0:01
Tom Lewand: You can use the machine learning and AI to create personal experiences, and
0:09
what we hear from our customers regularly is we don’t want to be a bunch of dots and spots.
0:11
We want to have a relationship with you.
0:17
Kristin Lemkau: Like most people, we do real-time testing and get actual customer feedback and
0:19
try to co-create with customers.
0:25
I still believe good, old-fashioned market research with strong quant is an important practice.
0:30
And then, from the analytics themselves, you can start to see certain trends.
0:35
For example, one of our most successful product launches was a card called Sapphire Reserve.
0:39
Market research told us that millennials were valuing experiences more than stuff, and we
0:44
loaded up the benefit of that card around travel and dining and
0:48
people understood the rational value for the card, but they also understood the aspirational
0:52
value of it, and it took off in a way that we didn’t expect.
0:56
Albert Garcia: Last year, we changed the whole organization in order to create a customer
0:58
experience department.
1:02
Before we launch anything, it’s really our challenge to ensure that we are enhancing
1:04
people’s experience.
1:09
We always leave an empty chair in the table, and we always say that this is the customer’s chair.
1:14
So we always have their idea or their point of view when we are deciding things.
1:19
And it’s something which the teams are really understanding, when there’s an empty chair there.
1:21
Speaker 1: Do you literally have an empty chair there?
1:24
Albert Garcia: We literally have an empty chair in every meeting.
1:28
Tom Lewand: We did a lot of work with our core customers, and what they clearly told
1:31
us loud and clear is they don’t want a typical loyalty program.
1:33
They don’t want to be incentivized.
1:34
They want to be included.
1:38
They want to be a part of our process — so things, doing Google Hangouts with some of
1:41
our core customers to show them the product roadmap.
1:47
Doing things like informal focus groups or shopping events where they’re giving us
1:51
feedback on future product development or telling us where we should take those things.
1:58
That, in turn, then gives us a built-in sort of double reward system where we’re being
2:02
rewarded by their phenomenal insight, they’re being rewarded because they feel closer to
2:06
the brand than any loyalty program could have made them feel.
2:10
Now we’re working at ways to scale that, but in ways that are thoughtful and not too
2:13
regimented or certainly not too systematized.
