Optimizing the customer journey across platforms – a FLOW Summit replay

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction to the next CX frontier

Raj Ramanand (00:03):

I have the incredible pleasure of actually introducing the next panel as well. Let me take a minute to do that. So our first panel is called The Next CX Frontier. We’ve got connecting platforms across the shopper journey. I’m excited about this. For one reason, you typically have, it’s some of these large events, a chief digital officer from a large company coming in and you sort of chat, which we did last year, but this time we decided to take a completely different tack. What we decided to do was focus a little bit more on product visionaries, people who have actually done this on a daily basis, who can talk about some of the things that they’re trying to accomplish. We have an amazing panel that I’d like to call. It’s no doubt that customer experience is a big thing for this group, but when you look across the customer journey, Adobe is a massive player, 80,000 merchants and growing and leads this space. When you think about the types of issues dealing with the customer experience and how you manage that related to fraud and risk, how do you all think about that at Adobe?

Adobe’s approach to customer experience and fraud management

Jason Knell (01:08):

That’s a great question. I love this question because at Adobe our mission is to change the world through digital experiences. So we think about this a lot and we think about it outside that transaction flow as well. But when you think about it, you’re worried about things that happen before the transaction at the transaction and post-transaction, as you were saying, if you go upstream before the transaction, Adobe has a whole suite of things we’re doing to make sure you’re acquiring customers, personalizing things for them, bringing ’em through the customer journey to get them to that transaction. So that’s really important to us that once you’ve spent all that time and resource in doing that, that the transaction experience is smooth. But also pre-transaction, you have things like account takeover, you’re worried about, you have during the transaction concerns about conversions, and then post-transaction, you have things like item not received that are a concern. And for a retailer that gets really overwhelming. There’s a lot to think about and there’s a lot of friction in the shopper journey. So I think it’s really important that you build an ecosystem of partners to help you solve that problem for the customer journey.

Raj Ramanand (02:23):

Yeah, I think you set it up well in a way to think about it across that customer journey from pre to ad checkout and post. And that sort of leads to the next question, and you think about that customer journey side at Google, you guys have spent years thinking about that problem and the friction that comes with putting a lot of recapture, whether you saw that popup for many years and you’re like, Hey, I don’t want to click four different traffic lights to get there. You’ve sort of gone to version three that doesn’t do that, but how do you think about that problem at the pre-transaction level? Yeah, it’s

Google’s innovations in reducing transaction friction

Cy Khormaee (02:56):

A great question. I know we’ve all kind of failed at a stoplight or really what is the school bus? It’s the existential questions in life, but you’re right. And this is the thing we’ve heard over and over again. We’ve seen this rapidly evolving set of attacks requiring more and more sophisticated defenses, and the challenge has been enacting those without creating more friction for users. And that’s just been the constant battle that we’ve seen, especially as the attacks get more sophisticated and look at every interaction from registration to log into promotions as inlays in order to get to that payment transaction or they think it can exploit. Secondarily, we’ve seen rising attacks and things like SMS spoofing and fraud as well as carding that are attacks on the defenses themselves that cost merchants direct dollars. So those are really a couple of the big challenges we see in this space from across all of our customers as well as us as a merchant ourselves. So we’re kind of in that interesting position to see it on both sides.

Raj Ramanand (03:50):

Yeah, it’s very interesting though, and being able to do that at the point where you don’t see the friction, but you’re still managing the risk behind that has been the big innovation. That’s interesting. We’ll talk about solutions in a little bit, but if you sort of move from the sense of pre-transaction and continue down the journey, John, the checkout process is a massive component of that. And you guys at FIS have been spending a lot of time with the Worldpay and FIS components to be able to understand how do you remove friction from the checkout process. But tell us a little bit about the problems you see at that stage. Yeah,

Checkout optimization and fraud prevention at FIS

Rajpreet Shikak (04:29):

No, it’s a good point. And to play off a little bit of what Jason was saying too there, I mean what Adobe is doing is trying to make that a really great experience for the consumer. At the end of the day, we’re trying to do the same thing from a Worldpay perspective and even on the issuing side too. So FIS cuts across both. You have Worldpay, that’s the merchant processing acquiring side of our business. And then on the FIS side, we have our core banking and processing business as well. And I think I can attest to this too. Before joining Worldpay nine years ago, I worked in the telco space and we were launching a new e-commerce site and I can remember we launched it, we were trying to make it easier for customers to interact with and the first thing that we saw was we saw a sales increase three times what they were before.

(05:25):

So we’re going around, we’re high fiving each other, we think this is the best thing. 60 days later, our controller is calling me into his office and about 80% of those sales were fraudulent. They were chargebacks and we were a big company, we were a regional telco wireless prepaid provider. It was a small segment of the business for the company, but at that point in time, our controllers coming to us and saying, you guys got to put some measures in place. I don’t think any of us as merchants go into business thinking about, Hey, I’m really good at managing chargebacks. I’m really good at fighting fraud, so I’m going to go and start selling cell phones or apparel or sporting goods equipment. That’s where I think it’s really important to take into consideration and us as we’re enabling helping to enable commerce. That’s where some of these solutions come in to make sure that not only is the checkout experience seamless, but you’re securing those. The other piece, and Raj, you mentioned it in your opening remarks is connecting issuers and merchants too. I think that’s really important because we can put all the right checks in place, feel really good about that transaction, it goes to the issuer, we’re kind of crossing our fingers that the issuer approves it too. So I’m excited about the ecosystem, how we do that. Connected fraud management.

Raj Ramanand (07:03):

That’s a really good point because if you think about a lot of what FIS Worldpay has is that you see both sides of the ecosystem where you see both the merchant and sort of the issuing processing side of the business across thousands of those issuers and being able to connect the dots between those two brings it full loop and closed loop in the process. But that sort of takes us, if you continue the problem journey down to the end of this whole thing, people think the sale ends the transaction between the customer and the merchant, but it is in anything else. It’s after signature if you will, that the customer experience begins. And so it’s after the sale that all of the experience really matters. And so when you think of the post transactional world, Kelly, how do you all see problems in that space and the friction introduced because of that?

Post-transaction challenges and solutions with Narvar

Kelli Lin (07:55):

Well, first I think it’s important to think about what really is included in post-purchase. Huge. It’s tracking, it’s communication, it’s product education recommendations down to the refunds, returns, exchanges that we may more typically think of post-purchase. And when you’ve got such a large window, you can really easily delight or frustrated customers at multiple points. And I think this is really where brand loyalty lives or dies and you’ve got customer excitement, customer trust and eagerness at a high here in the post-purchase phase. And sort of what you do in that moment can really drive repeat purchases in that customer lifetime value that I think all merchants are after. And so from a customer experience perspective, it’s a real sense of excitement, but potential angst as well because people want to know where their stuff is. Tracking is fundamental and we’ve seen on our own tracking experience pages that three and a half times on average per order, someone’s going to go and look and that goes up for higher value in luxury brands.

(09:01):

And then you get sort of into, well, if you don’t provide that information, they call that’s 60 to 80% of the average customer inquiry base, three to $6 a call. You do the math merchants have an issue if customers are calling, nevermind the opportunity that’s lost in delighting the consumer when you move to returns, that’s a huge area of focus because over 800 billion of merchandise was returned in the US last year. 20 to 30% of e-commerce purchases get returned. And the experience is fundamental. Customers really want to know, or the pain points as you asked, what are some of the issues we see repackaging, convenient, drop off locations, huge opportunity to frustrate or delight, and then the refund of course, and how fast you can get it back. And that’s really I think the opportunity that presents itself because not only can you sort of just get the money back faster, but you can start to get repurchases and things along those lines. So I know we’ll talk about solutions next, but it’s a huge window that I think merchants are really rightfully so paying more and more attention to because consumers demand it.

Raj Ramanand (10:12):

It’s such a good point. At least the component you mentioned around people think of the friction introduced in say just the refund processes limited to just the refund, but it’s actually the enablement of the experience to come back and purchase, which is, I know we’ll talk about solutions in a minute, but it’s a fundamental problem sort of in reorienting your mind and not think about the cost of making returns easier. Retailers worry about if I make returns too easy, they’re going to return everything, but it’s actually the other component of it. So thank you for that. I think we set up the problems. Well, it’s worth spending a little bit of time for the audience talking about solutions. And from your perspective, Jason, just thinking about the world and how Adobe thinks about the personalization aspect, how are you thinking about solutions in this space?

Personalization at scale: Adobe’s strategy

Jason Knell (11:09):

Yeah, I think from the Adobe perspective, the biggest thing we see is shopper expectations just continuing to rise. So we’ve been speaking a lot about personalization at scale, so it’s no longer suitable to have a few simple segments and kind of rally around those. You really need to think about what is the right experience for each shopper, and that’s very challenging. And so the way we’ve solved it at Adobe is we’ve made it really easy to connect up our commerce platform with their data platform and share all sorts of data back and forth. And that’s only a piece of it. You have this larger ecosystem of Adobe solutions or non Adobe solutions that you’re with and that can be very challenging. So we try and make it easy, but we also want to make sure it’s open so that there’s pieces you could plug in. For example, if we’re not an expert in the space around fraud, we work with a signify to help us solve that. So it needs to be easy to use, but also modular and the ability to grow with you.

Raj Ramanand (12:18):

And so it sounds like a partner ecosystem plus this interplay on data effectively understanding intent and personalizing that at the end of the day. Correct. Correctively valuable. Correct. Taking that back to the theme we’ve sort of been on, which is looking at it from a pre-transaction standpoint and understanding how you guys think about that problem, how are you thinking about solutions in this space?

Enhancing security with minimal friction: Insights from Google

Cy Khormaee (12:43):

Yeah, just kind of going back to the original theme of there’s this constant conflict between security and friction that constantly has an intent to rise and make the shopper experience harder and harder. Well, expectations for shoppers are at an all time high. And so really the way we have to break this is by bringing more data to the table, having better integrated solutions. And I mean even if you think about, we mentioned briefly recaption and we’re all probably familiar with clicking on stoplights, things like that. And that’s really where recap just started at a high friction solution in order to stop broad-based fraud. Over the last five years, we’ve realized that by installing across a large number of websites, we can observe behavior, start to draw conclusions about good and bad behavior, and in fact remove the friction completely from the process. And so you may be surprised to know that about 90% of the transactions you interact with maybe every day with recapture, you may not even be aware of because they’re fully frictionless because it installs just like Google Analytics on the backend.

(13:44):

And that’s one example where by bringing more data together, by bringing a coalition of merchants and people across the internet together, we can create a safer frictionless program and process for all of our customers that make a better experience across all shoppers. And I think that’s also why we’re excited to work with folks like signify where that’s just another piece of data at the table, right? Actually all of us here represent different silos, different verticals of data that we can all stitch together for you in order to create that total visibility that’s going to enable you to control and stop fraud without interrupting your customers and creating that great customer experience. I think everyone here expects

Raj Ramanand (14:22):

So fewer stoplight clicks for me,

Cy Khormaee (14:26):

Maybe a really fun April fool’s joke, right? We’ll make it really hard for one day.

Raj Ramanand (14:30):

That’s right. Everybody clicks a stoplight for the day, we’re going to screw with

Cy Khormaee (14:34):

You. Exactly.

Raj Ramanand (14:37):

Speaking a little bit on the checkout side of it, the problems are interesting, but the solutions are hard because ultimately you have 200 milliseconds or whatever, you guys have to be able to make an instant decision. No one’s going to wait there forever for a checkout button to how do you deal with it? What are some of the solutions you guys are thinking about?

Streamlining the checkout process with FIS and Worldpay

Rajpreet Shikak (14:55):

No, it’s a great point and especially when you think about it in the milliseconds, and we don’t even have a second at that point. What we try to do for our customers is think of it as more payment optimization, not fraud management. So in the past, I think people were thinking about how do I lower my fraud rate? How do I get it below that certain threshold? Because I got Visa MasterCard who are reaching out, knocking on my door, telling me I need to get below this certain rate. And some of the ways that we’ve done that for our customers that we work with, we have a solution called Guaranteed Payments that we’ve launched in partnership with signify. We launched it about a year and a half ago now. We’ve seen really great results with it. At its core, it’s a fraud solution. It’s the fraud solution that signified it’s been offering and many of the folks in this room take advantage of the other piece that we’ve launched.

(15:57):

And I’m excited to see folks from Bank of America and Cap one here as well. We have a solution called Off Max and really at its simplest form, it’s trusted mid it’s activity that we know is extremely low risk and we’re going to send a signal, let the issuer know on the other side to go ahead and approve this no matter what, whether it’s that expiration date is incorrect, CVV is incorrect. We see this as extremely low risk and if it does turn into a fraudulent chargeback, the issuer is able to charge that back and we won’t represent it because the merchant that we’re working with knows that this traffic is such low risk. But going back, Raj, I think to your point in terms of speed, that’s where a lot of our customers, they’re coming to us, especially if you go down market in like the s and b mid-market space, they may not have the resources to go and do a full fledged integration to an enterprise fraud solution or staff. It even, I mean I know for a lot of us in this room finding the individuals that can drive those review orders that are coming in, that’s a hard thing to do in today’s climate. So what we try to do is work with partners like signify that can take on a lot of that heavy lifting for clients, but then at the same time we’re making it to where the integration for the client is much lower than it would be to do say a direct integration.

Integrating data for better customer experiences

Raj Ramanand (17:39):

Two things that you touched on but I think are valuable as you think of the value chain from a merchant perspective. One is I, for the largest part, people have disassociated payments from fraud and they’ve gone separate because the payments businesses couldn’t provide the best quality decisions and therefore they sort of unbundle the stack so that merchants could go to best in class across the board. One of the things that you all are doing, and I think payments companies are innovating on is re-bundling of the stack effectively to say merchants don’t want to do five different integrations, they want to do one. And by doing that, they want to enable these other components by just clicking a button effectively. And I think what you guys are doing at FIS is also sort of rebundling of that stack by saying instead of having to you do these five different things, let’s put it all together.

Rajpreet Shikak (18:39):

No, that’s a great point. We see it within our own organization where we’re coming and we’re evaluating are we using multiple providers that provide the same service? If so, let’s streamline that. The other piece is if you’re already integrated with us in that we’re an approved vendor, that contract’s coming through Worldpay, so you’re not going back out and doing that same type of due diligence to vet out another third party provider. So it really kind of helps to speed up all aspects of the decision process.

Raj Ramanand (19:14):

And then the last one I just want to touch on, which is often underappreciated, is that when you think of the payments businesses, it’s again sort of unbundled. You’ve got acquirers separate from issuers and you’ve got gateways sometimes separated from acquirers. One of the fascinating things you all are doing is because you have 6,000 plus issuers within your network, which is a massive issuing network, plus you have the gateway and the acquiring piece, you actually see both sides of the equation when a transaction’s happening on the merchant level. But you also know what’s happening on the issuing side. Yes, you may use third parties on the issuing side to make that final decision, but you control both sides of the stack and that experience is amazing. Nobody else can really put that type of thing together.

Rajpreet Shikak (20:02):

And that’s another great point, Raj. So when I started out with a company, I was on the issuing side of the business, and so when you do fraud management, if you declined a transaction, you own the relationship with that card holder so you could reach out and find out right away whether that transaction was fraudulent or a good transaction. And I think probably the biggest opportunity and the piece that I’m excited to see, some of the big issuers that are here in attendance is how do we create that when the merchant fraud detection system says this is a bad transaction? You can even think of it going back to your example of you’re traveling to Singapore, something that’s different than what you typically do, but what if it’s not even the issuing side that does that decline? It’s the merchant system that does that decline.

(20:57):

If there was a way for us to feed that decline to the issuer so that they could go out and validate with the card holder whether or not this was their transaction, I think it would create a much better experience at the end of the day. Because what typically happens in that process, the issuer, when they don’t see that decline on their side, this is all happening. And I was having an interesting conversation last night with a person from Bank of America, and one of the things that happens is you’re not calling the merchant, you’re thinking there’s an issue with your credit card. So when you do that, you’re calling your bank and you’re saying, my transaction’s not going through what’s going on, and the bank doesn’t see that transaction attempt, so they think there’s something wrong with the card. And Kelly, going back to your point from a customer service standpoint, just with checking your order, you have somebody that’s calling their bank as well. So it’s this whole entire kind of ecosystem where now all of a sudden the bank’s reissuing the plastic, they took the phone call to their customer service, you have the delay in terms of when that new plastic comes out and at the end of the day, the consumer still didn’t get to make their purchase.

Raj Ramanand (22:19):

Yeah, well said. Moving to the last part of the stack, which is the post transactional elements, how are you thinking about some of the solutions in this space and what’s coming next?

The future of ecommerce ecosystems and partnerships

Kelli Lin (22:33):

Well, bringing it all back together and closing the loop is critical. I think that’s the ultimate piece. I mean, we talked about the rate of returns being high and just the cost and the opportunity there, but there is a significant amount of fraud. 10 ish percent of returns are just straight up fraudulent. So being able to account for the kinds of information that signify can bring is huge in understanding what should be allowed through or not. But that is also a spectrum from fraud to abuse and abuse of policies in the return space is significant claiming damage that was actually done by the consumer. When they say the retailer did it saying we didn’t get the item, when you can bring together things like tracking information, we have a proof of that package on your porch, we’ve got it from the carrier. So you bring together carrier signals, you bring together the fraud signals, you bring together the order information and the loyalty information.

(23:31):

You can make a lot of different decisions to sort of optimize the return flow for the consumer and open up different sort of avenues, direct them to store expedite a refund if we do believe that they’re a good customer. And I think the two encouraging facts that we see is for those that do abuse policies, if you make convenience the priority and you reduce the friction, they’re 40% less likely to abuse the system. They’re just lazy. At the end of the day, they won’t care. It’s a cost of doing business to enact this stretch of the rules. And that’s huge. And if you do have a good returns experience, of which 30% of consumers say their last one was not good, their 77% likely to shop with that brand. Again, that’s how important this is. And getting the fraud, abuse and experience can really close that loop. And when you get your customer service agents in the mix, they’ve got the information too. Everybody’s saying the same story and you go right back to the beginning and you’ve got a good circle going.

Raj Ramanand (24:42):

Yeah, so well said. If you think of the funnel where you’re spending all this money to acquire a customer coming in, whether it’s AdWords or whether it’s Facebook or whether it’s marketing dollars going in, a small percent of that actually ends up converting. After you spend all that money, the customer comes in, they buy $200 worth of your product, something was not okay, they return $200 worth of your product and they don’t buy from you again, the cost of reacquiring that one customer to come back is way more than spending two bucks or three bucks to be able to make that experience great. And I think retailers have sort of gone in the direction of saying it’s not about keeping it more friction to make the returns process harder. It’s about sort of saying they’re going to buy again and I don’t want to spend all this money on marketing dollars again and again. So

Kelli Lin (25:36):

It’s starts with the transaction with heavy engagement, but it becomes a brand opportunity. And the multiple points of just once you get that information out on the transaction, you can extend into repeat purchases, incremental revenue, it’s really the driver of the next sale.

Closing remarks and the path forward

Raj Ramanand (25:55):

Alright, we’re down to our last 10 minutes and so we have a big group and we want to make sure we get our final question in. Ultimately, it sounds like when you talk about everything here, it’s about connecting these platforms together to be able to make all of this talk. And there’s a component of it, which is all about the data that allows that to happen. Because to be able to understand the customer journey, you have to know what’s happening at every point and tie it all together. But ultimately when you look at where this is going, how do you see the world playing out in these different areas? And perhaps we’ll start with you here, Jason.

Jason Knell (26:34):

Thanks. Maybe I’ll speak to the merchant perspective from the Adobe side. I think the future is catching up to what we’re talking about here. I mean, when I talk to merchants, they’re overwhelmed by all the solutions out there and what to do. So I think getting started pulling together the data, having a strong ecosystem that works together, that’s what I see as the next challenge. And we’re trying to make that easier by picking partners that we want to bet on. So we’ve doubled down on the signified partnership because we used to say, Hey, here’s the fraud partners, you can work with Adobe Merchant and just give them a list. And that’s not very good. So we’ve gotten more prescriptive to help solve that problem.

Jason Knell (27:23):

Cy?

Cy Khormaee (27:24):

Yeah, I think the one big thing we see continually is look, fraud has always been a business that’s people are it to do a business and it’s become rapidly automated and especially more with ai. So this is just going to accelerate across every attack service. So I think of maybe we have few messages from merchants. One is of course instrument everywhere. So you want to protect your entire workflow. Two is integrated across all the different data that we see together. It each informs the next stage all the way from registration to return. It’s all important. And then the third part is really to kind of look at the flow and use that to reduce friction and create a great shopper experience across all legs of the journey through the automation with a single tool like a signify that can bring all those pieces of data together in an automated way that’s going to respond across your stack at the same speed that the adversaries are going to evolve.

Rajpreet Shikak (28:16):

For me, I think it really boils down to data at the end of the day, captain obvious I guess with that one, but looking at the slide that you were showing before, Raj, with your commerce network, the comparison of the 300 million for Amazon versus the 460 million for Signified is super impressive. And so when I think about any type of machine learning AI type model, it’s really only as good as the data that it’s being fed with and being able to see across ecosystems, across multiple merchants, multiple financial institutions. We see this with Worldpay and FIS. There could be trends and threats that are popping up in one segment that aren’t necessarily impacting another issuer at this point in time or from a merchant perspective as well. And so to me, again, if you’re going, you’re building these type of models, it’s just so important to have a strong consortium of data to do that.

Jason Knell (29:24):

Kelly

Kelli Lin (29:26):

Data and integration from a platform orientation, really, I mean as we’ve all said, but the way that I really think you turn it around is to be fearless like you just started the day with. Because at the end of the day, sure, a lot of the bits and pieces, especially Narvar as a platform, pulls together. A carrier can send a message, sure, it’s on its way, but is it branded? Have you recaptured sort of your voice in that and driven the next level of engagement? No, you have to step into it. You have to give that information. You have to fold in the right data points for decisioning and then you’re on top of it and you can really drive your business forward in a new way as opposed to just reacting or managing. And so being fearless is hopefully my message to reiterate yours.

Raj Ramanand (30:13):

Wonderful. Yeah, I think a comment here from my side, when you look at a lot of talk about large language models and generative ai, and maybe I’m teeing up the next session here too. There is a general understanding that AI is the next big investment in the next big thing. And it’s been around for a long time. So what’s sort of different? Ultimately, I was hearing this talk and I thought it was really interesting, but when the refrigerator was invented for the first time, people threw millions and millions of dollars at the problem. But ultimately, the people who made the billions were the Coke and the Pepsi, not the refrigerating companies. It became table stakes effectively. And you think of all these large language models, they’re all training on the same massive data sets eventually. And at some point that becomes table stakes. Everybody’s doing the same thing, the outcomes are going to be the same.

(31:17):

What’s unique about where these things could go is the proprietary sort of interesting customer data that goes into what people are thinking about in terms of behavior and intent and identity. And I think the future of where things go is when everything becomes a refrigerator in the LLM and sort of whatever you want to call it, space, you get into this concept of how do I get access to something new that’s happening in the customer journey that gives me a differentiation, gives me an edge in being able to produce a result. And I think a lot of the industry over the next five to 10 years is going to go with partnerships like these. These obviously there’s privacy issues we all have to deal with. There’s going to be legal issues we’re all dealing with. There’s a concern about data and all of that is going to be elements we’ll discuss. But I think the future is going to be tying that entire customer journey in a way that is very disparate today and leveraging the next generation of products that come out on top of that, which are going to be the multi-billion dollar companies that evolve. And I think that’s the next big, very exciting opportunity in this space. But I think we’re at time. I want to thank you all again. This was an interesting conversation. Appreciate you all doing this today.