The Latin word for star is stella. It carries the connotation of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, of trying to reach towards something higher.
Closer to the ground, we have the customer who sits at the centre of all the work we do. Brands universally aspire to Companies universally aspire to provide a premium offering and a memorable brand experience to delight their customers, surpass expectations, and establish new standards of performance and value that then opens a path to competitive market dominance as opposed to just advantage or parity. It’s why we at BORN have named this framework Stella. Placing a “5-star” customer experience at the heart of our philosophy, Stella seeks to elevate customer engagement and conversion across connected channels.
At the very top, we have a segmented method to deliver Human Centered Design aka The Experience. This experience is not limited to customers – it touches suppliers, employees, practitioners, communities and so on.
In our work with landmark global brands, we have found common ground in the ways they operate. Putting our perspectives together with our deep experience with studying customer behaviour and how they interact with an enterprise’s books of record, we have come up with a strategic framework for us – and our clients – to serve as a lens to see this entire process through.
To create a proper customer experience, we believe one has to consider three things:
Define and deliver the strategy as Brand Experience (BX)
Express the Brand Experience as relevant by channel – Behavioral Experience (BE) as well as monitor/study behavioral characteristics
Create one version of the truth in an aggregated book of record (BR) which will be used to inform and iteratively improve the Brand Experience, with the ultimate goal of a singular Brand Experience for each end-user
In the first layer of Stella, brand experience, BORN’s offerings such as creative design, content production, systems integration and data science create a holistic set of conditions that addresses and influences how a customer might view a brand.
This layer deals with 4 experiences – how to attract a customer (Design/Acquisition), interact with one (Content/UX), then transact (Commerce) leading to the last phase which pertains to feedback or react (e.g. Social, Chat, email). By covering these 4 phases BORN’s offerings seek to create the ultimate immersive and singular brand experience for its customers.
The considerations our team may take at this step include looking at first-party data, and the segmentation of visitors according to various criteria, together resulting in defined personas and journeys for each. These personas are then served through user interfaces and experiences, highly tailored to fit the audience, as well as customized and curated content. At the end of a journey, the goal may be to reward customers for their loyalty and advocacy, so that they are motivated to become ambassadors of the brand.
Stella’s second layer, that of behavioral experience, looks at the ways people engage and transact in their daily lives – through their interactions with traditional channels such as retail stores, events, voice, print, broadcast, radio, displays, packaging, mail and through more modern channels such as web, mobile, social, voice, gaming, and iOT appliances. The goal is to offer a seamless, connected experience through all these channels, whether owned by the client or run by someone else.
The multiple channels are optimized to attract an audience, interact with visitors, transact with them and react to their needs, in a manner that is personalized and offers a frictionless path to purchase and continued advocacy.
Stella‘s data layer then connects the dots between the integration and interaction of the first two layers with an enterprise’s underlying books of record.
The books of record include the data captured by the front office using the CRM system, the key tool of any client-centric organization geared towards improving relationships.
In addition to this is the back-office order orchestration between channels including an OMS that handles sourcing, allocations, returns and fulfilment.
The way an organization handles order to cash, procure to pay, and its financial metrics through an ERP system, which then defines many essential metrics of an organization’s success– how stable its financials are, how satisfied its customers are and how efficient is its supply chain.
Together with data science tools such as analytics, insight and cognition, Stella provides an aggregated book of record that combines all the information.
As a result, organizations, on their part, will have as Eric Gutoski, Chief Strategy Officer, BORN, put it, an “actionable 360-degree view of the customer and the investments needed to drive their engagement.”
Taken together, all three make up customer experience. Here’s our shorthand for it:
CX = Bx+Be+Br
With Stella, Brand eXperience, Behavioral Experience and the Books of Record work together seamlessly to deliver what BORN CEO Dilip Keshu calls “an immersive, memorable and thoughtful experiences” for users.
All in all, the experience promises to be stellar.
