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

Hi there.

Sure. I'm the Senior Vice President of Global Technical Services for OpenText, and 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, and the Innovation Tour took us to 16 cities across the globe. We were really getting out and talking to our customers about our message: transforming into digital organizations. We're talking about simplify, transform, and accelerate across the world, really helping businesses take the complexity out of their organizations and their dealings with customers. When we're looking at customer experience, one of the things people are telling us is they're trying to make things simpler for the customers, to get that simplified experience, take that effort out of dealing with organizations. The digital-first world really leads into that simpler, easier customer experience. If you think of the things you do in your consumer life, you check into a hotel or pick something up on the iTunes Store, it's a simple experience. That's what businesses are trying to take into the B2B world as well, to take the effort out of doing business with each other. That's really where OpenText can help out, and it's also where we've seen a lot of effort and focus. If you look at the customer experience world, whether it's websites, e-commerce, business services, it's really about taking the complexity of the business and transforming all that is paper-based or complex into a digital transaction. That's what our customers are telling us they're focused on: getting to those simpler digital transactions and ultimately a more straightforward organization.

Exactly. As we see the Millennials come into the workforce, these are people born in the digital age, and they expect things to be straightforward and simple. As Millennials come into the workforce, they bring that consumer focus and that simplified user experience. We don't expect that people will wait months or years to install software projects now. People are looking to get things done like that consumer experience: I want to click a button, I want it there, and I want to be transacting right away. When you look at the change that's come across the industry in the last few years, you used to think you'd sit down and start building a program, hire 100 people, go through a couple rounds of venture capital, and maybe a year and a half later you'd have a product out there. Now you sit down, spend 100 bucks, do some coding, you've got an app up on the App Store, and within weeks you've got thousands of customers pulling it down and using it. It's a much different world we're living in, and we expect this to continue to accelerate as we move into 2020. As people continue to transform into digital, it's just going to get faster and faster. So yes, to answer your question, absolutely we expect and we know that people are bringing their experience from the consumer world into the business world nowadays, and it's transforming the businesses.

It is a big challenge, and it's a challenge for a number of reasons. We interact with our customers in many different ways, whether it's on our websites, web stores, online stores, or through our billing departments. We're interacting with our customers in a number of ways, and many of these systems aren't connected. You have lots of insight in various different places. You might have a CRM system that contains all your sales data, but it might not contain all your customer experience data from your website or what you're picking up from your support organization or your billing systems. Those things in many organizations aren't really all that interconnected. But we are starting to see people bring these things together, to bring the various bits of interaction they're having with their customers together and start to analyze that. We do it at OpenText ourselves. We have a method for bringing these together, and we're really starting to gain some really good insights from bringing the different disparate pieces of data together and then reporting them out in various different ways to different departments. The ability to do that in an ad hoc manner and give a specific department, if I'm looking at a customer service issue, I can not only see the issue but also see what the customer purchased and bring that together to get one whole view. But it is something that companies are still struggling with and trying to expand that capability.

I think you hit it right, you hit all of them. As much as we want to work together, there are still silos in companies. You have different organizations focused on getting their daily tasks done, and they may not have the full 360 view; they may have the blinders on and just go straight down their track. So there's a bit of that. There's the complexity in the different systems that are employed, and all those things built together make it slightly difficult to get a unified view. It's not impossible. I think there's a lot of technology out there today that takes advantage of the power of the computers we have and the processing power, and can start to go through and analyze big data. We have the power now to pull that data together, do the analytics, pull the nuggets of information out, and create great reports and have a good view. But yeah, there are a lot of 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 come up with business results. That's the most important part. The process that goes around it, there are all kinds of things that go around the big data in order to make it useful. You can have all the data in the world, but if you don't have the process and the business goals to pull it together, it's just the next bright shiny thing. But to be honest, we look at it and think the capabilities we can deliver nowadays with the processing power and the software we have can really do some astonishing things. We have a customer using our analytics software to analyze the passengers on their transit system, building out the flows of the buses and schedules. When you start to look at the result you can get by looking at the information coming in from a citywide transit system and using that data to reschedule the buses, it's amazing. We have another customer going through the logs on their websites, viewing transactions and what people are doing, which services they're subscribing to, and it gives their marketing team a view of the customer that day. They know who the customers are and exactly what they're doing, and it allows them to adjust and manage the business in a different way. They pull system information from multiple systems into a Hadoop system and analyze it out of there. So there's quite an opportunity here.

I agree. The key thing is thinking of the business and driving the business results. I do agree that big data is a bit overhyped. It's not the be-all and end-all. The be-all and end-all is the business result you're able to derive from pulling that data together, getting the analytics, and massaging the data into a report that becomes useful for the business. That's really getting down to what the customers are doing at the end of the day.

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 offices in all the major Scandinavian cities and a dominant position in car financing. They have 300,000 financed vehicles in their portfolio and provide IT financing, vehicle fleet management, and factoring to the public sector. It's a large organization with a number of customers, and they were looking to expand their application to provide more information to the businesses and provide customers with up-to-date statistics and help track correlated costs. It's not so much about a company getting an overall view of their customers, but helping their customers understand their expenses, which in turn helps the organization. DNB had a car configurator application for its auto leasing business, allowing new and existing clients to choose and configure a car and obtain quotes online. They wanted to provide an add-on for that: reports about the usage of the vehicles to help control costs. Working with OpenText, they pulled a BIRT analytics solution together that helped their customers keep track of all their car-related costs and provide up-to-date reports on things like fuel usage, cost, mileage, damage reports, and various things, all on an ad hoc basis. So you're able to give customers the ability to look at their assets, see exactly where they are, what the costs are, and control that cost.

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned inside-out. There's an interesting book put out by Forrester, not to name drop, but it's called 'Outside In.' It encourages you, when thinking of customer experience, to take that outside-in view of your organization. As a customer, how do you interact with your company? It really does add some enlightening thoughts when you start to consider things in that manner. This is one of those cases. When you take that and back to your point, taking that overall 360-degree view of the customer, I think it really starts to take on an interesting perspective. If you look at aircraft engines, for example, many modern aircraft engines are able to report back on a frequent basis their operating statistics and metrics, which goes into a database. It really helps the manufacturing organization monitor and maintain those engines, but at the same time, it gives you the capability to suggest preventative maintenance and services to the customers. We see the same thing in farm implementation, where technology exists to allow tractors or farm implements working in the fields to transmit data about position, soil conditions, and those types of things back to organizations. They store the data, monitor it, and are able to report against it. So the view of the customer becomes more than just the transactions where they bought a piece of farm equipment or a jet engine; it becomes an ongoing view of the customer.

Exactly. It's not about that immediate sale or those initial transactions; it's the long-term usage. We're starting to see those types of things coming into software as well. On consumer sites particularly, there are usage statistics and functionality. As organizations monitor which pieces of software are getting the most use, they're able to focus their efforts on improving those and determining why other pieces aren't being used. This ongoing 360-degree view of the customer is really allowing organizations to better serve their customers long term, and ultimately retain customers and derive more revenue from them by continuing to monitor and analyze usage patterns and buying trends.

I think the most important thing when you're looking at simplify, transform, and accelerate to get a digital experience is to look at your existing processes and your existing interaction points with the customers, and model out what would be ideal. Take an outside-in view. Model the most effortless customer experience, taking out any piece of complexity. We want to invest in things that make for a more positive customer experience and get rid of things that impede it. It's really about getting down there, looking at that experience, and asking how you would want to interact if you were the customer. Making it simple, straightforward, and effortless is the goal. Obviously, we're talking a lot about the electronic and digital presence, and it's about building out that solid interaction on the front line. We're focusing here at OpenText on transforming our support organization into a digital organization. It takes a good level of cross-organizational collaboration, working closely with our IT, marketing, and sales teams to make sure we're building out that world-leading presence. But it's about taking out the effort and making an effortless experience for the customer. Think of the things that are successful today, whether it's the iTunes Store, Google Play, or Amazon.com. You go to Amazon and you can buy pretty much anything you want without much effort. That's the key. You need to design it to be an effortless experience. Then it's about building in the logical next steps for your customer experience. Getting the presence there is the first step. Then the transform part: once you have that front end, you can start to transform the organization to support it. You need different functions and capabilities. If you're looking at a support organization, it's no longer about answering every single question. You want to create knowledge so that it's out there in the digital world. When a customer comes in, the first thing they do is a search, they find a result, and they're perfectly happy. That is much better than having to wait to talk to somebody and explain the whole situation all over again. If you can come in, search, find your result, and be off and gone, that's an ideal customer experience.

I'm split, to be honest. I think it's very important that the CEO be behind the initiative. As with any initiative in an organization, if the CEO mandates it, something will happen in most organizations. But I really believe that as well as the CEO mandate, there has to be a good belief and a cultural drive in the organization to move in that direction. Whether it's digital transformation or a CX initiative, I believe the organization really needs to be focused on making that thing successful and needs to believe in the end goal. So sure, if the CEO mandates it, I would expect it would happen. But in order to make it truly successful, to make it just that little bit better, the organization needs to be truly bought in.

Exactly. You can get the dictate from the CEO's office and you will have a better customer experience, sure. People will focus on customer experience. But in order to make it truly successful, I believe you need to build that cultural drive in the organization to want to be better, to want to have that best customer experience. Organizations are made up of thousands of people, and everybody needs to be focused on a few key things. We're focused on improving our customer experience, and it's something that you talk to people in the organization and they understand what we're trying to do and how we want to get there. People are bought in. It's absolutely key to any transformation to have that culture that can turn the dial up in one direction or the other to make sure people are following along and are bought in.

Absolutely. I would love to shamelessly plug OpenText Analytics. We talked about customer experience here, and obviously I'm a big fan of customer experience. But 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 OpenText Analytics products to help customers understand and drive business results quicker. Whether it's information flowing through on a daily basis that you want to look at relatively live, or something stored in databases or different cloud applications, we have the capability to pull all that together and provide an easy and fast way of providing great reports to the various pieces in any business.

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