Cementing the Mosaic of customer experience with Experian

Experian is a global information services company that’s been going for almost 100 years now, operating on all continents. It’s a variety of different businesses focused on putting data into action from the perspective of credit for lenders and consumers, end-to-end with online credit scoring information; providing unique products in the digital fraud space; and helping clients turn their customer data into real actions and insights in the marketing solution space for predictive modelling. If you have 40-minutes to set aside, kick back and click play below to see what they do:

Narrowing the focus, Russell said Mosaic is one way of winning in the customer era – it’s a customer classification model that’s found its feet in 28 countries worldwide and classified over 2 billion people. That’s important because research commissioned by Experian and undertaken with Forrester Consulting across the EMEA region in August 2016 shows 75% of the South African respondents – 65 C-Suite (CXOs) and functional heads responsible for digital, risk, customer experience, IT, fraud and operations – believe traditional research models will disappear in the next five years. This speaks of the pace of change we're subjected to and why there’s greater urgency in SA around gaining those insights.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges we face is ineffective customer management due to lack of focus on their experiences with our brands, which means there's a lot of friction in the process as well as duplication of information in identifying those ideal customers. This in turn is leading to business issues like increased cost in dealing with customers, as well as in customer acquisition and higher churn, with as high as 80% unable to deliver optimised customer experiences or CX solutions.

Same consumer, different segments

This is, after all, what keeps CEOs up at night – how to retain customers and better understand them. The biggest challenge here is that the change budget is tiny but comes with a very long wish list. The process-led era is clearly over, now is the time for customer-led transformation, based on knowing who your customers are and what they want.

Experian SA MD Simon Russell © Monnas Photography.

That’s where Mosaic comes in. Think of the current consumer context: We're experiencing personalisation and better brand experiences from the likes of Apple, Uber and Airbnb and we love it – but now we expect the same level of service from other businesses. It’s time to productionise customer insights with a 360-degree view and a balanced approach to managing risk like cyber fraud without putting too much onus on the customer. If companies start optimising a digital approach with nuggets unique to them, using these customer insights means you can better design the right approach to please your customers.

Russell concluded that reverse engineering the process is an excellent way for marketers to decide which advertising media or platforms to use to target specific consumers with specific interests.

Next Riona Naidoo, head of Experian SA’s marketing solutions, specified that the key push is to get the whole business to see that the different segments they target are actually the same consumer. Getting this right will mean their online and offline experience with your brand will be more consistent as they won’t have to keep reintroducing themselves across the interaction channels.

It’s about creating a market segmentation that’s not skewed to a specific industry or group. Take Prince Charles and Ozzie Osborne, for example – they fit into the same basic demographic groupings but are very different people with very different interests.

Riona Naidoo, head of Experian SA’s marketing solutions © Monnas Photography.

Naidoo pointed out that Mosaic is tied to the global market as segmentation tool, making the effort less expensive going forward. That global market is segmented according to demographics, lifestyle, purchasing propensities and general preferences. This means census statistics, property value, research provider data sets and Experian’s own derivative measures are included. These are then all aggregated as data. For privacy, you can’t see specific identification details like names or ID numbers.

Russell added that in today’s business world the only constant is change, and that change is ever-accelerating. Building positive brand impact is about creating experiences companies love. Just look at Netflix, which didn't exist ten years ago and has effectively killed its bricks-and-mortar rivals. Apple didn't disrupt just one industry, it disrupted two and is now the largest watch manufacturer. All signs that if existing business models don't evolve, they will disappear. How are you going to evolve? Russell says the trick is to turn customer data into actions as a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works.

Naidoo concluded, “The greater the experience, the better we can create loyalty and this is a stepping stone to that single view of the customer”.

That’s the ultimate endgame – or rather, starting point. Click here for more on Experian’s Mosaic, and follow Experian on Twitter.