Solution
TCS Interactive
Humanizing Technology to Create Iconic Experiences
Highlights
- First introduced more than 20 years ago, the experience economy in which we currently live, is one where meaningful, memorable experiences create real business value.
- To stay relevant and competitive in today’s noisy, ever-changing marketplace, brands need to wow customers with contextual, persistent, and in-the-moment experiences.
- The best experiences are created by harmonizing brand, design, technology, and data—resulting in iconic, purpose-led experiences that help enterprises grow their brand and business.
On this page
Brand and experience
Memorable customer experiences can help companies stand out from the crowd to build brand value.
Brand success relies on various factors. But today, when a customer’s attention is pulled in every direction and businesses face perpetual change, there’s one thing that companies can’t afford to neglect—customer experience.
Customers expect to be wowed every time—and every moment—they interact with a brand. So each experience should be personal and relevant. It should be consistent and frictionless and capture a customer’s attention at exactly the right moment, every time, and across every touchpoint. Marketing leaders know that delivering meaningful, memorable customer experiences will help them achieve their organization’s business goals. They also know there’s more to it than just a superior call center, an efficient omnichannel strategy, or personalized services.
The best customer experiences require the confluence of science and art, data and contextual knowledge, and traditional and emerging technologies. They require profound customer knowledge, which can be obtained from deep ethical learning and technology integration, and continuously shaped by data-driven insights and artificial intelligence (AI).
Experience economy
We live in the experience economy, where customers are willing to pay more for experiences.
First introduced in the late nineties, the concept of the experience economy, or the idea that an experience has real economic value, has finally gained credence. The value of an experience lies in the worth ascribed to it by a customer. As a simple example, there are plenty of people who are willing to pay more for movie tickets at theaters that offer premium viewing formats, luxury seating, and upscale dining and drink options—all of which add up to a superior experience.
Brands like Starbucks and Apple dominate the market largely because of the experiences associated with their goods and services. Whether you walk into a Starbucks store, order your coffee in a drive-through, use their app, or buy coffee from a retailer who licenses the Starbucks brand, the experience is always familiar, like a dear friend. As for Apple, it has always focused on innovation, design, and user experience—all of which have helped the company build a devoted customer base spanning across the world. With its ‘unboxing’ videos that became a trendsetter, the company added to the excitement of buying and owning an Apple product.
What’s driving the demand for experiences is a shift from product marketing to a greater focus on customer centricity. Younger generations are especially influenced by experiences. Studies reiterate what many now know—millennials would rather spend money on experiences than things.
Some innovations and technologies have played a bigger role than others in creating experiences. Smartphones, for instance, have revolutionized how we live our lives and interact with others. And several new digital technologies, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), AI, and natural language processing (NLP), are helping us create and enjoy experiences.
Ultimate deliverable
Extraordinary experiences are contextual, persistent, and in-the-moment.
Because we can expect the experience economy to wield influence for the foreseeable future, business leaders need to hone their strategies and practices to deliver extraordinary experiences and stay ahead of the competition. We see an extraordinary experience as the ultimate deliverable characterized by three things.
Contextual: Customers’ experiences are extraordinary when they are contextual and relevant to their wants and needs. Brands can create these highly personalized experiences using data-driven insights. For instance, a diaper company might send new parents who are celebrating the birth of their child a short, instructional video about diapers in their social media feed, along with a QR code for special coupons. If this is of interest to them, the result is positive for both the company and the consumer. And that’s an experience win for the diaper company. Another example is that of hotels leveraging a customer’s preferences to offer the perfect experience. Some hotels are updating their apps so they can turn customer-volunteered information into personalized experiences. You always want a room on the first floor with a king-sized bed? The reservation team will make sure that happens. Prefer to have chamomile tea in the evening? Housekeepers will be sure to place a few of those teabags in the room before you arrive.
To deliver this kind of targeted, contextual experience, brands need to understand who their customers are and what they want. A holistic view of a customer’s profile and insights from historical data, along with all the interactions they have had with the customer, can be applied to engage them.
Persistent: When customers engage with a brand, no matter the channel or touchpoint, the experience must be consistent and frictionless throughout the entire customer journey. This isn’t just about a similar look and feel, or uniform messaging and optimized fluid content. It is also about the persistent use of data.
Persistent experiences increase customer loyalty because they elevate the trust customers have in brands. Companies score higher on brand recognition if customers encounter persistent experiences every time they engage with a brand, whether walking into a brick-and-mortar store, downloading and using an app, or following a social media channel. A good example of this is of a luxury goods company that enhanced end-user engagement with a persistent experience. By developing a phygital strategy for the company’s digital and physical stores, it could establish a strong, compliant, recognizable, and consistent brand identity across multiple channels.
In-the-moment: In-the-moment experiences are straightforward. They are about engaging with customers at the right time, with the right message, in whatever manner they choose. This is more important than ever given the fact that customers are constantly bombarded with brands seeking their attention.
To create and deliver in-the-moment experiences, brands need to rely on insights from the data they have collected and analyzed on their customer base. Doing so will allow them to orchestrate the technologies they use to design, build, and grow customer engagements.
Our work with a leading bank provides a great example of this. For the bank, we created an industry-first ticketing platform that uses machine learning algorithms to process data collected from various systems mapping commuters’ journeys on public transport. Through an app that uses the data, the bank could create a frictionless ticketing and payments experience, and in real time automatically process payments without any cash, card swipes, or waving of a mobile phone at a kiosk.
While the characteristics of an ultimate experience are clear, organizations need to do more than focusing on just these three aspects to create that wow experience.
Experience first
Crafting exceptional experiences for modern-day customers requires putting experience first.
Exceptional experiences require organizations to take an approach that harmonizes brand, design, technology, and data. Here’s why such an approach is critical:
Brands can inspire loyalty: Perhaps more than anything else, experiences have the power to lift or tank a brand. When customers feel positive during or after an engagement with a company, that good feeling can serve as a strong impetus for loyalty. Loyal customers grow brands. But a bad experience can have the opposite effect, and in particularly egregious examples, brands may have to pay dearly.
There are numerous examples of bad experiences. A particularly famous one involved a song that went viral. While waiting on an airplane for his flight to take off, musician Dave Carrol watched his band’s guitars being tossed on the tarmac before they were loaded into the airplane. Upon arrival, he discovered that one of the guitars was broken. If that experience wasn’t bad enough, Carrol spent months negotiating with the airline over the broken guitar. He got nowhere. Finally, he wrote a song that went viral. It cost the airline a lot more than expected: $1.4 billion to be precise.
On the other hand, there are examples of great customer experience positively impacting a brand and helping it grow. One from our experience of working with clients is the brand boost that ITV, one of Britain’s biggest television broadcasters, got from ITVX, its first-in-market freemium streaming service. TCS Interactive had designed and built the visual design for the service in nine months so ITV could launch it just in time for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, when millions of viewers tuned in. ITVX had just the right harmony of technology and design to enable a personalized, highly optimized experience for users. It earned one billion streams in April 2023, in just 4 months after going live. In the first month post launch, there was a 55% increase in streaming hours, and a 65% increase in online users. Read how ITV reinvents the streaming experience.
Design ties it all together: Marketers have more tools than ever before to deliver great customer experiences. For example, there’s VR, which immerses customers in virtual environments, and data analytics, which helps businesses know their customers better. But little of this is effective if you leave out design.
In fact, design plays a pivotal role in every marketing endeavor, from the early stages of ideation all the way through every touchpoint in the customer journey. Design ties everything together—humanizing technologies, creating more personal connections with customers, fostering new areas of growth, and inspiring everyone in the ecosystem, including customers, colleagues, and partners.
Technology and data drive personalization: Many organizations are already using marketing technology such as customer relationship management (CRM) software or marketing automation software. But modern marketing calls for more data-driven operations, and a customer data platform (CDP) can help. The platform can be used to collect, store, and manage customer data and offers a comprehensive approach to data access that is based on metrics to extract more value from data.
Companies can also leverage digital experience platforms (DXPs). These can help brands build and personalize digital experiences. Integrated tools DXPs support can assist with content, commerce, and customer loyalty, empowering marketing teams, improving time to market, and increasing conversion and acquisition rates.
In this age of AI, CMOs need to be prepared for the impact of AI on marketing.
At a high level, AI can provide marketing teams inspiration and improve productivity. Marketers are already using AI to create content including videos and images. Despite AI’s meteoric rise, especially after the advent of ChatGPT and other generative AI models, AI is still in its early stages. As it evolves, AI could be used to analyze and learn from vast amounts of data to better understand customer behaviors and orchestrate highly personalized experiences across channels and touchpoints.
For the near future, success with AI in marketing will require a symbiotic approach, with humans and AI working together.
The pace of technological innovation, the ever-demanding customer, and the velocity of business change have made this one of the most exciting times in modern marketing history. To create real value and thrive in today’s experience economy and for the foreseeable future, organizations need to delight customers with iconic experiences that are contextual, persistent, and in-the-moment.
