Hi, welcome. We're here today at Accenture's Digital Hub. There you go. It is a fantastically interesting place, there are a lot of interesting toys and gadgets to play with here, at least you can imagine that this is a very fun place to work. I'm here with Luis Villa, who is a Strategic Director at Accenture Interactive, and we're going to talk today about some of the challenges that we've already started exploring in the class, and we're going to talk a lot about in this coming week. That is how the brand strategy cascades into the customer experience across different touch points throughout the whole customer journey, and the challenges therein. So, Luis, welcome and thank you very much for the invitation to come here. I wonder if we could start with, just give us a little background about how you got to where you are today? How did you arrive at this position? It's a long story obviously. At 20 years, a long story. But anyway, I studied law one moment and I started to work as a lawyer for many years, but after one moment, I discovered the Internet in the '90s. I started to do what [inaudible] because I got so. So, I was not a programmer, not a designer. Designer who were in that moment in the internet. So, to do one thing that it was called information architecture, they was putting the content in digital format to the [inaudible] directories [inaudible] whatever, and then after that, they started to create something that was called, usability, interaction design, things like that. It wasn't customer experience because they weren't customers at that moment. Now, and little by little I started to learn all of the things just learning by doing, and I started to work in different companies. I started in a small internet provider internet, then IT traditional company doing e-commerce, and then I started in an incubator in [inaudible] it was called. After that, I went to consulting when the dot com bubble burst. Then I was there in a big company called Gemini was called this consulting company just doing the first way for digitalization with the internet technologies in banks and big companies. I was building teams and managing teams, and after that I joined a small company. At that moment, there were eight people, The Cocktail is the name. We were working in creating fun user experience, all the value chain of a digital transformation of a company. So, we started with user experience but then we had technology, we have the strategy, we have many different things. But after that, I left The Cocktail I joined Fjord. Fjord is a company that was founded in 2001, and the founder said that the future is service design for mobile. In 2001, there was only wop. Now you have this plastic Nokia and was wop. So, the customers experience didn't exist, but they find out that the smaller the screen, the more important the context of the user. So, they started to design what was happening around the customer. So, when I joined there, we were working in this course called [inaudible] Obviously, we're one of the pioneers, and then in service design, we're starting to align all the different touch points from the beginning to the end, to design an experience that was interesting, fun, and relevant for the client. Then we got acquired by Accenture like seven years ago, and it was an interesting movement because the different cultures playing together at the beginning it was like a tough thing because we were quite different. But now I think we are dense in very good, because we're combining our creativity, our intuition, our way of looking into people with the capabilities of a big company. So, we can create all these customer experiences and make them measurable, make them operational, all of these things. I think this is a trend that we're seeing is that the recognition that strategy companies like Accenture which traditionally had focused more and more into corporate strategy, business strategy, and the design aspect, there's a intersection there that should be explored, and I think this is testimony to that kind of movement here. What we're seeing in many cases is that normally the organization define the experience of the user, but now is the experience of the user who are defined in the organisation. So, we are seeing that they started with the different parts, they have online with what's the website, then normal application, call center. Many different things, but they weren't aligned. So, the customer experienced was totally broken, the campaign, the guys from the agency didn't talk with their guys of support. So, it was very difficult thing to manage and to measure. Now, what is happening is that many companies are realizing that they have to get back to the client. So, they have to start to design the value proposition, and all experience from the beginning till the end just to then reorganize themselves, so they can see the client again in the organization. So, to what extent is there getting traction? Because one of the things that we're talking a lot about in this class is the fact that brand strategy tends to be defined by a strategy team or by external consultants. Then the whole challenge of cascading their brand strategy to all the touch points in your organization, we've seen in our class and discussions, we've noticed the challenge that that connection that the intersection of strategy, and the customer facing customer experience employees have. So, I'm wondering if you've also seen that in the types of work that you're doing and your interaction with customers, is that a challenge that a lot of companies are facing in your [inaudible]. Yeah. One of the interesting things I will set in some of the other talks that Telcos utilities and insurance companies have the same customer journey. You have a campaign with happy people smiling, then you have a contractor with small print, a lot of small print, and then you have a call center. The experience is designed in three moments of truth, when you have the problem, and then the rest is paying now. The main issue that, as I said insurance utilities on Telco is the same, it's the same concept, and is designed to keep the customer way. You spend a lot of money marketing campaigns, but the marketing campaigns are different. If you cover the logo of uninsurance campaign Telco, utility is the same, you can tell. If an insurance company is an energy company or is a telecom company. So, the point is, how can you get from a transactional mindset to a more relationship oriented mindset? What role do you want to play in your customers lives because at the moment, do you want to give them away? Because they're very expensive to deal with. So, what we're trying to do is trying to find new opportunities to create new experiences, new ways of having relationships with the client, and going away from the transactional part because transactions are commodities. If you do this in transaction all the time, you have the same KPIs, you are the same. So, it's very difficult to differentiate as a brand. But why, in your view, why does that happen, why is there this disconnect between the strategy team that's working really hard to define great differentiation, and positioning, and all the key messages that they want to cascade through their conversations with customers. Why is there a disconnect between that? Then your line level employees that maybe don't know about the strategy. What are the challenges you see there? I think there's a lot of disconnections between the top management in a company and the company and the people who are on the front with the clients. Most of the cases what we see is that, the people in the top management have a filter information, they don't have the real information from the market. They see numbers, they see the pictures of campaigns, they see an a realistic picture of the market and it's totally different than the reality. So, what we're finding, as we said if experiences defining the organization what is happening now is that you need a lot of research, you need to get back to the client, to the streets, to the customer houses to understand what is the role of your business. You're talking about qualitative research, which is something we talk about in the first week and that's something that we continually emphasized throughout this class is that you can't just have quantitative, you have to have qualitative as well. It's one of these and the fact is that what's the value of a wink? With the value of a wink, can mean many different things from a quantitative perspective. A wink is a wink, from a qualitative it can be I love you, I got you, it can be many different things. So, the point is that the qualitative research and there are people with trained eyes to see things in with clients in the street have the ability to say why is this happening? Why is this number happening? What is the consequence of this number? Do you have any examples of companies where you've seen that there is a just unbelievable disconnection between how the line level, the line employees were interacting with customers, and how it differed from the values that were communicated in the original strategy for the brand? I would say that most of them. That's why I think many consulting companies, many agencies aren't going to the customer experience side not to design experiences, to design products and services. Because in the end, the money comes from the clients. So, you don't have clients, you don't have money, you have a business. So, what we see is that suddenly they have people coming from abroad from Silicon Valley, from many administrator types with small resources and not even having a physical presence, they build a brand on top of the assets in the country, we have Uber, Airbnb, an Uber is an Uber in many places but the cars are not there, it's not there. They create this experience and they're changing the perceptions of the client. What should be moving in the city, they're changing a lot of things. Most of the companies are still looking to their traditional competitors in a very linear perspective, they are not great in many cases to manage uncertainty. So, they need to, if I put some money here, how much money will I get there? The point is that this- In the next three months. Exactly. These companies are used to uncertainty and to experiment very fast, they're very good at data, but they're very good also and reacting and learning also. So, I think most of the big companies they have high moment now, because of that and also because of the culture. The culture is transactional, it's linear, and think in terms of industry, not in terms of experience. So, what needs to change? So, if you're a company that's been struggling to get this emphasis on the interactions and the relationship with customers that happens consistently throughout the whole customer experience, how do you move from that type of relationship that you have today, which is distant and as you said is very transactional in a commodity, to something that's more relational, what's the secret? For me, the secret is just in my view is understanding that all numbers that you have come from interaction between people. If the people want to interact I mean employees, top management with moral low-level employees, with the customers, with the partners, with the providers, whatever, you will have numbers. The problem sometimes is that people focus on the numbers without knowing where the numbers come from, this is the qualitative part on one side, and another side is that in the end, you have to go back and talk in authentic way with customers. Because if you don't do that, in the end you are only another player, people won't regret that you are gone. That's a very good point I think the authenticity of those customer interactions is really key. So, there is some hope, it just requires a foundation of good customer research too. I think that and also aligning to your purpose. I mean one of the things that we're seeing in many cases when we do the research is that, people want to interact with brands that have some purpose. If not, they have like a utilitarian relationship, but in many cases, they even show off that they are interacting with these brands. I think that we have this thing, I think people are worried about sustainability, ethics, and now with technology with the data privacy. The trust is a very important thing. Also what role do you play in my life as a brand? Why should I interact with you? What is your role in my life? I have some brands that are definitive, they changed my life I can't imagine my life without them. But the others are totally exchangeable, there's no problem with them. You have to define what type of register do you have, and then align the rest of the customer experience to that positioning, to that strategy. So, maybe you want to be anonymous, that's not a problem. But you have to know that you are being anonymous and you have to interact in a different way that you want to be something relevant, meaningful, and unique for the client. As you can see, we could probably talk about this for a long time, but I want to thank you for your insights because this is fantastic and it's very much aligned with a lot of things we're going to be talking about in this class in later weeks. We're going to be talking about ethics and trying to align your strategies throughout all the different stages of the customer journey. So, thank you very much for your time and we look forward to seeing you again on. Thank you. Take care. Thank you very much.
