Guest Blog: Customer Experience = The New Corporate Arms Race

Contributed by John Sheldon: Global SVP, Innovation Management at MasterCard

Building the best Customer Experience is the new corporate arms race. This “stockpiling” of better and better moments, all increasingly productized for replication, is happening around the globe. Enabled by technology and access to data, digital giants, startups and even more traditional companies like MasterCard are redefining each aspect of their everyday customer interactions. And once the customer has had a taste of this new and better way, it becomes the “experience floor”, the new minimum acceptable standard against which he/she will judge all future experiences.

Innovation lies at the heart of these changes and it is accelerating at MasterCard at a faster pace than ever before. We are teaching our customers to expect better experiences with each interaction, and the best companies are becoming better and achieving that.  For us at MasterCard, this is having a profound impact on us strategically, technologically and organizationally. It’s an exciting, challenging time.

New Strategies
The pace of change and need to continually improve the Customer Experience has our organization thinking differently about our strategies in (at least) three ways:

1.    Who we consider as our competition

Ten years ago, and even more recently, if you asked inside and outside of our company who the competition was, you would get two four letter brand names and if the person stretched, they might say PayPal (with a ?). Today, competition to create better payment experiences has reached fever pitch. That list might now include hundreds of names, some highly recognized brands, others not including mobile money providers, faster ACH, digital wallet providers and even the potential that some see in the Blockchain. These new competitors each seem to start by taking one aspect of the payments and commerce experience and using that as a lever to gain share with customers who recognize there may be an improvement. We see threats to our business everywhere and that what makes this moment in time so invigorating.

2.    How we can support our core customers

Our traditional customers – banks and merchants – aren’t universally known for their speed of innovation. To be clear, we have some incredibly customer-centric, forward thinking customers, but there are others who for any number of reasons – cost, compliance risk, institutional aversion – would be well-classified as laggards. In today’s world, this can be very costly. One of the main reasons we created MasterCard Labs is to help our customers by innovating alongside them. We help them solve specific customer experience needs using the same tools and techniques that we have developed within MasterCard. We deliver this on a consulting basis through a group we call Labs-as-a-Service. 

3.    The role we need to play in the overall Customer Experience

Anyone who has stepped out of an Uber car recently can tell you there are huge changes in “the moment of payment” within the customer experience realm. In some ways, the payment is becoming invisible. Obviously this has a profound impact on our brand and our hero moment when we deliver that fast, safe, secure, trusted, completed transaction. For our brand to remain relevant, we must add value around the transaction – before, during (of course) and afterwards. Witness the acquisitions we have made in the loyalty space, including Pinpoint and Truaxis as a key proof point.

The good news for MasterCard is that we have great assets and relationships to build on here. Over two billion cards, a global footprint and unprecedented data visibility give us the ability to look at important everyday use cases and find improvements. Recent great examples include dining (Qkr pay-at-table), refilling gas (P97 partnership) and even the laundromat (Maytag Clothespin app) as areas where our understanding of the hurdles in these experiences can lead to dramatic improvements before, during and after the moment of payment. 

New Technologies
There is an ever-expanding list of enabling technologies that are driving opportunities for better experiences. For companies to keep up, they need to be evaluating technology at every stage of the Gartner Hype Cycle (link). For MasterCard that list includes not only what is happening in e-commerce and at the checkout aisle, but everything from drones to VR to iris scanning to IoT, sensors and beyond. 
It is critical that companies work to understand these new technologies and their possibilities for impacting their business. Regularly holding “war game” type discussions where teams understand the opportunities and threats around a technology is a worthwhile exercise. 

Organizational Impacts
As the person managing the innovation programs and processes for MasterCard, I exist as an embodiment of the fact that companies need to adapt their organizations to deal with improving customer experiences. In our case, creating a separate organization – MasterCard Labs – was necessary for us to be able to protect our core business from the experimentation and other consequences of innovating customer experiences. We needed a place where, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, we could “move fast and break things.” Not every organization needs this.

Even though we have Labs, innovation isn’t our exclusive province. The rest of the company needs to participate in improving experiences. In fact, the employees of MasterCard are the richest source of our ideas within Labs. We tap their everyday experiences as both consumers and customer advocates. They know where the bodies are buried, so Labs just helps unearth them. Just having a structured program to allow your employees to share ideas (and rewarding them) is a powerful first step.

One can see the far ranging effects of systematically working to improve customer experiences. Don’t be overwhelmed. The key is to just start. Quick wins will drive momentum and organizational support.

As a consumer, I love that companies are working hard to make my life better by improving my experiences and I intend to reward those that do it best.