With apps such as Uber disrupting business travel as much as the taxi market, Addison Lee has shifted its focus from account management to the passenger’s experience, which entailed a technology overhaul and a whole new way of working.
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4 october 2019
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Why Addison Lee is putting customers in the driving seat
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Brands across the world, in virtually every sector, have learned the hard way that disruption can come at any time and that there is no choice but to heed the mantra ‘adapt or die’.
Disruptors don’t come much more disruptive than Uber. But while the effect it has had on the taxi industry is well known, it has also had a significant impact on business transportation.
While premium car and courier service Addison Lee wouldn’t consider itself to be in the same market as Uber, the reality is that individuals can easily make the choice to use Uber or other taxi apps for their business travel, even if their company has an Addison Lee account. That has forced it to shift its focus onto providing the best possible experience to the traveller.
It is a common story for brands today, as Salesforce’s latest ‘State of the Connected Customer' report indicates: 73% of customers say one extraordinary experience raises their expectations of other companies.
Addison Lee’s head of CRM technology services and customer product, Matt Baker, says: “We’ve definitely gone on a journey and we’ve definitely transformed as a business. Five years ago we were very much account-centric.
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“The whole area of our business has pivoted from account to individual.”
Matt Baker, Addison Lee
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SOURCE: SALESFORCE, 'STATE OF MARKETING 2019'
By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones
“I see customer experience as our shopfront window”
Matt Baker, Addison Lee
Source: SALESFORCE
Read the report
here
“We had customers who were banks, so the account was king. How many people were booking on that account? How much revenue do we make out of that account. The fact there was a human being at the end of that bill didn’t really register as a challenge and a focus we should work to.”
But today the business’s strategic priorities have shifted. It now has two key objectives: global growth and improving customer experience to retain business.
“The whole area of our business has pivoted from account to individual,” says Baker. “That has followed the technology change [of transport apps]. People are in control of their own travel right now so we have to engage the end passenger.”
The company is building its customer experience (CX) around a single contact centre that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, offering a global service across the 350 cities where Addison Lee operates. So if, for example, a passenger leaves a bag in the back of a car, the centre can instantly relay their message back to the driver and co-ordinate the quickest or most convenient way to return it, whether that’s turning the car around or having the bag couriered to another location.
According to Baker, the key to providing excellent service is the emotional bond. That comes from having reliable cars, customers having amiable relationships with good drivers and the knowledge that when things go wrong, the company will resolve it quickly.
“That’s where I see customer experience. It’s our shopfront window. We don’t have a shop, you don’t browse Addison Lee’s website to see what services we offer like you do [with a retailer]. When people are working with us, CX is the most important thing to build that emotional connection with the brand and hopefully retain customers.”
2017
2018
2019
10
12
18
Median number of data sources used by financial services marketing organisations
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use of ai among financial service marketers
Currently use AI
49%
Plan to use AI within the next two years
+141%
Projected growth rate of AI use over the next two years
35%
Source: SALESFORCE
He argues: “It enables you to really focus on and develop these muscles. We can have a whole team that’s devoted to predictive analytics, and improving that and getting better at it, and then understanding how it can be used more broadly in the business.”
Another key priority is to ensure data projects have valuable outcomes beyond just insights, he says: “Rather than doing analytics for the sake of analytics and maybe having a nice PowerPoint at the end of it, the whole idea is when you’re doing your project, is there an asset you can leave behind that can be repurposed or reused?”
For example, Barclays has used its analytics capabilities to create segmentations based on where customers’ spending behaviour clusters around particular brands. This has created new insights on brand behaviour that Barclays can offer to corporate clients.
Hardy explains: “We looked at our customers’ transactional behaviour and we looked at the brands that they spend on, and then we looked at the interaction between those brands – so if someone spends at brand X they are also likely to spend at brand Y. Then we performed some clustering around those brands and found which travelled together, and are better explained together than apart.”
Barclays also used anonymised card transaction data to find ways to serve its most valuable customers better in branches. The analysis showed affluent customers were more likely to be in the area around a branch later in the day, which led to the bank extending opening hours to allow them to come into the premises.
A third application of analytics was to examine the catchment areas for particular stores using similar transaction data, for the benefit of clients in the retail and restaurant sectors. This has enabled those clients to work out how far consumers are willing to travel to visit a store, so they can see which existing stores have overlapping catchments and where they might be able to access a new market by opening a new store.
This type of innovation around data has not been common for big, established financial services companies. Indeed, for many, the need to protect legacy business models has actively held it back. But as Aviva’s UK retail and brand director Tom Daniell told Marketing Week recently, “if customers believe we are innovating on their behalf, that’s a real driver of trust”.
The brand’s new AvivaPlus subscription product has been designed to reward loyal customers with the best price, rather than giving new customers the best deals and implicitly penalising those already with the brand. It has required a new product development model and was only possible because the company switched towards more agile working, where teams responsible for communications, data, media, proposition, product, customer experience, pricing and risk all sit together.
According to Daniell: “This isn’t about putting a veneer over an existing product. This is grassroots up, absolutely a new product that fundamentally behaves economically for us in a different way but also behaves in a different way for customers.”
It also means there is consistency in the customer journey, from marketing messages through to purchase and call centre service. Customer satisfaction and net promoter scores are already higher than for Aviva’s standard insurance product, following a soft launch.
This is the kind of service consumers now expect – even from monolithic financial services organisations. The whole sector now needs to move just as fast as new digital entrants in order to keep up. ■
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The biggest challenges in adapting to this new model have been cultural; particularly “getting technology teams to understand the business and the business drivers, but also getting the business to take a bit more responsibility for technology”, Baker says.
Technical people tend to focus on what’s coming next, while business people focus on delivering what needs to be achieved right now, and the two need to be more able to meet in the middle. But Addison Lee’s twin business objectives of global growth and better CX – which have buy-in at the highest level – serve to focus minds on outcomes that can be measured against these.
“Where Addison Lee is very lucky is that we’re still small enough to be agile,” Baker concludes. “Even though we are a global business, I still have access to everyone I need within 20 seconds’ walk, including the CEO.”
With revenue up 12.9% and gross profit up 8.3% last year, the approach Addison Lee is taking appears to be bearing fruit. ■
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Addison Lee takes the same approach to its courier business, which is currently its largest growth area. Baker says the company appreciates its customers are just trying to do their jobs, and the task of getting an item from A to B is usually not their core role yet it is also crucial to the business.
Many of the items it delivers are secure data – for example a DVD, storage drive or paperwork. As such, they are likely to contain business-critical information.
“There’s a reason that’s got to be [at its destination] at a certain time,” Baker says. “Usually it’s because somebody is going to use it and move forwards, and if we delay by an hour, a day, they can’t get on with their jobs. We focus our entire process around that, to say ‘how we can make that as efficient and effective as possible?’”
Making these changes hasn’t been simple for Addison Lee. It has necessitated a move from several siloed technology systems to a single Salesforce CX platform. With that has come an office move that has shaken up working practices and cross-departmental relationships.
Before, Baker says, the company separated departments out, “gave them all different systems and then wondered why we couldn’t get a consistent customer experience”. Now, all staff hot-desk and communicate to one another on the CX platform, which “lends itself to faster delivery so we can go to market quicker and we can fail and succeed faster”.
12.9%
Rise in Addison Lee’s 2018 revenue, year on year
8.3%
Rise in its annual
gross profits
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Read the report here
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Read the report here