Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Nancy Dafiewhare
Former Head of Digital Marketing at Standard Life (Phoenix Group)
Unlocking Customer Value: The Role of Relationships and Advocacy in a World of Changing Consumer Behaviour and Generative AI
About Nancy Dafiewhare
Nancy was the former Head of Digital Marketing at Standard Life (Phoenix Group). She joined the business in 2021 to build their digital marketing function from scratch, including marketing automation, social media, and updating outdated systems. A major project was developing a DTC proposition and marketing Phase 1 of their MarTech stack, which included a successful pension consolidation pilot. Under Nancy's leadership, Standard Life reinvigorated its digital brand presence and emerged back into the market to compete with fintech challengers.
What existing tools, technologies and platforms are most crucial to your current advocacy and loyalty approach? And where do you see the greatest room for improvement or innovation?
There were definitely gaps we needed to address. We lacked basic listening and engagement tracking, having overlooked review sites where our rating hovered around 2 out of 5 stars. That caused concern recently for a large potential client getting poor feedback from employees who would be future platform users. So we know investing more in social listening, site engagement tracking, and customer co-design is essential before launch. Technologies revealing digital body language like clickstreams are crucial too - to cut through what people say versus what they actually do. Then surveying tools are vital for measuring progress while also pairing with informal focus groups. There's currently no single solution. But the priority is continually assessing the gap between customer expectation and their reality.
You mentioned the problem of inconsistent experiences across channels. Were you ever able to map any correlation between suboptimal journeys and metrics like attrition?
Absolutely - analyzing the granular data revealed clear connection points. We noticed an odd revenue cliff in March that seemed anomalous for peak tax season. Diving deeper, we discovered the root cause - extreme customer frustration from opaque internal transfer processes. People would transfer pensions over, then hear nothing for 6+ weeks as back-end teams secured releases from the prior provider. But we weren’t communicating properly, so customers assumed we had the funds and were simply negligent. They would wait 2 months with no updates, get angry, and transfer right back out. Once we mapped the failure points and lack of visibility, we introduced better milestone updates. But without the data, we may have never pinpointed the need.
If you could identify brand ambassadors more tangibly through technology, would you see value in factoring advocacy metrics like referrals into calculations around top customers?
Without question. We explored referral schemes and loyalty programs conceptually, but didn’t have the foundational tracking capability or maturity to execute effectively at Standard Life...yet. But embedding advocacy signals like direct referrals alongside existing KPIs for revenue, longevity and cross/upsell would lend invaluable context. You could accurately showcase who your VIPs are - those generating income themselves while simultaneously inspiring other customers. That multiplier effect can have an exponential impact. The next step is implementing the martech to quantify word-of-mouth influence. No amount of manual surveying captures enough breadth of data to truly understand each customer’s value.
Where do you see the biggest potential for AI and automation to enhance future customer relationships?
Personalization. Customers want to feel understood and known at an individual level, as we just discussed. And it's unrealistic for any single brand with millions of customers to achieve that without leveraging technology. AI can detect shared behaviors and attributes across people that appear unrelated on the surface, and segment them in an exponentially more sophisticated manner. Instead of having 10 broad customer personas that still only scratch the surface against a customer base of 15 million, AI can actually generate hundreds of micro-personas and tailor engagement appropriately. It can rapidly process infinitely more data signals than humans. But the critical piece is there must still be a human role in reviewing and approving any final personalized content before deployment.
How can brands ensure a genuine human touch remains even while utilizing data and AI to customize CX?
As I just mentioned, AI should be leveraged to handle the heavy-lifting of data processing and initial personalization, but human oversight is still needed before final deployment. There must be a stage where people can review, quality check and tweak things to ensure the right tone and sentiment is there - as AI lacks natural emotional intelligence currently. While AI will only improve, people must always be in the loop particularly when customer relationships are involved, to pick up on nuances technology might miss. The human touch augments the scale and efficiency brought by AI.
Do you feel emerging innovations like AI could damage relationships if managed poorly? How can this be prevented?
Definitely - just as any technology can be used negligently or even maliciously... AI could certainly follow a similar dark path if underlying ethical principles, safety considerations, checks and balances aren't instilled upfront and governance keeps pace with advancements. It's evolving exponentially faster than the ability to regulate though. Brands must make AI transparency, ethical data usage and security top priorities right now. They need proper guidelines, training and staffing to prevent automated experiences running recklessly free without human oversight. If they wait, customer trust will only erode through preventable AI-related scandals.
Up Next: Shaun Rowan-Popoff
