"In the history of IBM and Singapore, over the last 66 years, one of the shared values has been in our commitment to trust. This belief of trust is in all relationships. And today we shift that discussion of trust to trust in data," said Brenda Harvey, incoming IBM Asia Pacific head while introducing the results.
"The use of data and sharing of data and trusting interesting data goes beyond technology like cloud, AI, Blockchain, although we believe that's really, really important. It really is about culture, and people, and skills."
Michelle Peluso IBM Senior VP Digital Sales and CMO, introduced the three main findings of the IBM C-Suite Study 2019:
- How to win consumers' trust
- The human-technology partnership
- Data and trust in an ecosystem
According to Peluso, increasingly-sophisticated ecosystems require an incredibly powerful approach to understanding data. She noted that there is a paradox with data. Consumers demand and expect a personalised experience, which requires vendors to possess data about them. At the same time, consumers are divided on whether they can trust that whoever has their data is managing it in a way that is in their best interests.
She pointed out a consumer paradox where consumers expect brands to know everything about their history when they are shopping online or contacting the brand. "(They) expect personalised recommendations based on their geography, their interests, what they've done with you in the past.
"And yet, there's also this growing divide, where consumers are increasingly worried about 'if I give my data over (to the brand) can I trust that the person on the other end of that relationship is actually doing things are in my best interest," she explained. "So we have this burgeoning paradox emerging."
Peluso said the best brands respond to this paradox with transparency, which in turn encourages consumers to be more open. She said, "Great brands are getting more and more sophisticated, and frankly, simplifying the way they talk about how their customers data is (used)...we see great brands are really leading the forefront of providing transparency."
Reciprocity, giving customers something they value in return for their data, is another solution, Peluso said. She spoke of one of the world's largest pharmacy chains, whose customers were reluctant to hand over their mobile numbers initially. Once the pharmacy reframed the request in terms of being able to text customers when their prescriptions were ready, customers were more than happy to do so.
“Takeup rates soared through the roof,” Peluso said. "This idea of earning reciprocity and really making sure that you're giving something back to the consumer providing you with additional information becomes more and more important," she said.
Data sharing goes hand in hand with accountability - how customer data is being used, shared and compliant with standards, she added. The question is how to turn that into an advantage and building a trusted brand. “Data standards and governance have to be owned by your company,” she said.
Human-technology partnerships
The human/tech partnership is remade by data, artificial intelligence (AI), and new connections between people, skills and culture to change the way we work. Peluso gave the example of the classic call centre: a thousand people having individual conversations with clients. In the contact centre of the future, banks of people speaking to customers one-to-one will no longer exist.
"You walk into a call centre of the future, and I've been able to go through some of these with our clients, and you see something entirely different. You see teams of 10. You see teams of 10 agents who are sitting there monitoring 1,000 or so chatbots," she said.
"Time is all of a sudden asynchronous. The consumer starts a conversation in chat, stops to make dinner for children or to help the kids with homework or do something really critical at work, and then continues the conversation. These 10 agents are doing very different jobs, they're monitoring those thousands of chatbots to determine whether the (conversation) is going off the rails and consumers getting frustrated."
The human touch is still needed to determine frustration levels and retrain the chatbots. Meanwhile, agents can focus on higher-value activities, Peluso said. "We're really refocusing individual agent time on a higher value services like sales and personalisation," she concluded.
Data and trust in an ecosystem
"Executives have to think about data in an ecosystem environment. It is no longer the case that I interact only with my customer," she said. AI could be useful in many applications as they are not biased, Peluso shared, but transparency is needed. "You have to be able to understand how these algorithms produce the results you see," she said.
Underpinning it all is the hybrid cloud. "This idea of making sure you have the right hybrid cloud infrastructure, so that you can analyse data wherever that data resides and form important conclusions for your company, becomes critical. There's no one strategy here that's not tied to a really smart thoughtful hybrid cloud infrastructure," she said.
*Conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) in cooperation with Oxford Economics, the 20th edition of IBM’s bi-annual Build Your Trust Advantage report polled nearly 13,500 C-level executives who oversee leading brands across 98 countries and 20 industries.
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