How Sony is Humanizing the Digital Customer Experience to Actively Engage Customers

Transcription

1 How Sony is Humanizing the Digital Customer Experience to Actively Engage Customers with Catherine Jensen & David Fulton MAY 19, 2014 Catherine Jensen, Vice President of Consumer Experience at Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC, and David Fulton, Director of CRM Product Management at Oracle, discussed how organizations drive and meet consumer expectations.

2 CATHERINE JENSEN: Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC is a division that delivers the PlayStation gaming system. Sony is obviously a huge, global company, but we re really focused on gamers and the gaming experience. That requires a little bit of a different take on consumers and consumer experience because we have such a specific demographic. It s exciting for me to be involved in a company that has such an incredible brand as well as the brand loyalty that consumers have for PlayStation. I ve had responsibilities with other enterprise companies before but the PlayStation Nation is unique and very dynamic with respect to their needs and wants from PlayStation and its energizing to challenge ourselves at how we get faster and better at meeting those needs. DAVID FULTON: You have a customer experience title. It s become a great trend over the last few years for businesses to view customer experience as extremely important, even as far up as executive roles within the business. Could you start by giving us more background on yourself, your role at Sony and the groups you manage or influence in your day-to-day work? Sure, and I think it s a great note that companies are focused on experience and engagement rather than transactions. That really comes from consumer empowerment. Consumers have far more choices now, and that makes them more informed and more selective. It is about the end-to-end experience, all the way from how customers first learn about your products, to their purchasing of the products, to enjoying them and hopefully continuing to enjoy them and recommending them to others. It s a great evolution. My responsibilities at Sony PlayStation include technical and account support, both for hand-held consoles as well as the PlayStation Network, as well as all of the e-commerce behind the scenes all of the content that consumers can purchase and enjoy. We produce and review consumer experience analytics, and then we share that information with the other regional groups at PlayStation to look at what we can do to prevent problems, increase the usage of different types of I think it s great that companies are focused on experience and engagement rather than transactions. activities or tools and get faster adoption for future releases. It s interesting to see the evolution of the entertainment system with PlayStation 4. It s not just a way for the individual to interact with entertainment but also to interact with others through games and other entertainment material. I d be interested in getting your insights into how that s changing the way that consumers engage with your brand. We are in a much more complex space and, as you ve noted, engaging with consumers is a lot more complex and challenging. They certainly have a wider degree of choice about the brands they interact with. How has the way you ve seen consumers interact with companies changed throughout your career, particularly in the last year at Sony Computer Entertainment America as the PlayStation 4 has hit the market? Whether it s a service provider or a product manufacturer, the evolution of the way that consumers interact with companies over even just the last five years has been dramatic. Technology is really only one part of the equation. The customer care industry has swung; we have gone from high-touch personalization, where voice was your only channel for interaction, to low-touch interactions, where self-service is maybe the only option. As an industry, and certainly here at PlayStation, we re bringing a balance to service channels of choice, with mobile and social as the fastest ways for us to reach large populations with consistent messaging about the information they want and need. The PlayStation 4 is a social device. You can share your experiences through the console to your social media accounts, be it Facebook or Twitter, Twitch or U-Stream. So our consumers are much more accessible as well as demanding of our attention than they have ever been before. It provides us with a lot of opportunity but also a lot of obligation to be responsive in the channels that our consumers are in. Since our latest gaming console is so social, not just with sharing but with live streaming capabilities, the question has been, How do we make sure that we re both enabling that experience and protecting the ecosystem? 2

3 Obviously, consumer expectations are changing, and Sony is adapting to that. How is Sony providing a digital experience that is engaging, personable and memorable to catch those consumers as they start moving away from the phone as they dominate the channel of interaction? Digital enables immediacy, not just in the ability to procure and download new content but also to share the gameplay highlights or, as I mentioned, stream live events. It also puts a lot of pressure on the agility we need within our support and service teams to respond to real-time events rather than waiting for consumers to let us know that there s a problem with their console, platform or a particular game title. If you add to that the complexity of cultural expectations, trying to personalize a digital experience in a global forum is not easy. It takes a lot of cross-company collaboration to work, and that s something that we continue to prioritize at Sony. We share the same platform with the PlayStation Network and the same console, but the consumer expectations can be very different across cultures. So we have to make sure that we re monitoring that interaction, humanizing it and making sure that its right for a particular demographic. Without being specific about particular markets that Sony is focused on, are there differences in the proactive behavior you referenced such as reaching out to consumers before they realize they have a problem that you may do in the Americas that you might not do in other parts of the world? Can you give us just a few examples? Despite being regionally focused, we share a global brand and a common platform. With respect to the Americas, there s really a blend of acceptance and expectations of interactions in the social arena. Forums, Twitter and Facebook are quite common mechanisms for consumers to reach out to us for feedback or assistance. That s not the case in some of the other regions. Consumers in other regions or even in different demographics within the Americas differ on what should be shared and when to share it, and it s important to recognize and act accordingly. Humanizing the digital experience is...simplifying how [consumers] can satisfy...needs and wants. As you ve already noted, customer experience the whole process of humanizing the digital experience to create something that s memorable matters more than ever before. It s becoming more challenging for businesses to provide a memorable experience that consumers will appreciate and share with other consumers, either through the device or in their own networks. How is Sony going about humanizing that digital experience and creating those memorable, authentic experiences? That s a great question, and I ll tackle it in two parts. The first part is from a product aspect. As I mentioned, our gaming consoles enable people to interact with their friends, family or like-minded people with similar interests and share their competitive or storyline experience. Sony is very focused on that engagement and the unexpected delight that our consumers gamers in particular expect from PlayStation. From a service and support perspective, it s an opportunity for us to make sure that we re protecting and extending that experience so that we re proactive on any experience disrupters. We need to make sure that we re triggering the right resolution actions, which can be difficult, depending on the issue. One example is that we need to highlight benefits the different channels of support offerings that we have. We re in all of the common channels voice, chat, our online forums and social. If a consumer has a particular type of issue, one of those channels is better than the others to get the fastest resolution to that consumer. There s not one service channel that is right for all demographics. Humanizing the digital experience is recognizing what consumers need and want and simplifying how they can satisfy those needs and wants. We ve heard a lot of businesses talk about right channeling in the past, but the right channeling approach has always been fairly low key. Businesses would show up, throw a number of channels on the page and leave it to the consumer to choose a preference. In Sony s case, you re so focused on providing not just resolutions but also memorable experiences. You re making recommendations as consumers go through the Web experience and 3

4 providing a lot more information to address their needs. You re guiding them to the right channel by which they ll resolve their issue. Do you agree? Absolutely; it s really about being easy to do business with and making sure that we understand and recognize what our gamers are looking for, and we can be in the channel proactively providing that. I think choice is the key, both in the product and the service offerings. We offer multiuser online gameplay, but we also offer in-home, exclusive experiences as well. So our service offerings can t be one dimensional when we certainly wouldn t make our product offerings one dimensional. It s important that we engage with consumers in the way that they want. That means that we need to be in the channels they are. At the same time, we can give them information and help to direct them into the channel that s optimal for them. Choice can be overwhelming. I don t want our gamers to worry about figuring out which channel is best for resolving their issue; I want that to be intuitive and easy. Are there other examples of an interaction that s either so important to the consumer, so important to Sony or both that you would try to get them into a live channel as quickly as possible? Our social channels are great for updates and information on the PlayStation Network. If we had a particular disruption planned for maintenance, social is really the most efficient channel for us to inform and alert our consumers all at once with the same messaging. It s something that we can leverage on a scalable basis to a wide range of consumers. At the same time, we must have message consistency across our channel interactions. We can update our telephony solution, our online forums and our website, as well as highlight a new promotion that they may be waiting for in the PlayStation store. Our service offerings can t be one dimensional when we certainly wouldn t make our product offerings one dimensional. of your products and services, are there other methods that you use to engage customers? We re currently evolving our social care strategy to give us the ability to proactively listen, identify support inquiries and level the channel of choice to respond and communicate in a very responsive manner. Mobile and social are the key channels that we need to continue to extend and scale to meet the demand of our consumers. There is an immediate demand both for the experience that our gamers expect and for the ability to make sure that there s nothing preventing them from having that experience. Let s cast our eyes forward. You ve had a major product release. I m sure your whole team is just gasping for breath after the PS4 hit the market. It s a game changer in terms of what the experience enables for consumers, and it will likely lead to a shaping of expectations going forward on how you interact, not just with technology but with other people and the brand itself. What excites you most when you look forward and consider the experiences you ll be able to offer in the future? How do you feel that experience is likely to change, and what do you think the customer s role is in driving that change at Sony? What do you see evolving in the immediate months? The launch of the PlayStation 4 was an incredible experience the brand loyalty, the anticipation and the passion of consumers with this particular product release has been unimaginable. We ve had such a great response from the gaming community, and one of the things that we ll continue to do throughout this year and throughout the life of the console is recognize and reward that loyalty with continued advancements in our product functionality as well as online entertainment. Consumers don t buy a gaming console without the games, so Sony will continue to deliver extensive contributions to that rich content. You are certainly ensuring that you re engaging with customers in the ways that they want to engage. Outside of the support space and the defined ability I m most excited about how we will leverage social engagement to further connect with the PlayStation ecosystem. We know more about our gamers than ever before, and they know more about their peers and 4

5 their community than ever before. Social engagement is going to help us extend and monitor that gamer experience because Sony s brand promise is making sure that we re the best place to play. A lot of that work is being backed up by ongoing initiatives in your business to make that promise a reality. When you and your team look beyond 2014 and start to consider how you can continue to deliver a great consumer experience at Sony Computer Entertainment America, how do you expect the space to evolve in the next two or three years? There are some avid gamers in the industry who are definitely driving the content and looking at more of an agile interaction within our platform. Technology is accelerating, and it will be up to the gamers to create the experience and to uniquely direct that engagement or interaction. I believe that our industry will continue to become more and more personalized. That will add complexity to how we support and serve those consumers because they will have such a personalized engagement with their devices. It will be more interesting and exciting as we start to figure that landscape out further. Catherine Jensen Catherine Jensen is the Vice President of Consumer Experience at Sony Computer Entertainment Americas, where she is responsible for the customer care and support of PlayStation products and services, including the newest video game console, PS4. More than 7 million consumers in 40 countries are actively playing, connecting and sharing experiences on the PS4 since November 2013 s successful Americas launch. Prior to joining Sony, Jensen was Vice President of Business Operations of Enterprise Support Services at Symantec, where she was responsible for leading customer-driven initiatives and global programs for driving world-class support. networking communities to augment service availability while reducing operating costs. While at Oracle, Jensen led Oracle to become the first enterprise software company to be certified by J.D. Power and Associates for Outstanding Customer Service Excellence. Prior to the Oracle acquisition, Jensen held senior leadership roles at PeopleSoft in customer service and was responsible for global staffing and service delivery operations designed to achieve world-class customer satisfaction and loyalty. Jensen has a Bachelor s of Science degree in Computer Information Systems from California Polytechnic State University. Jensen sits on the corporate board of advisor s for the University of Nevada s College of Business Administration and maintains active affiliations with Watermark and Technology Services Industry Association. David Fulton David Fulton runs the Web Service Transformation Product Management team at Oracle RightNow that has a product remit that covers Web Self Service, Social Customer Service (Communities) and Natural Language. David has been with Oracle RightNow for nine years, with the last six of those years spent within the product management/development group in Bozeman, Montana. What goals is David and the Web Service Transformation team working towards? The online web customer service product of the future is one that can anticipate the needs of the user, provide them a tailored customer experience on their choice of device or channel, interact with that consumer in conversational language (in all of its idiomatic and imprecise glory) and take the consumer to the point of satisfaction, whether their destination is knowledge, an interaction (with data or with a contact center agent) or to the transaction. Previously, Jensen was the Vice President of Service Delivery where she was responsible for the strategic direction and end-to-end service experience for Intuit s one million small business payroll customers. While at Intuit, Jensen implemented initiatives leveraging social 122 W 26th St, 2nd Floor New York, NY (646) MAIN