations to take a Pit Stop to rethink the business, organisations should regularly relook their business models and insights from current business to replan and refresh (if needed). Using insights from multiple stakeholder perspectives to relook, collaborating organisation wide for ideas for replan and putting Purpose at the core of your strategy to refresh are essential to getting the most out of your Pit Stops.

Acknowledgements

A few months back, I attended a LBS webinar by Prof Andrew Scott (Do check the Pandemic webinar series by London Business School - Thanks Stuart for sharing this), where the impact of Corona Virus on the global economy was discussed. Prof Scott mentioned using the COVID enforced break for businesses as an opportunity for doing a pit stop. This got me thinking and hence this article. Also, Thanks to Imran & Akhilesh for reviewing and providing feedback on this.

This was originally published on LinkedIn

4 steps for addressing Personalisation challenges in Customer Experience

"For the lover, a beautiful woman is an object of desire;
 for the hermit, a distraction; 
 for the wolf, a good meal" -Canonical buddhist verse quoted

I love the quote above which, in the context of customer experience, highlights both the importance of getting personalisation right and dangers of generalisation.

My definition of Personalisation is 'truly' understanding your customer and adjusting/changing your service/content/interactions with the customer's context and needs in mind. This is not an easy task especially in a consumer facing situation - this is borne out by the high failure rates of the proliferation of startups in the online space (Check out this article on reasons for the failure).

Why is Personalisation Important?

There are a number of reasons for getting personalisation right related to customer loyalty which can be summed up as follows:

• Build a deeper emotional connect with customer The key ingredient for building loyalty and trust with your customer is by having an emotional connect - the feelings your every interaction with the customer (be it in an online context or in person or any other channel) will drive the customer lifetime value.
• Drive Top line Growth According to a July 2018 Mckinsey article Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15 percent revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial-services sectors.
• Develop a Strategic Advantage Emotional connect with your customers → better understanding of customers → insights on the direction your product/service → Strategic Advantage. 

Types of Personalisation

So what're the different levels of personalisation any organisation can offer, irrespective of whether you're a B2B (business to business) or a B2C (business to consumer) organisation? Although there are other tiers you can define based on industry and maturity of your customer data/understanding, I like to think of it in the following terms (obviously technology, organisational maturity and data play a huge role in progressing from one level to the next):

• Basic This is the basic level where some generic aspect of a customer is used to differ the experience e.g. a country/region specific page is displayed for a user based on his/her location
• Demographic or Interaction based Here some of the basic data the customer has shared or product he/she is looking at is used to tailor the customer experience (again it is basic level - age, gender etc.) - this is also where online data based insights like 'people who bought this, also looked at' etc come into play
• Self-service Personalisation In addition to the previous two level, here the customer is given an opportunity to control his/her experience by tailoring (e.g. how the page components are displayed in a news website or nickname used in Online shopping etc.)
• Deep Personalisation Combining all the power of the previous 3 levels, deep personalisation uses all the statistics from customer's interaction with your organisation across channels to deliver a tailored and continuously evolving experience. This is a Big-Data enabled personalisation.

A word of caution here is that it may not be necessary to aim to move to deep personalisation for all industries or all organisations. The regulatory environment, product/service features, channel of interaction and company value proposition may necessitate just the basic personalisation in some cases.

4 Step Personalisation Transformation 

Getting personalisation right is not easy, takes time and is a continuous process. I believe the following four steps, from my experience of working with customers and learning from the experts in the field, will help organisations make the journey to optimal personalisation with their customers. 

Step 1: Make customers an ally in your transformation

Customer trust is a linchpin of any successful customer experience transformation. It is important to get existing customer excited and bought into any customer experience transformation you have planned - you need honest feedback and desire to make things better for both themselves and others. Open, honest relationship along with a superior product or service is key. A structured program to recruit pilot customers who are representative of your wider customer base is necessary if you're trying to experiment different personalisation approaches.

Step 2: Become a Customer Data Focused Organisation

All organisation collect a lot of data but most lack focus in their collection and usage of data. In the journey to being an organisation further along the personalisation maturity, the data strategy needs to have 

Step 3: Connect all your sales, service, marketing and other channels

Once you've nailed your data strategy with a customer experience improvement focus, the biggest impact on your overall customer experience is by being consistent across every interaction point. This should be right from the first marketing message to sale to customer onboarding to ongoing service to even an exit scenario. With the right data strategy coupled with building and providing a holistic picture of your customer at all touch points, consistency across all interactions is possible. Consistency also means that the ability to use data from previous interactions (both positive and negative) becomes extremely important - for instance, your call centre agents having access to the same customer data as someone in a retail center (This has been the promise of omni-channel software).

Step 4: Tweak your customer experiences, continuously

With Steps 1-3 accomplished, the next step is about agility in your customer interaction channels. The ability to do A/B testing on your changes to understand customer responses is critical as well.Your personalisation approaches should be able to change based on changing customer habits, better technology availability and individual customer's preferences. It is also about realising that, like any other transformation initiative, there is no 'end-state' in a personalisation transformation journey. Personalisation is a continuous improvement initiative which needs to be constantly adjusted for it to remain relevant for your customers.

 Although I have used these steps in the context of personalisation transformation, it is generic enough to be applied to other areas of customer/employee experience transformations as well.

Competitive advantage and evolution of technology

As someone who is a keen student of business strategy and technology as an enabler of competitive advantage, I want to take a look at how the evolution of the technology landscape has helped businesses in their quest for competitive advantage. This post is my attempt at simplifying the radical changes the business technology/software landscape has gone through. As you'll note, I have taken several broad sweepes and editorial freedoms :) to make things simpler.

I have divided the evolution into four distinct eras:
A) Mainframe
B) Client Server
C) Cloud Computing
D) Mobile Cloud

Please note that I have not considered the move from client server to a internet based model, referred to by the business vendors in the early 2000 as e-business suites, as a separate era since it felt like an extension of client server with the server being at data centres and served to clients through the internet.

Let's look at each of these eras in the context of what the advantage it gave to firms in the context of Business agility and the end user experience (refer fig 1 below). I am of the opinion that both agility and user experience factors along with the technology evolution gave the companies who adopted these technologies a distinct 'competitive advantage' compared to their peers. My premise is also that these advantages became a baseline as everyone adopted those technologies, hence the move to the next technology disruption by itself is a 'competitive advantage'. Expanding on it further, the more agile an enterprise is, the better placed it is compared to its peers to respond to broader market or economic changes. And better user experience it provides it customers and employees, greater their loyalty and again a definite competitive advantage.

Fig1: Business Agility vs User Experience  - Technology

A. Mainframe Era

Mainframes helped address the issues with the data processing requirements of large business - the shift from manual, error prone to the reliability and stability of computers gave large businesses a huge advantage compared to other businesses. The shift from manual to mainframes was good from a reliability standpoint but was not a quick fix or a great user experience - this meant that the users were primarily large businesses who could afford the expense. Check out this IBM article on Mainframe usage - which looks at current usage as well and is slightly different from my consideration in the previous era.

Mainframe, to an extent, drove the growth of larger businesses since now they could scale to handle large order processing, payroll management and other processes. 

From a business agility perspective, mainframes meant long expensive implementation cycles and once defined a process remained fairly standard. And user had to be content with blue screens and had to remember transaction codes etc , hence with minimal user convenience in mind. 

B. Client Server 

The move to client server made things better both from an agility point of view as well as user experience. The era of desktop application meant that you could give a little bit more consideration for the user and also application development itself had more options with the likes of languages like C, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder etc. 

In terms of competitive advantage, this meant that only organisations with access to developers could build application according to their needs. This meant that there were more options for differentiation in certain areas. 

This was also an era when ERP vendors like SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle et al extended their reach across the enterprise and came up with the idea of a best-in-class process for the standard back-office processes. This was also an era were computerisation took hold with packaged software across both small and large businesses - the greater your access to capital, the greater was your ability to make something specific which offered you a competitive advantage.

C. Cloud Computing

 With advent of greater connectivity speed and establishment of the idea of sharing computing resources, cloud computing has established itself as key model for delivering software. This has done away with the need for businesses to have capital expenses for their IT estate and turning software as a regular service which buy on an ongoing basis. The key competitive advantage comes with the agility it affords in terms getting your employees and customers enabled with a process delivered in the cloud. 

Businesses are taking this agility to the next level by using business platforms which they can use to develop differentiated services or automation quickly.

Services still were delivered via browser and user experience wasn't as good as a customised client server model with a dedicated WAN/LAN could provide especially in scenarios where internet connection wasn't good enough.

Hence cloud computing by itself scored high on business agility but not as high on user experience.

D. Mobile Cloud

The advent of mobile and the app economy has meant that the users are always connected and can work anywhere anytime. Apps and device agnostic software combined with the agility delivered by cloud has meant that user and business agility are both high.
Competitive advantage now arises in the ability of businesses to cater to their stakeholder, be it customers, employees or partner with a value proposition which is differentiated and high on user experience.

Future looks very exciting and there are multiple scenarios which could lead us to the next phase in the evolution - could be IoT combined with wearables providing us with context relevant help and driving greater automation.

Here is to the next phase in software evolution - agility and user experience rules :).