User-Driven Identity and Personalization for the Internet
Digital Channel Is As Warm as a Handshake in Hazmat Suits…
2020 and its Covid-19 lockdown gave us a look at a digital future. Can the digital channel serve as a replacement for in-person and over-the-phone methods of sales and customer support? Are we ready to equate it with ‘real life’? I thought through the implications of Everyone completing Everything online, and why it feels like this proposed “metaverse” online future is missing something fundamental.
The more a person relies on the digital channel for all of life’s tasks, the more it becomes a pervasive experience shaping quality of life. As its use becomes ubiquitous in our population, it shapes our culture and values as well. It is possible that increased polarization, suicides, and violence and even rising authoritarianism and nationalism are correlated with negative and deceptive online experiences.
The next leap forward for our collective online experience will be personal and based on connecting with individuals, not wowing users with technology.
In this article I’ve defined a concept for user-driven identity and personalization. My goal has been to define an experience that mirrors the best of real life, what we get from friendships or any relationship where there is familiarity, respect, and context, and then propose ideas for adding that to our online experience. The first companies to deliver this new experience will create a massive competitive advantage through attracting and retaining customers. Those companies will own the messaging in the competition to be the voice of change and innovation.
There are people and situations we are drawn to and others we avoid, and it’s based on our identity, affinities, and other attributes. Each of us also has innate and learned traits, style, and preferences. Attributes of our identity and personality can be modeled, captured, and used to revolutionize how pleasing, respectful, informative, and/or beneficial an online experience is for a specific user, whether it is e-commerce, support, or a community chat. Developments in neuroscience provide us a roadmap for how to create more interesting and rewarding online experiences, so I’ve been asking, “how can we build more of this rich context and texture into our online activities?”
Since the late 1990’s, the Internet has generated massive revenue from gathering data on users and using it to classify, select, or discard them and predict their behavior. There are signs personal data collection has reached maturity on the technology adoption curve. There are signs of downward margin pressure due to increased consumer scrutiny and regulation. With the aging collection paradigm, how much more value can be collected? Dumpster diving in the alley with drones? OK, that was a jab but I’m just observing signs that the domain has matured, costs are rising, and margins will tighten. The concept that individuals have rights over data collected about them was made real by the EU. That signaled a shift in user expectations, and the oversight and approach companies would need to take.
The constraints with personal data collection pointed to the need for a new paradigm to lead the next era of Internet growth. That paradigm is user-driven identity and personalization.
The Big Shift to the Digital Channel
In-person ->to-> over-the-phone->to-> digital (mobile app or web site)
With each support channel transition, we gave up a bit of personal connection. That tends to get drowned out by the mantra that more efficiency means lower costs, which are passed on to the customer, yada-yada.
I’ve spent time in call centers, dual-jacking with agents to listen to calls; evaluating systems and training; and collecting and analyzing data to develop customer experience analytics. I saw the global issue with retention and training of agents and the resulting high costs. Shifting to digital support relieved many headaches but created emotional distance from complaints. a complaint via text is not as personal as one over the phone, and even less than one received in person. The trouble is, we have more customer analysis tools than ever, but we are also more personally distanced from consumers than ever.
A friendly, empathetic in-person representative, who has deep knowledge of business processes and is empowered to solve problems can handle a wide range of customer ‘exceptions’ (transactions that are low-frequency or may require review/approval). With call centers, agent desktops can pop up personal attributes and assessments of the customer who is on the phone, allowing a skilled agent to personalize service and resolve special needs. The automation of the digital channel has cut personalized service and ‘exception’ processing.
In the ‘real world’ we are drawn to experiences where we are recognized and respected and treated kindly, and we avoid people and situations where we are likely to be disrespected, unappreciated, and judged. During the 2020 lockdown, we had to get things done online, but often we realized these systems gave us no love (cue Eminem track).
Making Digital as Good as Real Life
Neuroscience and Psychology contribute many concepts and new findings that can enrich personalization. With text, audio, or even high-resolution screens, we greatly limit the potential richness of our sensory inputs and brain processing. Neuroscientist Anil Seth has explained that what we call reality is really a successive approximation built from successive predictions our brains make from sensory input, and each of our ‘hallucinations’ of reality are tied to who we are physically as well as our experience and learned behaviors. At a practical level that means with experimentation we can likely find ways to add context and meaning that personalize online experiences. We may find ways to game our predictor to make it more real.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman has explained that our vision is not like a webcam. None of our senses are lossless streaming devices. Our sensory inputs are best viewed as world-class exception processors, attentive to change or novelty, but lazy to the point of faking or skipping inputs that seem unchanged or insignificant. To understand how to improve the online experience, we must understand the range and depth of our perception in other settings, as well as how our experience and perception combine to make judgments about an interaction or setting.
What is the best of how we interact and communicate in “The Real World”? Consciously and subconsciously with a friend or a favorite colleague, we communicate elements like recognition, interest, and context. Some of what we communicate is explicit and conscious, some of what we perceive is subconscious, such as with many dimensions of spoken language (tone, inflection, word choice, cadence), as well as body language and particularly facial expressions. All of this combines to build the other person’s perception, such as whether the encounter was respectful, helpful, conclusive, or rewarding.
As IT connects business processes to customers using the Internet, they start with the simplest assumptions, aka the Happy Path. The Happy Path involves implementing a business process with the assumption that the customer conforms to a narrow set of requirements and does not require any special needs, which are known in systems parlance as ‘exceptions’. Because the cost and complexity of implementing the full range of process paths, such as those that are traditionally handled in-person or over-the-phone, the digital channel is often restricted to a narrow band of capabilities.
The result of Happy Path support is discrimination against customers whose needs fall outside of a narrow range. Any population will have a considerable number of cases that fall into a ‘long tail’ of needs, from the perspective of a normal distribution, which fall outside the Happy Path. This can be due to a customer’s own ‘exception’ conditions, like being the victim of fire, flood, loss of job, change of address, or ID/identity theft. Or, it can be simply due to the assumption that customer diversity is a problem, as detailed in the book, “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil. I personally had several bad online experiences when my wallet was stolen out of my locked locker at the gym. With some experiences, I felt like I was the criminal rather than the victim of a crime. If your status and needs fall within tight boundaries, you can get things done quickly and painlessly.
Walking through outlier cases helped me organize attributes related to identity and personalization, such as core identity, style, personality traits, learning style, affinities, and aspirations. I set up cases like, “think of how you interact with a longtime friend or business associate, where there is mutual respect”. I identified a starting context, information passed that is based on shared experiences, the ability to read the significance of information based on how it is communicated, and subconscious perception that is more accurate with familiarity. Is there a way to map this sensory and memory depth with real relationships to enhance the personalization of online interactions?
We also innate and learned traits that influence how we consume information. For example, we each have different strengths and preferences in processing textual vs. audio vs. graphical information, known as learning styles that have standard assessment tests. In the real world, or more precisely ‘a world we control’, we set ourselves up for success so that we consume information in a way that plays to our strengths. Why should the online experience be so foreign to that concept?
How do you adapt your environment to be most productive, relaxed, or creative? How do you get things done, digest information, get notified of important things, and make it familiar and personalized to feel grounded? What is your preferred cadence and need for detail, and how does that change if you are dealing with unfamiliar information? Are you more tunnel-focused on tasks or do your get value out of seeing connections and related items? Do you like to be surprised with something related and new and how frequently?
I have not encountered a recommendation engine that acknowledges my diversity of interests. If I’ve watched a few similar movies or read a few similar books, current engines pigeonhole me. Think of a personalized recommendation engine that knows the full range of your interests, nuanced affinities, and enjoyment of an occasional surprise.
Neuroscientist Eagleman and others have pointed out that our brains energize and create new and deeper neural connections with exposure to novelty. New experiences and challenges enhance our memory and create sensations of pleasure and reward. Personalization is about orienting online experiences to what we know of how our brains are stimulated, create new connections, and experience pleasure and reward.
There are many types of bias that we introduce due to human nature. Companies can easily create selection bias with their narrow-band support for business processes on the digital channel. To understand the diversity of needs across the existing or potential customer base, and what needs to be done to create a satisfying experience across this larger population, they need to go beyond the most readily available data. This data is likely skewed towards those customers who fit the narrow assumptions that comply with limited, initial process implementations.
There is evidence that bias is part of human nature. To counter this we can design systems with respect for diversity and how each person defines their own identity. User-driven identity and personalization can enrich the experience for every user and deliver more respectful interactions. The complete approach requires expanding support beyond narrow business processes to include the ‘long tail’ of customer needs. Given the nature of this data, users will have to actively participate in building their identities and agreeing on their distribution and use. This approach avoids privacy violation and forms a basis of trust and respect from the start.
The Three Fundamental Business Strategies
An opportunity for a fundamentally better, more personal connection that impacts one of the largest markets. Isn’t this the kind of arbitrage opportunity that built companies like Apple and Google? It’s a tenet of mine that as we put technology to work for us, we should always make life better.
Legendary management consultant, author, and Claremont professor Peter Drucker built a case that there are only three fundamental business strategies: Operational Efficiency, Product Innovation, and Customer Intimacy.
Operational Efficiency prodded, incentivized, and forced us to the digital channel. The novelty of the thing was cool so we didn’t fuss too much, but now it’s like death from 1000 cuts.
Product Innovation gave us one-click purchases and home delivery, very nice. But your next step is to put goggles on us to explore your metaverse? Sorry, that’s not me.
Customer Intimacy. It’s your turn to deliver on the Voice of the Customer. You need to drive the next chapter for the digital channel. With all our knowledge and technology, it’s possible to make it personal, respectful, and rewarding for everyone.
The business driver can’t be “the least-cost channel” anymore.
