 Hello, welcome to today's product school webinar, keeping digital transformation customer centric. Thanks for tuning in and taking out the time to be here today. We'll go over the agenda. Get to know me, who am I? The second thing that we'll talk about is what is digital transformation and how does digital transformation make an impact on the customer experience? We'll then talk about re-managing the customer experience on e-commerce checkout, a case study for e-commerce checkout that we made significant improvements to the customer experience. And digital transformation and customer centricity, how digital transformation brings together improvements on customer centricity. How did we fare some metrics to measure customer experience and lessons learned in the journey? So get to know me. My name is Niranjan. People call me Nier, Dravid. I'm a senior product manager working with American Express and I work on the e-commerce and digital payment products. The payment product that I manage gives our customers secure and easy checkout experience on e-commerce transactions to reduce fraud risk and also provide value added features at checkout journeys for customer engagement. My prior experience was in the global loyalty and benefits space. My professional journey, I started off my career working on ships in the merchant navy as an engineer working in the engine room. And I did it for like two years and I didn't like it. So I jumped it into the IT world, starting off working as a software engineer and then progressing to a senior software engineer and a technical lead. I then moved on into the product project and technical program management for some time. When I took experience on the various aspects of a program and project management, how did I land up in the product as a product manager? So I was always curious and excited to understand how the business work, what the customer really liked. Did we build a product that the customer asked us to build or did we build something which we assume the customer asked and product management is all about did you build the product that your customers love? It has aspects on deep understanding of the customer that uses the product, deep understanding of the product data, deep understanding of the market which has an impact on the product outcomes and deep understanding of the competition. And all those aspects really excited me and that's why I jumped into the product management space. I will be talking about digital transformation and customer centricity, how to keep the customer at the center of the ecosystem as we work on digital transformation initiatives. I had the opportunity to work on two digital transformation products in my existing and earlier product roles. One of the products which we built was the largest digital transformation initiatives in the company. And it has given us a lot of opportunities to make a difference in our customers' lives by giving them a revolutionary experience and provided differentiated products which they use frequently. So really what is digital transformation? It is a commonly used buzzword which sounds pretty cool. In simplest terms, digital transformation is a use of technology, any technology that helps improve your business and overall improve the revenue for the company. It is nothing but business transformation using technology as a driver. And it includes modernizing technology or improving existing technology to improve customer experiences, be more efficient, nimble and effective in the marketplace. Digital transformation can mean different things to different people. How do we change the way business works? And ask customers are at the center of our business and ecosystem. How do we improve the lives of a customer and deliver impactful customer experiences using value-added features as we embark on this journey? If you see how digital we are, the world population is around 7.6 billion out of which we have 4 billion active internet users, around 5.1 billion unique mobile users, around 3.5 billion social media accounts. And what is more interesting is post-COVID pandemic, there has been an addition of a billion users over the past one year. All this is the outcome of digital transformation. So it's very important to drive and improve customer journeys and experiences across the ecosystem and make a positive impact on our customer's life as we do digital transformation. So why do we need digital transformation? The first thing is enhanced customer data collection. We have customer data segregated across the ecosystem in the organization. It is because over time platforms are built, data is scattered across platforms. It is important to collect data, have data domains, establish relationships to slice and dice the data for meaningful insights. The second thing is improving the customer experience and customer centricity. Post-pandemic, the e-commerce space is booming with astronomical growth. The retail global e-commerce market has grown from $4.2 trillion in 2020 to a projected $5.7 trillion by the end of 2022 and almost $7.3 trillion by the end of 2025. You can see that's astronomical growth. And so we really need to improve the customer experiences, the customer centricity, taking it to account such a huge growth. The third thing is improve data-driven customer insights. Drive decisions for customers based on data related to your behaviors and patterns. For example, in our reward ecosystem, we collected data for our customers and based on insights on customer behaviors, we targeted customers and segmented customer for certain promotions and offers. That's behavior-based marketing. Number four is increased customer engagement. Now, during the e-commerce checkout journey, so how do you keep your customers engaged? Positive engagement will lead to more revenue. And last but not least, is increasing in the revenue and savings. What generally happens in digital transformation is many a times, the focus is on modernizing the platform and stack and we as product leaders need to take the responsibility to keep our customers in the center of everything we do and take these opportunities to focus on improving customer experiences. Next, we move to digital transformation and customer experience. Now, digital transformation is forcing companies to change their business models and adapt to the new market reality. And what is more interesting about it, this is, it is not the companies that are driving this change. Instead, this change is being driven by the customers themselves. I have been through two digital transformation journeys, one of which was the largest in the company and transformed the rewards experience for our customers and gave them a revolutionary experience to earn and redeem rewards. And the second one was to reimagine our e-commerce checkout for a digital payment product. I think the first and foremost step starts with having a clear product strategy. What exactly is a clear product strategy? Where are we today? Where do we want to be tomorrow? And what are we going to do to get there? Having a clear and transparent product strategy really helps a long way in improving customer experiences. The second thing is VOC, which is voice of customer. Evaluate the existing customer journeys on the platform. And the first step is getting feedback from the customers, interacting and engaging with customers for feedback. And most importantly, understanding the main points in the existing customer journeys. You can get feedback from different sources, right? Like customer care, float on surveys, social media, Twitter, and also through different sources like A, B, N, A, B, and A, B, N testing and multivariant testing, where you can get some feedback from them about your existing UI UX and how we can improve the UI UX. And then design journeys, which are improved consistent, global and frictionless. Get feedback from customers to measure the success after you've done the transformation. In one of our surveys, 40% of the customer responded, saying that custom experience is their top priority for digital transformation. The third thing is reimagining the customer experience. After getting feedback from our customers, empathy mapping or customer experience mapping comes in here as a critical tool for ensuring your team focus entirely on the customer in the way they carry out their responsibilities. And every aspect of your digital properties, design and functionality must take a tool from a robust understanding of your target customers. But we need to get that level of customer knowledge from customer data that we collected from VOC voice of customer before you can design and deliver and maintain the perfect customer experience. And empathy is a potent attribute of a customer experience design. Without empathy, you won't be able to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. You won't be able to see what they see, feel what they feel and process the experiences the same way that they do. When you make empathy central in this regard, many benefits come with it. For one, it deepens your understanding of the customer. The comprehension eliminates any form of guesswork, not just in the product that you're creating for them, but also in how you create that product. The next thing is after reimagining the customer experience, it's important we personalize the customer experience based on historic data that we have for our customers. And running some machine learning algorithms to understand the trend for a cluster of customers. In our case, we used some non-supervised algorithms to determine the cluster of customers who want certain preferences or offers. So for example, if a customer is redeeming rewards on Amazon, it's worthwhile to consider giving them reward redemption offers and personalize that whole experience for them, right? And extend the customer experiences than to seamless omni-channel experiences like whether it's desktop, whether it's mobile web, whether it's mobile app and so on, and give the transparent experience on our channels. Just wanted to talk about a case study, I mean, one of the things that we did to improve the customer experience on e-commerce checkout. Now, our payment product is designed one of our payment products is designed to support the e-commerce checkout authentication journey with some value ads. And you observe that there were a lot of complaints around friction in the journey in one of the markets with customers abandoning the cart. And we collected data around customer complaints found that they were facing a lot of friction since they were asked additional authentication and then showing them value ads which was causing a lot of friction. And as a result, there were cart abandonments with revenue impact. And every cart abandonment leads to revenue impact because you miss the window of that opportunity. And remember the customer's patience and attention of span in e-commerce transaction is honestly not more than 30 to 45 seconds. In that period of time, it's important to give them a fabulous experience. If you miss that window of opportunity, you miss the revenue, right? So how do we improve the customer journey? The first thing is we collected data around abandonment rate and found that the rate was very high, you know, 3.9%. We re-imagined the customer experience by redesigning the experience and the UI UX to give them a fictional journey. How did we do that? We collected preferences up front for certain value ads which made the journey, check out journey faster. And as a result, we improve revenue figures which was lost earlier due to friction. So after we improve the journey, when we look at the abandonment rate, it reduced to around 2.1% and that lost revenue which we lost, we gained that much revenue, right? And we are still improving it, right? We are still trying to figure out how can we make it more frictionless? How can we reduce more abandonment, card abandonment rates? Next, we'll talk about digital transformation and customer centricity. As you know, Amix is not only a credit card company but it has various lines of business ranging from the recently launched digital banking for business and consumers, personal loans, cross-border payments, to name a few payment instruments for our customers. An example of customer centricity that comes to my mind is when we reimagined our global rewards experience, our vision was to bring all the customer relationships irrespective of the payment instrument card or non-card and give a one-reward experience which was transformational, impactful and revolutionary. So if you see in this slide, you have one view for rewards for our customers keeping payment instruments really transparent and closely engaging with them to show them their relationships of reward balances and how they earn the balances and so on. So it's very important to keep the customer at the center of everything we do and provide them with a differentiated and more improved customer experience as we do digital transformation. Now, how do we fare? Product metrics, how will you measure the product success after a digital transformation exercise, right? One of the sample that I've shown here is before and after, right? And so for example, if you have 29 customer journeys before you did this exercise versus now you have 13 customer journeys. But again, that does not guarantee that because you reduce the number of customer journeys, your customer experience actually improved, right? So these are the sample metrics on the right side if you see showing what are some of the sample metrics that you should be collecting before and after. Number of successful checkout transactions, number of failed checkout transactions, the card abandonment rate, the take-up rate. Take-up rate is nothing but whether the customer actually took the value add which you're showing on the checkout screen or not. Customer effective score, which is called CES. CES is how much effort customers need to put to complete an experience or a journey. Customer CSAT, which is Customer Satisfaction Index, how happy or unhappy your customers are using your product. This can be using a variety of surveys over time or before and after the journeys. Retention, customer retention rate, but the rate at which the customers are using your product over time, active transactions. Customer churn rate, the rate at which customers are opting out and not using the product, no active transaction for the customers. And obviously the revenue impacted. That's one of the most important metrics, right? Do you gain revenue because you improve the customer journeys? Some of the lessons that I've learned in the journey and I continue to learn on a daily basis, right? Customer empathy, make an effort to listen to the customer. Empathy is go in the sugar of the customer and feel the pain or happiness. What if it was you using the product as you may be doing every day? Are you experiencing joy? Are you experiencing frustration? Try to empathize with the customer. Be advocate for the customer. You may get input saying that this is good for the customer and the feedback that you've got from your customers. But it's important to be advocates and actually take that feedback very seriously. Focus not only reimagining platforms but reimagining the experience too. Always ask the why, why and why as a product manager. Be very curious, try to dig deep and try to get to the bottom by asking the why, why, why question. And clarify the what and also the why. When you talk to the stakeholders as a product manager it's very important for you to clarify not only the what, especially to the engineering teams but give them a background of why you need to do certain things. Why you need this capability or a feature? What is the reason? Champion and encourage behavior-driven design use cases. It's very important to have clear and concise behavior-driven design use cases for acceptance criteria. Use data to drive and influence product decisions. This is huge. You really need the historic data or data to understand how the trends are from all aspects. And last but not trust, but trust and verify it. I think these are the some of the lessons that I learned as a product leader. And I would like to thank a product school for giving me this opportunity. Please feel free to connect to me on the rate of Niranjan Dravid at LinkedIn and my email niranjan.dravid.gmail.com. Thank you and have a great day.