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There’s a story about the early days of personalised retail that has become something of a parable. Some nine years ago, the US retailer Target created a model to identify customers who were likely to be pregnant, after it noticed that certain combinations of purchases were tell-tale signs: fragrance-free lotion, hand sanitiser, large bags of cotton balls. This insight allowed Target to send them vouchers for pregnancy-related products – useful, right? Well, not for the pregnant teenage girl, whose father found the coupons. As reported in a landmark New York Times Magazine piece, he initially complained to Target: “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” Only later did he realise the store knew something he didn’t.
Since then, the drive to deliver “smart” experiences – fast, AI-powered, end-to-end journeys that adapt to individual circumstances and behaviours – has only intensified. As Target’s early experiment demonstrates, getting it right isn’t a given – but when it works, it’s powerful. “Those times where you can create an incredible level of empathy with your customer base are the times when they remember you,” says Aimie Chapple, divisional chief executive officer for customer management at Capita. “That’s when your services and products become really impactful – and the customer will become your ambassador out in the world.” The challenge is to deliver that experience with as few frustrations, interruptions or unintended consequences as possible.
It’s in the gap between real life and cyberspace that we find many of those frictions. One technology that is helping alleviate some of them is augmented reality – precisely because it fuses those two realms. We are all familiar, for instance, with furniture companies offering AR tools to help customers visualise a sofa, say, in their living room before ordering. It’s an effective way of helping shoppers make better decisions and, in turn, reducing the number of returned items. Chapple points out, however, that some of the most innovative AR applications will emerge in areas of our lives that have hitherto been defiantly analogue. Imagine a newly qualified boiler engineer visiting your home: if they are equipped with an AR headset, it doesn’t matter if they haven’t encountered your issue before – they would be able to communicate with a support centre which can overlay their vision with instructions. “That becomes a frictionless experience for the customer,” says Chapple, “because you avoid a repair person coming over, looking at it and not being able to do anything about the problem.”
Creating and implementing game-changing technology that solves long-standing frictions could be lucrative. Few brands are more focused on this than Amazon which, having conquered online retail, is now redesigning the bricks-and-mortar in-store experience in a bid to remove age-old frictions around queuing at a point of purchase. Many believe that the Amazon Go chain of convenience stores is a representative blueprint of the “store of the future”: an automated environment where computers track what customers place in their baskets and charge them without the need for a physical checkout – the thing people like least about real-world shopping. As the roll-out continues, the success of this reduced-friction concept remains to be proven, though early user feedback is positive.
Beyond the physical environment, Chapple believes that one of the major “unsolved” friction points is passwords – there’s nothing that interrupts warm feelings about a brand quite like a cumbersome ID-verification process. “Right now, most organisations are still part of the ‘password generation’ – they require you to come up with three keywords, but five years later you’ve forgotten them,” says Chapple. So what to do? Chapple points to innovative new tools that do away with passwords altogether, such as Trusona, which allows you to sign in by scanning a QR code with your mobile. In the future, however, the password step could become yet more invisible thanks to blockchain. The startup Remme has a vision for how that could work: your device is issued a unique piece of code that allows for encrypted online communication, the details of which are logged on a blockchain, which means the certificate cannot be faked. When you wish to log into a site, you don’t have to provide a password – your device (and its certificate) is authenticated on the blockchain and you’re granted entry. Couple this with fingerprint ID or facial recognition and you have a frictionless and highly secure customer experience. A recent report by Verified Market Research highlights the opportunity for such technologies, forecasting the global identity and access management market to grow to $29.79 billion by 2027.
Of course, for all the shiny new tech, businesses have to remain attuned to the pitfalls – the areas where these supposed solutions might actually create new frictions, as Target learned the hard way. Voice recognition is an obvious example. What could be more frictionless than not requiring a customer to engage with a screen at all? If you have a smart speaker, for instance, you can ask it to order groceries. It’s a technology that’s accessible to everyone – including people who might use it to make unauthorised purchases, such as your children. That’s why users of this technology still need ways to confirm that the speaker is entitled to shop.
While smart speakers now have the capability to distinguish between voices and create voice profiles, as Chapple points out, “it's not quite frictionless yet.” The customer experience will also be improved, she notes, as voice assistants get better at identifying emotions. This will enable companies to create more empathetic experiences that see devices respond to emotion in the user’s voice. Does the customer sound stressed? If so, now might be a bad time to recommend new products. As AI voice assistants get smarter and integrate with an ever-broader range of devices, the opportunity to reduce friction increases – user behaviours and preferences will increasingly be factored into digital responses, offering the user a more uniquely tailored experience.
It is in the interest of brands to redesign experiences and make every step of the customer journey easier. Frictionless matters because, at its heart, it speaks to the very thing that people are most protective of: their time. Consumers have become more sensitive than ever to unnecessarily giving up their time. A friction-free experience is one that frees up time, rather than wasting it on returning products, remembering passwords or wielding a keyboard. Pulling that off might require data-driven technologies, but the goal is as human as they come. Get it right, and it’s more powerful than any coupon.
To find out more, go to Capita's website.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
