words by Anthony Baker
R/GA Tokyo’s Executive Director for Technology Anthony Baker shares how customer experience needs to go beyond efficiency and put the spotlight on purposeful CX:
We are in a 2 Trillion USD Digital Transformation Race – a race with an alarming failure rate, where half of enterprises are not successful running a digital transformation program and more than 70 percent of companies claim to face roadblocks to innovation.
In 2018 IBM claimed that digital transformation projects take 4 years on average and 85 percent of them end in failure. With the emergence of Covid-19, Mckinsey reports claim that the pandemic has “vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of around eight weeks”.
Despite wiping out 500 billion USD from worldwide digital transformation spending, it has created pockets of opportunities in most industries, from finance and education, to telecommunications, health and new platform business models.
However we have observed that those locked in traditional enterprise tech are struggling. Because of their monolithic architecture, it’s much slower and costlier, hampering businesses in adapting to new behaviours, not being able to adapt quickly enough as compared to those with a more nimble and modular tech approach. Most incumbent enterprise platforms are offering no alternatives to these proprietary and slow-to-implement solutions and have a hefty price tag ranging from 2 million USD to 30 million USD. Additionally, the average time-to-market rarely goes below 12 months. This has led to companies struggling to close the gap between what consumers expect from their products and services, and what they can realistically offer.
So this begs the question: how can companies innovate faster to successfully ride the waves of change in customer needs? A radical new approach to modern digital platforms is now vital for success.
The Lean Experience Stack, our lean experience innovation approach, helps brands to accelerate digital transformation by enabling them to create best-in-class experiences and humanise their company’s value proposition.
The Lean Experience Stack offers an alternative to the traditional big bang approach and the slow adoption process that incumbent enterprise solutions require. It enables us to design purposeful experiences for customers. Starting from the underlying tech architecture and the processes, we enable lean, real-world, testable iterations at a faster pace. Our approach enables us to help businesses get to market twice as fast with half the effort. This allows businesses to then shift their focus on creating a bigger impact in customer’s satisfaction while generating up to 60% of cost reduction and savings over a three year period.
With the Lean Experience Stack, we were able to utilize new technologies to create purposeful customer experiences at speed. We created Merch Aid, an e-commerce initiative to connect designers and illustrators with small businesses to create and sell merchandise with 100% of the proceeds going back to the business. We created the whole experience in 2 weeks, and it was powered by a responsive platform which includes seamless content management, brand design and e-commerce capabilities, with more than $150,000 raised up to date, helping more than 25 businesses in New York, Los Angeles and Austin.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we created a community platform in Singapore for volunteers to help the elderly get their groceries, so the vulnerable population can stay safe at home. In less than 10 days from idea to launch, we leveraged messaging and mobile services that overcome language barriers and created a tangible impact for a community in times of need.
The key to our lean experience approach is that we adopt a modular principle, which in turn leads to digital experience innovation. Instead of a monolithic “full-suite” approach, we craft bespoke solutions that piece together best-in-class services in the most flexible and efficient way. We then design the experiences to fully maximise these services in different layers and in different combinations, allowing for continuous innovation.
Think about it as Lego pieces. We can put together a simple model with a few pieces and make it work without big efforts or committing to a huge investment. Because of its modular nature, we are able to design a truly bespoke and effective experience by adding, replacing or removing pieces without affecting the whole model.
We leveraged our lean experience innovation approach to build an entire new digital ecosystem for Shiseido Professional across Asia Pacific, enabling the brand to re-imagine their digital services from the ground up, serving end-consumers with a new brand identity, editorial content, treatment and product recommendation tools as well as integrated salon finding functionality across the region. We launched a new e-learning platform to support stylists to foster a new generation of beauty creators, and in-salon tools to connect end- customers with their stylists in a much deeper way. All while building a user-friendly and efficient platform with content management, asset management, user-centric databases, foundational CRM capabilities, and integrated localisation across 12 markets. The project was brought to life by a lean, multi-disciplinary team with a production time of just five months, and reducing operations, maintenance and vendor costs by 50 percent.
As we gear up for the next wave of digital disruption, here are some key business imperatives that companies should implement to unlock lean innovation:
Lean Innovation is all about removing waste:
Cut out the waste and clutter to enable faster and better innovation.
Continuous Innovation needs ongoing customer feedback:
Design and establish virtuous cycles with customers, continuously capturing consumer feedback and making it part of your strategy, design and development process.
Focus on a clear and differentiated value proposition:
Eighty percent of companies’ problems lie with their value proposition, not with their technology or marketing executions. Be laser-focus on the value proposition you want to offer to your customers, and then make sure it’s clear, transparent and well understood across your organization.
Understand the customer experience people need and expect:
Design and deliver a customer experience that can deliver your value proposition to customers in a seamless and effective way.
Don’t shy away from experimenting with business models:
Be bold in leveraging lean innovation to explore new business models and test creative value propositions. Don’t get hold up on the current ways of doing things, try to capture the opportunities of tomorrow, not just solve the problems of today
Nurture hybrid talent that combines different skills and mindsets:
COVID has changed our workstyle, lifestyle and talent needs in ways that we didn’t predict. Nurture new hybrid skills, creative mindsets, new ways of working, and new kinds of leaders
Harvest the power of technology innovation through new players:
Move away from traditional “suite” solutions and proprietary technologies and embrace modern and new cloud services, forge partnerships with brave and nimble tech companies Work with creative and diverse teams and agencies that understand them.
As we continue to face disruption, adopting Lean Innovation for your business will allow for constant iteration to deliver continuous, meaningful value to customers and ultimately, returning value back to your business.
About the Author
Anthony Baker leads multi-disciplinary teams in crafting strategic solutions that change brand experiences. He joined R/GA Tokyo from R/GA London where he was behind internationally celebrated work spanning digital and physical events, online services, apps, backend engines and bespoke CMS, API design and integration, emerging technologies, hardware prototyping and machine learning.
Some of Anthony’s projects include NikeID Interactive Mirror, Google Outside, #ShowYourColour for Beats by Dre and RayBan Ambermatic.
