PCM Vol.2 - Issue 10

Thought Leaders Corner
Invisible Identity
It’s all about making the end-to-end experience frictionless.
Imagine this scenario cutting across
multiple industry silos - medicine,
medical insurance, wearables,
smartphones, payment, transportation,
test labs, etc. You are a consumer that
is health conscious, wants to have
proactive ways to monitor attributes
that impact your health, does not want
to deal with the complication of various
health systems and insurance providers
and the ping pong between them, wants
to have access to global specialists onby
Shailesh Grover
How to make more money
from customers and how
to continually acquire more
of them: this seems to be
the standard question across most
organisations, large and small, that have
some product or service to offer. Very
few truly focus on how to provide a great
experience by leveraging technology
rather than building useless products
and then struggling to sell. The other
extreme is the new billion $$ valuation,
what I classify as experience companies
- Uber, Airbnb; in my view, these and
others like them sell an experience
rather than a product as they technically
don’t own anything but the frictionless
experience.
On similar lines, consumer adoption
of technology is growing at a much
faster rate compared to the readiness
of retailers and other service providers
to cope with this change. Consumer
behaviour and expectations are also
changing and they need more speed,
transparency, personalised experience
- all this on the channel of their choice
and on demand. Surprisingly in 2016,
most retailers still cite 9am-5pm on their
Twitter, Facebook and contact centres…
so they are applying their legacy rules to
new tools.
The evolution in technology and its
adoption lends itself to eliminating
friction across most customer use
cases. One such aspect that arguably
underpins all use cases is (electronic)
identity and authentication. Every
aspect of our life has an identity of sorts
attached to it - medical, employment,
business, driving, travel, pension,
insurance, mobile, banking, shopping,
etc. And each of them, historically, have
issued a physical “thing” and then moved
to digital “online or mobile”. Some of the
more recent providers have a mobilefirst
way of doing things but even they
ask you to create a means for you to
access the service - making you to deal
with remembering the various disparate
sets of “username” and “password” -
not to mention remembering the right
permutation that goes with each service.
Those that have moved to biometrics
have again used traditional ways to get
you started first.
A few years ago I shared a panel with
someone that claimed to have a chip
in his right arm that did authentication
for a new service. While it sounded
very cool, I personally would think twice
before doing anything like that! Intrigued
with the thought, I did ask a random set
of young graduates and interns whether
they would be interested - and when I
articulated how that chip in their arm
would make their life easier, they all
responded in the affirmative.
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