The Future of Customer Experience

Marketforce asked Matthew to present the Future of Customer Experience, and then join a panel, at its 20:20 Customer Experience Summit in London. With incumbents under constant attack from digital startups, customer experience has become a battleground, and for Matthew it is inseparable from privacy, because personalisation depends on companies tracking our digital footprints and shadows to build detailed individual profiles.

Speakers from Argos, Barclays, Channel 4 and others painted a rosy picture of data collection in the name of personalisation, and most of the audience accepted it, though on a sliding scale of comfort. Matthew contrasted two cases. A streaming service using your viewing history to build playlists is relatively benign. An online credit card, loan or mortgage application that trawls over 450 data points, sometimes including those of friends and relatives in a process called "n+1" analysis, is a different matter.

"Imagine the power you'd feel if you had control over your own data, and now imagine going one step further and being able to monetise it."Matthew Griffin, London, July 2017

Both are examples of the "Algorithmic Society", where opaque algorithms profile us and decide what we can access. When you are turned down, the call centre can only say the system took a multitude of factors into account. Because these algorithmic black boxes are not transparent, even to their designers, no one can tell you why the machine said no, so you cannot fix it and it can happen again and again.

Near the end he asked how many in the room were comfortable with the way companies track and analyse them. No one was, and he finds the same answer in every country. Matthew argued that people can take back control, pointing to blockchain based Sovereign ID platforms that let individuals capture and control their own information, see who uses it and when, and switch a provider off. The next step, he suggested, is being able to monetise that data.