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D/2017/45/352 – ISBN 978 94 014 4521 4 – NUR 802 Design: Karl Demoen Translation: Ian Connerty © Steven Van Belleghem & Lannoo Publishers nv, Tielt, 2017. LannooCampus Publishers is a subsidiary of Lannoo Publishers, the book and multimedia division of Lannoo Publishers nv. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced and/or made public, by means of printing, photocopying, microfilm or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. LannooCampus Publishers Erasme Ruelensvest 179 box 101 3001 Leuven Belgium www.lannoocampus.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The third phase in digital evolution 13 Customers The Day After Tomorrow 14 The structure of Customers The Day After Tomorrow 17 Feedback 17 Bringing the book to life via Augmented Reality 19

CHAPTER 1. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN THE THIRD PHASE OF DIGITALIZATION Success today? Process – Measuring – Culture 22

The talking Kone lifts 39

Social media pushes customer experience

ISS uses algorithms for better and more efficient service 39

into the boardroom 24

Algorithms direct decisions 40

The customer relationship is the TOP priority

A new customer journey 42

for companies 25

Process – Measuring – Culture is no longer enough 45

The third digital wave: Connectivity, Artificial Intelligence and Automation 27 The opening shot? DeepMind beats the Go world champion 30 From Go to poker to dogfights to business impact 32 From stupid to smart in five years time 33 We are reaching the point of convergence 35

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THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW MINDSET CHAPTER 2. FROM MOBILE FIRST TO AI FIRST

An expert speaks: Joeri Van den Bergh 88

Faster adoption and higher impact

50

Invisible technology leads to magical experiences

51

The best service level ever

91

The AI-first mindset

55

1. Faster than real time: from reactive to proactive service

92

AI is necessary for governments to meet their

2. Hyper-personalization:

financial targets

57

How a single self-driving car can reduce traffic jams

59

3. Unparalleled ease of use (‘convenience’):

Trust in machines > trust in people

60

from average to individual customer a world without a manual

95 99

The six fields where AI will offer added value in customer relations

62

AI = Data

67

From supervised learning to non-supervised learning

69

CHAPTER 4. THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW MODEL

Weapons of mass influence

70

The Azure Window

112

From perception to real value

71

The Day After Tomorrow

113

Too enthusiastic or too scared

73

Towards the new customer relationship in The Day After Tomorrow

Jeremiah Owyang about the evolution

Customer 2020 at the KBC

117

towards automation 75

The next phase for Booking.com

118

Lemonade, a very tasty insurer

119

Knab moves into the insurance world

121

Three starting points, one philosophy

121

CHAPTER 3. IT’S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, IT’S THE CUSTOMER

6

116

Solutions to get around The Day After Tomorrow stalemate 122

It’s not about the technology, it’s about the customer

82

The expectation of Today versus The Day After Tomorrow

123

Car central or citizen central?

83

Play offensively

124

The explosion of expectations

85

Customers The Day After Tomorrow in Efteling

124

A devilish dilemma

86

Four axes of investment on the road to The Day

The real Customer of The Day After Tomorrow

87

After Tomorrow

128

CUSTOMERS THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW INVESTMENT AXES CHAPTER 5. THE DATA LEVER

CHAPTER 6. NEW USER INTERFACES

The limitations of segmentation

134

A virtual assistant for students

154

The power of context

135

Social media are too slow!

154

Who is reading who?

135

Real-time is the new minimum

155

From security to knowledge

136

Blue is my favourite colour as well!

156

Google retail lab

137

Solving the shortage of doctors

157

Ali-ID: the power of Youku Tudou and Alibaba

138

A world full of micro-bots

158

One Football: Youku Tudou on a smaller scale

139

The end of ‘search’?

159

‘Our gut feeling is worthless’: marketing has become

The evolution of interfaces

161

a science

141

From complex to simple

162

A fundamental shift in value creation

143

Customer-friendly mobile interfaces push satisfaction

Netflix as the king of consumer science

145

and conversion at Belfius

162

‘In God we trust; all others bring data’

147

From simple to automated

164

Planet Labs turns insurance into a science

147

Buy the best cakes in San Francisco - automatically

165

Ant Financial Services: the data lever in a classic industry

149

Smart contracts using Blockchain

166

Investing in the data lever

150

A robot as financial adviser

167

Vanguard grows thanks to robot advice

168

From automated to augmented

168

Google Lens!

170

A world without screens

171

Towards augmented customer experience

171

An automated world with perfect timing

173

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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CHAPTER 7. FIGHTING THE COMMODITY MAGNET

CHAPTER 8. INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTED

The platform as a marker of trust

176

Artificial intelligence is more dangerous than

The commodity magnet

178

nuclear weapons

194

The strongest commodity magnet ever

179

Open AI

195

The super AI myth

195

Marketing: influencing the consumer and influencing the algorithm

181

Robots steal our jobs, but less quickly than we think

199

The marketing department for The Day After Tomorrow

183

Feeling threatened by automation? Learn new skills!

200

Four strategies to beat the commodity magnet

184

Bottleneck occupations? Send in the robots!

201

New and renewed expertise

191

Intelligence augmented

203

The scaling-up of human skills

203

The starting point: customer service

204

Intelligence augmented in all phases of the customer experience

206

Investing in intelligence augmented

207

Cyborgs! 208 How far along are you?

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THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW CONSEQUENCES CHAPTER 9. ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS FOR THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

CHAPTER 10. ETHICS IN THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW Society in The Day After Tomorrow?

244

By Peter Hinssen, founder and partner at Nexxworks 213

A world of limitless ambition

244

The greatest comeback ever!

245

How successful companies are preparing

Not just ambitious billionaires

246

for The Day After Tomorrow’

214

Homo Deus

246

Patterns of The Day After Tomorrow

216

A world full of technological filters

248

PATTERN #1: The remote silo

216

Fake news? You ain’t seen nothing yet!

249

PATTERN #2: The separate entity

219

The current privacy discussion is the wrong discussion

250

PATTERN #3: The ‘catapult’

221

Brands with convictions

251

PATTERN #4: Customer co-creation

222

Explicit ethical choices

253

PATTERN #5: The portfolio organization

224

How far can technology go?

254

PATTERN #6: The accelerator

227

Towards a collaborative model?

255

PATTERN #7: The corporate garage

229

PATTERN #8: The network organization

231

FINALLY…

PATTERN #9: Integral disruption

234

Dream of the future, but use what is available today

256

THANK YOU!

257

PHOTO CREDITS

259

NOTES

261

PATTERN #10: The pollutants strategy The Day After Tomorrow canvas

237 239

Today 240 Tomorrow 240 Day After Tomorrow 240

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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An eight-year-old boy is sitting eating a cheeseburger with his

Google Translate is getting better every day. Artificial intelligence

sister in a McDonald’s in Ohio. Just as he pops the last bite into

is helping the translation tool to work faster and more efficiently.

his mouth, the police arrive to question the two children. “Have I

Google Translate can now translate from Japanese to English

done something wrong?” the boy asks the policemen politely. He

and vice versa; and also from Korean to English and vice versa. So

certainly doesn’t think so. As far as he can remember, he followed

the next logical question is this: can the computer teach itself to

all the rules of the road perfectly when he drove here in his dad’s

translate from Japanese to Korean and back again? The obvious

car. “So where did you learn to drive, kid?” asks one of the cops.

way to do this is to translate first from Japanese to English and

“Me? On YouTube, of course!”1

then from English to Korean. However, artificial intelligence software discovered that it was more effective to develop its own

A murder trial is going nowhere. The defendant protests

intermediary language for this intermediary step, a language

his innocence, but there are no witnesses to sup-

that gave much better results than English. But the

port his story. His only chance for acquittal is his

developer of this intermediary language was not a

Amazon Echo – the virtual assistant that more

human engineer. The computer, Google DeepMind,

and more consumers are using to make their

decided for itself that this was the best route to

lives easier. The device is effectively the world’s

follow.3

first computer with no keyboard, and people have quickly started to use it for everyday tasks

Children learning to drive with YouTube. A machine

like checking the news, buying products or listen-

testifying in court. Computers that can think and

ing to music. The interface is operated by the us-

learn for themselves. Ten years ago, it would have

er’s voice, but it is not just the owners’ words that

sounded like science fiction. Today, it is reality. In

are registered by Echo; the device also picks up

just ten years, YouTube has grown to become the

every other spoken word within its range. In this

second largest search engine in the world. Amazon

ground-breaking case, the police asked Amazon

Echo is the most popular gadget of the moment:

to release the data from the defendant’s Echo,

more than 10 million American families currently

in the hope that this might move the murder

have this virtual assistant in their living room.4

trial forward. Initially, Amazon refused, but later

Google DeepMind is widely regarded as the smart-

changed their mind, at the explicit request of the

est computer in the world. And this is just the tip of

defendant. So, the key witness in the trial became

the iceberg.

a machine. Not a person.2 12

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The third phase in digital evolution

companies to identify and solve their customers’ problems before they even know that it is a problem. Faster than real-time customer service is quickly becoming the new norm. The level of personalization of products and services is also increasing rapidly, based on a dramatic improvement in the quality of data

All signs are pointing in the same direction. We are at the start of

management. Last but not least, user interfaces are becoming

a new phase in digital evolution. The first stage was about mak-

more intuitive than ever before, with the way we operate devices

ing information available via the internet. The second phase was

and software changing beyond recognition in recent years.

about mobile technology and new forms of communication. The third phase will be about automation and artificial intelligence.

To make all these benefits available to their customers, companies are now making the strategic shift from ‘mobile first’ to ‘AI

In this book you will be offered far-reaching insights about the

first’. Initially, it will be unclear to some why certain brands are

influence of this third phase of digitalization on customer rela-

successfully improving their customer service, while others are

tions. What impact will artificial intelligence (AI) and rapidly-ad-

not. The reason being that, in most cases, artificial intelligence is

vancing levels of automation have on the relationships between

invisible technology. A website (phase 1 of digitalization) and an

businesses and customers? That is the core of this book.

app (phase 2 of digitalization) were investments that were highly

For customers, we are entering a period where we can expect

visible to everyone – customers and competitors. The unseen

an unrivalled quality of service. Smart technology now allows

nature of AI means that businesses that are quick to embrace it

INTRODUCTION

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can quickly gain a significant competitive advantage. Customers

When Digital Becomes Human (2014), my third management

won’t understand it. It will simply seem as though company A

book, focused on the initial shift from phase 2 to phase 3. It is the

has better staff than company B, but in reality, the staff in com-

period in which digital transformation became the buzzwords, as

pany A are being assisted by smarter software. In the first part of

companies asked themselves how the relationship between peo-

this book I will describe in detail this transition from ‘mobile first’

ple and machines could be enhanced. Three years later (2017), the

to ‘AI first’.

basic conclusion of When Digital Becomes Human is still relevant: computers should add value primarily through the automation

Customers The Day After Tomorrow

of operational processes while people should focus on the more emotional tasks. People and machines are highly complementary when it comes to offering added value to customers. This will not change in the years ahead. All that will happen is that the role of the machines will become more prominent and the role of the people will be given an even sharper focus. Customers The Day After Tomorrow, as the title implies, is all

My first two books, The Conversation Manager (2010) and The

about customer relationships in the medium-term future. In this

Conversation Company (2012), were both guides for marketing

book, I will make clear where companies need to invest if they

in the second phase of digitalization. The books described how

want to be successful in phase 3. The challenge is to combine

companies could adjust their culture and communication in a

this investment for The Day After Tomorrow with the further

new world of social media and smartphones.

development of evolutions from phase 2. In other words, working to improve customer relations The Day After Tomorrow runs

Today, the second phase of digitalization has reached maturity.

parallel with continued efforts to improve customer relations

That is not to say that it isn’t still vital to continue investing in

today and tomorrow.

mobile and social media communication. The third phase of digitalization has already started, but this does not mean that

This book is not an appeal to end investment in your current

consumers no longer have a need for good communication and

day-to-day relations. On the contrary, it is an appeal to continue

service provision based on technology from phase 2. In fact, it is

investing in today, but also to set aside resources for what your

more ingrained into consumer behaviour than ever before.

customers will expect in the future. A future that will arrive much faster than you think.

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Today, there is so much hype around so many emerging technol-

To make this as concrete as possible, the second part of the book

ogies that it can be difficult for companies to know where their

describes four axes of investment for the customer relationship

focus should be. The answer is that the most important focus

of the future. Firstly, there is a need to increasingly see customer

should always be the customer, and as this book will explain, if

relations as a science. Data must be used as a lever for developing

you take the customer as your starting point, the specific tech-

new customer benefits, and consequently, the need for data in

nology becomes less crucial.

the third phase of digital development is greater than ever. Artificial intelligence can only work effectively if it has enough data.

INTRODUCTION

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Secondly, there is a need for new interfaces to automate com-

Thirdly, there is the battle against the commodity magnet. Be-

munication and interaction with customers more efficiently.

cause customers will be taking more and more decisions based

Customers are no longer willing to wait an hour for an answer.

on algorithms and the power of the major digital platforms

Real time is the new expected minimum for communication, and

continues to grow, there is a risk that every product will become

it must be via user-friendly interfaces. Reducing the amount of

a commodity where price is the most important factor. As a busi-

effort the customer must make is the priority. In The Day After

ness leader and a marketeer, it is vital to find ways to add value

Tomorrow people will not be looking for a flawless customer

and differentiate to counter this risk.

experience; they will be more interested in an automated or very simple customer relationship.

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Fourthly, The Day After Tomorrow requires investment to im-

Autodesk, etc.) and disruptive rising stars (Planet Labs, Fyusion,

prove the performance of people via technology. How can speed

etc.).

be increased and the number of errors reduced in the most personal manner possible? How can we help our team to meet

The story of this book is based on more than 300 company visits

the wishes and expectations of the customers of the future?

spread across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley,

This fourth axis is focused on ‘augmented intelligence’: enhanced

Seattle, Barcelona, London, Berlin, Dublin, Belgium, the Nether-

human performance with the assistance of technology.

lands, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou.

In short, customer relations The Day After Tomorrow will use

I have also carefully selected and interviewed nine experts,

data as a lever for additional customer benefits (1), employ the

whose thoughts add further insights to the most important

most user-friendly interfaces (2), succeed in escaping from the

aspects of my story. All the interviews were filmed and can be

commodity magnet (3) and bring in new technology to optimize

viewed on www.youtube.com/stevenvanbelleghem. You will, of

human skills (4).

course, also read their comments and opinions throughout the book.

The structure of Customers The Day After Tomorrow

Feedback I would be delighted to receive your questions and comments. My email address is Steven@VanBelleghem.biz. It is always a pleasure to read your feedback. I hope you enjoy my book Customers The Day After Tomorrow.

Over the past five years, I have had the pleasure of following the

Steven Van Belleghem

evolution of the most innovative companies in the world from the front row. These companies include the biggest names in the

www.stevenvanbelleghem.com

field of technology (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, Tencent,

www.youtube.com/stevenvanbelleghem

Alibaba, Microsoft, etc.), established market leaders (Cisco, Oracle, INTRODUCTION

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CUSTOMERS THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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Bringing the book to life via Augmented Reality This book is about the future. One of the technologies that looks set to boom in the years ahead is Augmented Reality (AR). I will be talking about it a lot in the next few pages. But I want to do more than just talk about it; I want to use it as well. So, this is one of the first books in which AR applications have been integrated. This is what you need to do to bring this book to life:

Download the ‘Aurasma’ app on your smartphone

Create an Aurasma-acount

Look for pages with the ‘Aurasma’ logo (take a look at the cover if you are not sure)

Scan the page or the image with your smartphone

Find me, ‘stevenvanbelleghem’ via ‘Discover Auras’ and follow me on Aurasma

Watch how the book comes to life

INTRODUCTION

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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN THE THIRD PHASE OF DIGITALIZATION

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Success today? Process – Measuring – Culture

tomers to give you a score between 1 and 10 to reflect how willing they would be to recommend your company to others. Whoever gives a score of 9 or 10 is a promoter. If you give a score of 0 to 6, you are a detractor. By subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters, you end up with your Net Promoter Score. The central proposition of this book is simple: if you measure your NPS, this single score will tell you whether your company is performing well or not. If the score is higher than zero, your company will grow faster than the market. If the

Before we look forward into the future, I would first like to look

score is lower than zero, you have a problem. The most important

back at the recent history of customer experience management,

impact of NPS was felt in the boardroom. Many top executives

using three seminal books as examples. Each of the three books

now suddenly had a way to measure and interpret how custom-

added fundamental insights to the customer experience debate.

ers saw them. The concept has always had its supporters and opponents, but it is impossible to deny that it had a huge effect

The first is The Disney Way5 (Bill Capodagli, 2001). Since its earliest

on the business world. Customer experience evolved from some-

days, Disney has been a reference for customer experience. This

thing you had to ‘believe’ into something you could ‘measure’. As

book describes the entertainment company’s service philosophy.

a result, it brought customer experience management higher up

In short, it is a story of perfectly designed processes to make

the agenda.

the life of the customer as enjoyable as possible. The first step towards satisfied customers is to make sure that all your transac-

The third influential book was written by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of

tions run smoothly. And if you visit one of the Disney parks, you

Zappos. Delivering Happiness7 (2010) tells the story of one of the

will immediately notice that each and every one of their process-

world’s largest online shoe stores, which is now generally regard-

es is still thought out to the very last detail. They have even set

ed as a leading pioneer in the development of enhanced custom-

up a separate division, the Disney Academy, to share this philoso-

er experience. They first became famous as a result of a number

phy with other companies.

of seemingly extreme decisions, which all worked to the benefit of the customers, but at times appeared detrimental to the com-

22

The second book is The Ultimate Question6 (Fred Reichheld,

pany. However, Tony is convinced that if you choose what’s best

2006). It was this book that introduced the Net Promoter Score

for the customer, you will also be choosing what’s best for the

(NPS). To calculate your Net Promoter Score, you ask your cus-

company. So just how extreme were these decisions? Here’s an

CUSTOMERS THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

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