Design Your Customer Experience (CX) Strategy the Mastercard Way: Q&A; With Mastercard’s EVP of Global Customer Care, Lance Gruner

“The biggest misstep companies make is not having a Chief Customer Officer at the leadership table or at least a senior executive who thinks about the customer 24/7 and can act as their advocate throughout the organization.”

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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Lance Gruner, executive vice president of global customer care, Mastercard, shares his thoughts on why customer experience (CX) strategies need the same importance as any other marketing strategy at the leadership table. He explains how customer experience can drive sales, engage customers and encourage loyalty when done well.

A marketing maven, Lance leads the global customer care team at Mastercard. From customer intelligence and CX to performance analytics and AI, he throws light on Mastercard’s transition to a data-driven culture and brand. In this exclusive with MarTech Advisor, Lance reveals what you need to do as a customer-centric marketing leader to stay relevant in today’s omnichannel, multi-device digital environment.

Key takeaways from this Q&A; on the importance of customer experience:

• Insights gained from Mastercard’s CX journey
• Top tips on how brands can stay relevant in the customer’s mind
• Latest trends to follow in customer experience design for 2020 and beyond
   

 Highlights of the Q&A; With Lance Gruner of Mastercard
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Here’s the edited transcript of Lance’s conversation with us on the importance of customer experience and more:

How have you seen the concept of ‘customer care’ evolve in the last decade or so, given the rapid evolution of both, the multi-channel, multi-device digital environment; and customer behavior and expectations from brands? What have been the biggest areas of transformation?

We are living in the “experience economy,” which means customer expectations are higher than ever before. Customers are always connected and looking for immediate gratification; they also have the power to lift brands up and take them down with a single tweet.

As a result, we see a big change in both how we talk about our work and the reputation it has within the company. Our organization is now thinking holistically about the experience we give customers, whether that’s through the product, after-purchase support or even in our communication.

While “customer care” used to be thought of as a cost center, that perception is quickly changing. Of course, we’ve always been working to add value and drive the brand forward, but now we have a seat at the table to make and inform strategic decisions, based on our voice of the customer and feedback loop with our internal partners. In short, customer experience is now recognized as a critical driver of brand and business value. A recent CEO study by Conference Board found that “customers place a higher value on the experience of using a product than on the product itself and CEOs see enhancing ‘the experience’ as the way to future success.”

What will be the next big transformation in the industry? The ability to assess rich data and utilize the new technologies and innovation that legitimately drives business value. It’s not about having all the bells and whistles but about integrating the right technology and efficiently using data that delivers the best experience and keeping up with changing customer expectations.

What are the typical missteps that brands make, that lead to irrelevance in the customer’s mind? What practical steps could a customer-centric marketing leader take to stay relevant?

It’s easy for brands to get excited about shiny new tools like chatbots and lose sight of what truly matters to the customer. Companies need to understand that there is a difference between talking about customer experience and knowing what to do about it. The biggest misstep companies make is not having a Chief Customer Officer at the leadership table or at least a senior executive who thinks about the customer 24x7 and can act as their advocate throughout the organization.

I used to work as a CX executive in hospitality and I always tell my team to metaphorically “walk the property” like I used to do on the hotel properties that I managed. In other words: put yourself in the customer’s shoes and see how your product or service lives. How does the customer use it? Does it really solve a need? We do this by encouraging product and technology owners to listen and see first-hand how our products are used. We also host multiple customer conferences globally every year to hear directly from our customers and develop tangible plans to act on that feedback.  

Beyond my customer care team, I am also constantly working to ensure a customer-first mindset pervades the organization. The experience of the customer must be top of mind in everything we do from designing new features to crafting technical content. Without this cultural change, all the technology and tools in the world won’t matter. Customer will quickly see what companies are truly focused on the customer.

Learn More: Why Customer Experience Matters Even More in 2019: Q&A; with Matt Zilli of Marketo, An Adobe Company

Staying engaged with the customer through their journey and delivering delightful customer experience (CX) is an imperative today. What are the basic principles Mastercard follows when it comes to Customer Experience design?

A great experience is the culmination of every interaction we have with a customer. Therefore, our team’s North Star centers on something we call, “one view for the customer.” Our customers today are using multiple communication channels, both personally and professionally, that’s why we strive to think about every touchpoint and how it contributes to creating a holistic experience with our brand. “One view for the customer” means we turn the telescope around and not think of our view of customers, but rather, how they see us from sales through service.

Ultimately, this enables us to effectively respond to their requests more quickly and helps us set the right expectations about how we can and can’t help. While internally we may have several platforms that support our interactions with our customers, it is essential that from the customer’s perspective, they have a single source of truth and get what they’re looking for when they contact us.

Which tools/technology helped you to map customer engagement and focus on creating a customer-centric culture?

As a company with top-tier technology at its core, we have the technical talent to build and use some of the best tools and technology out there. Every stitch of technology we use boils down to three goals:

1. Need: the extent does it help someone do something
2. Ease: the degree of simplicity to accomplish a goal
3. Emotion: how the interactions makes someone feel
    

More specifically, we’re doing some exciting work with predictive analytics tools, which help us stay one step ahead of customers. As we put new products and enhancements into the market, predictive analytics helps to ensure we have the right amount of support in place to address customers’ needs in a timely fashion and exceed their expectations. It also helps with forecasting the volume of inquiries so that we can resource accordingly. And because we have a better sense of what customer support skills are most in-demand, this technology has also informed how we train employees and help them skill up.

What have been your biggest learnings about transitioning to a data-driven decision-making culture at Mastercard?

The pace of technology innovation and the amount of data available to us today. Our industry will see more AI and CX tools emerge in the next five years than in the previous 20. Speech and text analytics, chatbots, AI, biometrics, all these developments are impacting both how our customers interact with us and how we leverage insights about our customers.

However, all companies hit a spot where they must learn that it’s not about the data, you’re adding to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform but how you’re organizing and using it. If the data organization doesn’t allow you to be more sophisticated, give predictive analytics and act non-intrusively, then why bother with the cost of energy

And let’s not forget, we are in an omnichannel revolution. Customers want to choose the channel easiest for them to reach out to us. And while it’s a very exciting time to look at what all we can do to elevate our customer’s journey through data-driven decision-making, we can’t forget that the goal is always to make our connection with the customer better. It’s important to always go back to the basics, simplify their experience, make their journey frictionless, and then measure and execute based on continuous feedback.

Learn More: Data-Driven Marketing Trends for the AI Age: Q&A; With Palace Resorts’ VP of Global Marketing, Kathy Halpern

Neha: Thank you, Lance, for sharing your insights on the importance of customer experience strategies. We hope to talk to you again soon.

About Lance Gruner:

Lance Gruner is EVP, Global Customer Care, for Mastercard. In this role, he is responsible for leading the Global Customer Service, Global Contact Center Management, Customer Technical Communications, Customer Intelligence, and Experience and Customer Integration, and Performance Analytics teams. He focuses on providing high-level service and support for Mastercard customer financial institutions and drives strategy, alignment and innovative care execution with other external stakeholder groups including merchants, governments and consumers.

About Mastercard:

Mastercard is a technology company in the global payments industry. Our global payments processing network connects consumers, financial institutions, merchants, governments and businesses in more than 210 countries and territories. Mastercard products and solutions make everyday commerce activities, such as shopping, traveling, running a business and managing finances easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone.

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