Five ways Silicon Valley is reinventing CX

Silicon Valley is the world's hotbed for technological innovation and many tech start-ups and giants alike have been gaining attention for the ways that they are transforming the customer experience.

Here, CX Network looks at five ways Silicon Valley is reinventing CX.

Giving customers the power

With an enviable NPS score of 96, Tesla Motors is well-known for being a leader in CX excellence and credits this to actioning VOC insights. While this mostly results in vehicle refinements and updates, it has also seen a network of EV charging points spring up across the world.

When customers complained about the difficulty of finding charging stations, in Q3 of 2021 Tesla committed to tripling the size its supercharger network within two years.

When customers told Tesla that wait times for charging a vehicle were too long, they implemented a system that allows drivers to swap out their battery for a fully charged one in 90 seconds.

Bringing conversational intelligence to video calls

Attaining insights from sales calls to determine the efficacy of sales strategies or attain a deeper understanding of what customers are looking for has long been a standard practice. Zoom has taken this a step further with its new product Zoom IQ for Sales, a conversational intelligence add-on for Zoom meetings.

The add-on applies AI to analyze conversations with customers, constantly observing for possible pain points to boost CX, while also giving actionable feedback to support EX, by providing opportunities to improve selling skills for team members at all levels.

The insights also help with highlighting positive sales calls, so that team members can be rewarded and recognized, and successful approaches can be spotlighted across the business.

From data to “consumer science”

As mentioned above, many brands collect data from customer interactions to offer personalized advertising, while other businesses use data to tailor their services to individual customers.

This has been a major focus for Netflix, which has built its business on personalized recommendations for advert-free films and shows. In fact, founder Reed Hastings has spoken at length about how “consumer science” has driven the streaming giant’s CX successes – and its commitment to ad-free streaming.

At Netflix, consumer science employs traditional scientific methodology to form and test hypotheses and determine what will work best for its customers.

It has seen Netflix turn to focus groups, usability sessions, one-on-ones and demographic or cancel surveys, followed by A/B testing for the assumptions that are drawn from these sessions. And it could soon turn the Netflix business model on its head – Netflix is now forming a plan to introduce subscription tiers that do include adverts, as consumers look for cheaper options.

Personalization with in-built privacy

In recent years, many of us have been surprised by the extent to which businesses collect and store our personal data to provide us with targeted ads. The primary issue that many customers have had with this is that it feels like an infringement on our personal privacy, no matter how well targeted the ads are.

According to Dan Levy, vice-president of ads and business products at Facebook, the social media giant is now taking steps to show that you do not need to sacrifice on customer privacy to offer personalization. The business is developing privacy-enhancing technologies which allow for personalized ads while minimizing the amount of personal information that needs to be processed or stored.

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Using behavioral science to remove friction

Despite being one of the biggest innovators in food delivery and ridesharing, Uber faced a significant challenge in figuring out how to make services safer and easier for customers during the Covid-19 pandemic. As Maisie Lam, head of customer experience for Uber in Australia and New Zealand told Forbes, the solution to this was removing friction from the customer experience:

“A negative peak or an end to an experience can completely bias a customer’s judgement. It means you need to know where in your users’ experience there is negative friction, or even positive peaks and resolutions,” Lam said.

To accomplish this, Uber applied behavioral science methodologies to remove bias in the assessment of customer interactions and ensure that any insights drawn were accurate. For example, a Netflix employee might deem a customer interaction positive based on their experience of previous ones, but the customer may see the interaction in an entirely different way.

By using scientific methodology to remove bias from the assessment of these interactions, the business was more easily able to identify the areas where friction was present in the customer experience.