Towards a unified view of the customer - Interview with James McGourlay of OpenText

Sure. I'm the Senior Vice President of Global Technical Services for OpenText. OpenText is the leading provider of enterprise information management technology and services. We help customers transform their organizations into digital-first organizations.

Yeah, we did. We just came off the Innovation Tour, which took us to 16 cities across the globe. We were getting out and talking to our customers about transforming into digital organizations, simplifying, and accelerating. People are telling us they're trying to make things simpler for customers, take the effort out of dealing with organizations. The digital-first world leads to a simpler customer experience. Businesses are trying to bring that consumer simplicity into the B2B world. OpenText can help with that. We've seen a lot of focus on customer experience, whether websites, e-commerce, or managed services. It's about transforming paper-based or complex processes into digital transactions. That's what our customers are focused on: simpler digital transactions and a more straightforward organization.

Exactly. As we see Millennials come into the workforce, they're born in the digital age and expect things to be straightforward and simple. They bring that consumer focus and simplified user experience. People don't expect to wait months or years for software projects; they want to click a button and transact right away. The industry has changed: you used to hire 100 people, go through venture capital, and a year and a half later have a product. Now you can sit down, spend $100, do some coding, and have an app on the App Store within weeks with thousands of customers. It's a much different world, and it's going to continue to accelerate as we move into 2020. People are bringing their consumer experience into the business world, transforming businesses.

I mean it is a big challenge for a number of reasons. We interact with customers in many different ways: websites, web stores, billing departments, etc. Many of these systems aren't connected. You might have a CRM system with sales data but not customer experience data from your website or support organization. Those things in many organizations aren't interconnected. But we are starting to see people bring these together and analyze them. At OpenText, we have a method for bringing disparate pieces of data together and reporting them out to different departments. For example, if I'm looking at a customer service issue, I can also see what the customer purchased and get one whole view. But it is something companies are still struggling with and trying to expand.

I think you hit it right, you hit all of them. There are still silos in companies. Different organizations are focused on their daily tasks and may not have the full 360 view. There's complexity in the different systems employed. All those things together make it difficult to get a unified view. It's not impossible. There's a lot of technology today that takes advantage of processing power to pull data together, do analytics, and extract nuggets of information. But there are many things that make it difficult at first glance.

Well, yeah. As I said, we look at big data or data as the same thing. Data is just data, there's a lot of it. But to your point, it's not the end result. What we want is to pull together the business and the information to provide analytics and business results. The process around big data is what makes it useful. You can have all the data in the world but without the process and business goals, it's just the next bright shiny thing. But the capabilities we can deliver nowadays with processing power and software can do astonishing things. For example, we have customers using our analytics software to analyze passengers on a transit system to build bus schedules. Another customer analyzes website logs to see which services are up or down and adjust their business. They pull system information from multiple systems into Hadoop and analyze it. There's quite an opportunity.

Yeah, DNB Bank Group in Norway, Scandinavia's second largest bank. Its subsidiary DNB Finance is one of the largest finance companies in the Nordic region, with a dominant position in car financing, 300,000 vehicles in portfolio. They provide IT financing, vehicle fleet management, and factoring to the public sector. They were looking to expand their application to provide more information to businesses and customers with up-to-date statistics and help track correlated costs. They had a car configurator for auto leasing, allowing clients to choose and configure a car and obtain quotes online. They wanted to add a reporting add-on for vehicle usage and cost control. Working with OpenText, they pulled together a business analytics solution that helps their customers keep track of all car-related costs: fuel usage, cost, mileage, damage reports, etc., on an ad hoc basis. So customers can look at their assets and control costs. It's an outside-in view, as described in the book 'Outside In' by Forrester. Taking that 360-degree view of the customer, you can look at aircraft engines that report operating statistics, or farm equipment that transmits data about position and soil conditions. It becomes more than just transactions; it's about the long-term usage and relationship. Organizations can better serve customers, retain them, and derive more revenue by monitoring usage patterns and buying trends.

So I think the most important thing when looking at simplify, transform, and accelerate to get a digital experience is to look at your existing processes and interaction points with customers and model out what would be ideal from an outside-in view. How do you model the most effortless customer experience? Take out any piece of complexity. Invest in things that make for a positive customer experience and remove things that impede it. It's about getting down there, looking at that experience, and making it simple, straightforward, and effortless. Build out a solid digital presence on the front line. At OpenText, we are transforming our support organization into a digital organization. It requires cross-organizational collaboration with IT, marketing, and sales. It's about taking out the effort and making an effortless experience. Think of successful examples like iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon: easy to use. Design it to be effortless. Then build in the logical next steps for the customer experience. Once you have that front end, you can start to transform the organization to support it. For a support organization, it's no longer answering every question; it's creating knowledge so customers can search and find results themselves. That's an ideal customer experience.

Well, I'm split to be honest. It's very important that the CEO is behind the initiative. If the CEO mandates it, something will happen in most organizations. But as well as the CEO mandate, there has to be a good belief and cultural drive in the organization to move in that direction. Whether it's digital transformation or a CX initiative, the organization needs to be focused on making it successful and believe in the end goal. The CEO mandates it, and I would expect it to happen, but to make it truly successful, the organization needs to be truly bought in. It can't just be a dictate from the CEO's office; it has to be something everybody buys into. You can get a dictate and have a better customer experience, but to make it truly successful, you need to build that cultural drive. Organizations are made up of thousands of people, and everybody needs to be focused on a few key things. At OpenText, we are focused on improving our customer experience, and people understand what we're trying to do and are bought in. That culture is key to any transformation.

Absolutely. I would love to shamelessly plug OpenText Analytics. We talked about customer experience, and I'm a big fan of that. As organizations start to get a hold of data and realize the potential of reviewing what they have, I think OpenText is positioned with our analytics products to help customers understand and drive business results quicker. Whether it's information flowing on a daily basis that you want to look at live, or data stored in databases or cloud applications, we have the capability to pull it all together and provide an easy and fast way of providing great reports to various parts of the business.

Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure. Anytime.