Richard Hatherall: How to Get the Most Out of Customer Experience Tools

When planning a customer experience transformation, companies can equip themselves for success by focusing on a handful of key tools. Richard Hatherall, who leads Bain's Customer Strategy & Marketing practice in Asia-Pacific, discusses three of the most-used customer experience tools and examines what leading companies are doing well to illustrate a blueprint for success. 

Read the transcript below.

RICHARD HATHERALL: Chinese ride-hailing company Didi facilitates 25 million journeys a day, which gives them a huge data advantage. They're able to use that data to do predictive analytics, to figure out what are the things that anger customers and which are the things that delight them. They're also able to give their drivers fast feedback and triggers for service recovery.

Didi is emblematic of one of the findings from Bain's survey of customer experience tools, which was that APAC companies are in the lead in adoption. Among the 20 tools we assessed, the top three in adoption were predictive analytics, personalized experience, and product and operational sensors.

One interesting finding was that satisfaction with tools negatively correlated with the rate of adoption. What we found is that as users get familiar with the tool, their expectations rise, and they bump up against the limits of the tools. And conversely, those tools that are new, things like drone delivery and episode management, have a much higher rate of satisfaction.

The best outcomes come for companies that focus on a few tools and don't dabble in a broad range of them, and they're able to embed the tools in their operations and their ways of working.

Leading firms really do three things well. They have a clear link of tools that are business strategy. They choose the small set of tools to do the job and allocate the right resources to them. And they adapt their usage according to competitive shifts and technological developments.

A key takeaway is that a well-equipped and well-trained company raises the odds of success in customer experience transformation.

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