Using psychographics to influence customer behavior

Ahead of her session at CXN Live: CX Trends and Predictions 2021, Millie Gillon, MD and global head of CX at Standard Chartered Bank, shares with CX Network about her career so far.

Born and raised in New York City, and Millie Gillon grew up in financial services out of high school through a scholarship program at JPMorgan, where she learned about both the consumer side of the banking as well as investment banking, fixed income derivatives and trading.

She worked at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and American Express before finally returning to JPMorgan Chase.

She says: “[I was] focused on digital product innovation, specifically marrying the value proposition and the strong relationships with their large organizations and then marrying that with their individual consumers, starting with the card portfolio. Essentially trying to leverage the benefits from these large relationships, and then giving those benefits to individual customers to try and deepen the relationship.”

In her next position at Prudential she led the product innovation for individual life insurance, creating new business models, incorporating technology and data and targeting Millennials rather than the traditional target segments of Baby Boomers and Gen X. Gillon introduced design thinking and the importance of innovation and created the first innovation lab focused both on short-term and long-term bets.

Following this, she took a role at Mastercard, helping solve business problems by using design thinking before becoming global head of client experience at Standard Chartered.

She says: “Over the past two years, I have been focused on increasing NPS and decreasing the complaints volume by finding thematic issues and addressing the root cause. I used the capacity savings to pivot towards being design thinkers, deep insights researchers and process improvement managers.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 she became stuck in New York, trying to get approval to return to Singapore for six months. During this period, she taught her global team about design thinking across six time zones, allowing them to practice it in countries to lead the CX transformation of the company at the market level.

In 2021, her focus has been on optimizing the business, but also to create capabilities, and lead design thinking initiatives to help to differentiate the organization, its solutions and offerings so that it can pivot towards more disruptive and innovative focus.

What is psychographics?

When discussing her work with psychographics to influence customer behavior, Gillon stresses that they are not to be confused with demographics.

“While demographics give some data points around a person, psychographics are much more enriched information bytes. How they are utilized also differs a lot. Demographics are largely quantitative in nature, while psychographics are qualitative in nature. They describe traits of humans on psychological attributes,” she says.

Psychographics can be applied to gain a better understanding of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

She continues: “Traditionally, demographics were utilized to study customer behavior and create targeted campaigns and products. However, with the globalization and frequent movement of people, demographics are increasingly becoming ineffective. Psychographics provide a much sharper and precise indicator of customer behavioral trends.”