"You can't outsource CX to the CX Manager " -
Andrea Prazakova
Thanks Andrea for having us. During the next 45 minutes, we are going to talk about customer experience (CX, Ed.). We always ask the interviewee to give a bit of background, what they are currently doing, what their personal journey was towards customer experience. So feel free to tell us a bit more about your journey.
Andrea: Thanks Frederic! My name is Andrea Prazakova, and we are recording from beautiful Dubai. I am an Innovator, AI, WEB3, Sustainability and CX evangelist. Currently I’m a Senior Vice President at Mastercard (EEMEA – Eastern Europe Middle East & Africa region), which spans more than 80 countries. In this role, I look after three areas:
I consider myself very lucky because I think I have the best job in the company, I can work on areas which are defining our future such as AI, sustainability, and gaming.
As for the second part of your question, I’ve been in customer experience for many years without realizing it. In 1992, I started at the Raiffeisen Landesbank in Austria, where I worked in a branch, servicing customers – which is also giving ‘customer experience’. And I always wanted customers to be delighted and to help them before they needed it. I believe this is a trait that is inbuild in my DNA.
From there I had couple of breaking milestones in my career.
The first one for me was around the year 2000, when I was still working for Raiffeisen in Vienna, heading the sales and service channels for Eastern Europe. Back then, I was implementing a sales channel strategy, and there were two important parts to this. One of them was remodeling branches – in the traditional European retail banking, you would have one counter for this, one counter for that, one counter for something else... And to me, this was miserable experience. You had to queue before each cubicle, and it felt very intimidating. My bosses Chris Davis and Herman Bender, gave me this project to come up with a concept for branches in Eastern Europe. So together with the agency and another colleague of mine Hendrik Bremer, and we came up with the idea that a branch should be like a hotel. Right where you come in, there would be a concierge – we would call them meet-and-greeters. This meet-and-greeter would welcome customers, walk up to them and say, ‘What can I do for you?’ We also shifted desks – the goal was to help the customers from A to Z. Imagine our people had to be more multidisciplinary in terms of knowledge. Customers didn't have to queue multiple times. We also enhanced the proposition with service-level agreements. And we equipped our employees with techniques like self-assessment, observation, their own feedback. It all made me realize how much power you have if you give customers great experiences. But on the other hand, there was a lot of resistance: Banks don't operate like this, you need to have glass between you and the customer… so you also need to change the culture and the minds of the people. This was my first ‘aha’ moment.
The second breaking point came in 2014. I went on an innovation tour in San Francisco with European Financial Management Association. It was always with a small group, and they organized amazing visits to companies like Google, Facebook, PayPal, Ripple, Capital 360 and many more. During that trip, I met a remarkable lady, Maria José Jorda Garcia, who was Head of Customer Experience for BBVA at that time. I didn't even know that kind of job existed, but she introduced me to design thinking. And that completely changed my life: I pursued extra studies (also at Stanford Design School, Ed.), and it elevated my understanding of service design, design thinking and system design.
It was a long answer, but it was also a long journey. (smiles)
So, Andrea, you now work at Mastercard – when did the switch come? And did you start at Mastercard directly within customer experience or not?
Andrea: No, I didn't. But it’s an interesting topic because many companies create a customer experience function, and management thinks they can outsource the whole experience to that person, while I believe customer experience should be part of everybody's job description and everybody's life.
I was in banking for about 23 years before I joined Mastercard. Back then, I was heading the retail and SME business in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Botswana and Mozambique for Zimbabwean BancABC. I was Group Head of Retail, and customer experience was part of my job description. At that time, I put all my direct reports through a design thinking training, and I also implemented a new branch concept in all the 5 markets.
When I joined Mastercard in 2015, I started as a Head of Enterprise Business Solutions, which was an area that was looking after more complex projects from inception to implementation. It fitted well with my obsession with customer experience. This function was introduced by Raghu Malhotra (President, Global Enterprise Growth at Mastercard, Ed.), and his idea was that we need to start to understand our customers better. We need to do the mapping, understand their needs, empathize with them along the journey, then create the solution and build it right, which is quite new as well. And I had the privilege to do that with many banks here in the UAE (United Arab Emirates, Ed.). At that time, Ajay Banga (former CEO of Mastercard, Ed.) was still the CEO, and he announced a Chief Experience Officer, Donald Chesnut, and I remember that I went to my boss at the time, and I said that I wanted to head CX for the EMEA region. In the end, I got the job, and I was the first regional person on customer experience for Mastercard.
Each time I also ask for a definition of customer experience. Normally, I get different answers because it's sometimes difficult to give one definition of customer experience. So, what’s your definition of CX?
Andrea: Let me use a metaphor for this. I think that you can compare customer experience to a relationship. Because a relationship is full of interactions, full of understanding for each other and full of empathy. A relationship is also full of different touchpoints. And I think that customer experience is exactly that.
But we often forget that, because customer experience encompasses every single time you interact with a brand. It's how the brand looks, how the brand smells, how they engage with me when I call them, how they deal with negative scenarios, how their website is… So every single touchpoint, interaction and emotion I am exposed to as a consumer – or as a partner in a relationship – that's the entire experience. And you have a couple of master brands that are mastering the relationship with the consumer, and others that need some heavy counseling.
Sometimes people also need to step out of their daily job and ask themselves: What can I do to make my experience great, how can I transfer the right kind of attitudes and emotions to deliver a better customer experience?
CX is a constant evolution, and you need to be curious. For instance, I have two kids, who are Generation Alpha – they are virtual natives and have very different expectations. They are also much smarter than we were at their age. Today, as a company, I cannot only think about experiences I create for today's consumers, but I really must invest heavily in the experiences for future consumers. How do I build new technology? What do I need to do to not fall behind? But how I am consuming today, they will not. They will have implanted chips, will do everything by voice, it will be more difficult to keep them satisfied. I think that the generational impact will be quite significant.
Absolutely. And it's a challenge for a lot of companies. What I also see in the Middle East is that people sometimes confuse customer experience with customer service. What are for you the similarities and the main differences?
Andrea: I like that question. Well, I think that customer experience is the overall relationship with a customer. Every time I interact with you, every time I speak to you, how I make you feel as a customer.
Customer service is more of a subset of CX – how you fulfill something, that it happens in two hours, or it happens in 60 seconds, or you send me an e-mail back. That's also the reason why you have service design within customer experience – so that you can identify what the process is, the documents and the time needed for it…
It’s a big misunderstanding in the community to think that customer experience is customer service. They are two different things – one is a subset of the other.
If you want to implement a CX strategy, it takes a long time. So what are for you the main components of a good customer experience strategy? You've already talked about the service design part.
Andrea: Before I go into the practical details of a CX strategy, let me talk a bit about company DNA. I think that's critical because no tools in the world can make a company customer-centric if the top management doesn't believe in it. It’s critical that the company management really believes this is something important so they live it, demand it and lead by example and most importantly put funding behind it. One shouldn’t have a customer strategy just because everybody else has it. But you need to acknowledge that a CX strategy is something that will elevate your brand, increase your shareholder value and make you more profitable.
For me, the following components are very important in a CX strategy:
Now that you're talking about data, we see that a lot of companies are investing in NPS (net promoter score, Ed.), and they all go after a high number. But we also see that a lot of companies have so much data that the customer's answer or the customer's behavior is already inside the data. What's your take on it? Are you saying, OK, we still need to send out a lot of customer surveys, or are you saying no, normally we should have enough data to analyze everything related to the customers’ behavior and feedback?
Andrea: Well, in the past, you would have different types of scores: It could be NPS, it could be CSAT (customer satisfaction score, Ed.), it could be your internal surveys, which tell you that you’re great. I'm not a big fan of net promoter scores and traditional satisfaction surveys because they don't give you enough meat. They give you a generic perception of people who you didn't identify as opinion leaders or stakeholders.
Personally, I feel that we need to move away from this because it doesn't give you the reality check. I mean, even if you’re a new company, you know what the customer data is telling you. You need to be able to read the data, connect the dots, validate, and run predictability models with possible impact. Not only understand what the important parameters are, like what the attrition is, how often your product or service is used but most importantly why is this happening. With AI today, you can find the root cause of a problem and even understand the tone of voice: Was the customer frustrated on the call? How long did it take them to resolve it? Did the customer call again, and after he had this experience in a call center, did he do any more transactions, or did the transactions drop down?
With having the right data and AI strategy around learnings from customer feedback, I think it's far more important than measuring customer satisfaction in a traditional research manner. Also, research questions are created by humans, and they are answered by someone who might not have exposure to everything that you do. I would start to move more towards the technology part. Because the data is there, we just need to mine it.
Are you particularly proud of something you did here at Mastercard regarding CX? You already said here you need to take small steps, but was there a step of which you say: this really moved forward CX?
Andrea: Since you talk about small steps, I want to call out a small project which I did here during COVID: We tried to understand what the customer was going through. For us, this is our consumers, our merchants, our government partners and our banks. Some of our people came up with ideas, but when you looked at the ideas, many were designed inside out. But we wanted to hear from the customers themselves, so we started with a “customer proximity movement”. A community of colleagues who truly cared about our users. We created this community in EEMEA, trained them and gave them five questions. The goal was to reach out to your neighbor, your friend, to somebody who has a company and ask them these five questions on their current state.
You also need to understand that Mastercard is not a B2C company (business-to-consumer, Ed.). Our account teams usually engage with customers to sell something. You don't ask the customer how they're feeling and what they're doing.
There was some skepticism at the start, but we had about 70 people who volunteered to participate. And some of them did up to 14 interviews. The results were great:
Next to that, we also have the listening-in series. We outsource this to some agencies, and then our employees can dial in and listen to the interviews. For example, we have a product in Uganda and Kenya, and there we did interviews with some farmers. These interviews were in Lingala, so we translated them. There was a farmer who was using our product, and he paid for his solar power by phone. And for him, this payment service provided a big solution: The lions didn't come to eat his kettle anymore because he had light.
When you are sitting in Dubai, creating a new product, you would never have been able to create that connection. For me, it’s about bringing human experiences to your consumers, even when they are far detached from your world. And to me, this is the real power of CX: listen and get closer to your customers. With AI you can now augment these initiative with using powerful tools such as Syntheticuser to combine human input, real data and synthetic data.
If you want to implement a CX strategy, there are a lot of obstacles to tackle. You already mentioned a few of them. What are, according to you, the main obstacles that companies are facing?
Andrea: To be honest, it’s the people. We are sometimes our own biggest enemies (laughs). So it’s up to the decisions that people are taking.
With the new technologies of today, we can move much faster: API-enabled technologies, chatbots, AI, Chat GPT…
Ultimately, it’s the commitment of people to make the investment in CX. If you see that it takes two to four years to implement a CX strategy, you need to have the right people to decide, put the money down, set up the right teams and make the change in the organization. Are you able to take 2% of your margin and reinvest it in CX, knowing that it will come back to you in maybe four years with more growth? The reason I am putting the time for 24-48 months is that changing people, culture and technology is simply not easy in big companies. What is critical that you look at Customer experience next to community and loyalty as no negotiable parts of your company fabric, otherwise you will have a Kodak moment.
Are there for you some good CX examples from some companies here in the region?
Andrea: Let me start with one out of the region: Apple. I’m a big Apple fan. Like the moment that you buy a new Apple phone and you just put the old one next to it, and it transfers your whole profile.
Here in the region, we have Instashop (grocery delivery app in the UAE, Ed.). This is a really great example, it's a marketplace for different shops. The beauty of it is that as a consumer, you don’t need to go to the native apps anymore because Instashop is consistent in terms of how you experience it, when your goods will be delivered, where the driver is, if the product is not there, they call you and you can choose other products. I also hope that banks get more inspired from what retail is doing. Retail is obviously so much better in resolving complaints and customer issues.
Also, Careem (Dubai-based super app, Ed.) is amazing. You know, as a parent who works, you don’t always have time to do shopping. For instance, when your kids come home after school and say they need something for tomorrow, and you don't have the time to get it for them. Then Careem is like your extended arm: just give them a picture on the app, they go to the store, call you back, get the product and bring it to you.
I deliberately pick up these three companies as they make my life as consumer easy, deliver fantastic experience, bring me into community of same minded users and deepen my loyalty through constant innovation and reward.
There are multiple companies who address real pain points of consumers right now. For me, it goes back to design thinking, empathy and understanding your customers. Who will you target and how will you solve the pain points for, e.g., working parents, people alone, older people, younger people…?
CX-Dubai: Thanks for this, you gave me some very good examples of customer experience here in the region. Now, how would you evaluate CX maturity within a company? We know it sometimes takes 3-5 more years to implement a CX strategy. What is the checkpoint when you can say: We have now reached a good level of CX maturity?
Andrea: Each company needs to define this for themselves. There is no one-size-fits-all because we are in different industries.
What’s critical for me is how you define success and what you aspire to. You need to have checkpoints to verify what will be delivered by a certain time. For instance, you are monitoring a group of customers who had problems before dropping out on a web shop, and now are not dropping out anymore. You need to be able to measure the solution to the problem by a certain time.
Not even Apple will ever think that they are perfect – that's also why they are constantly evolving and strive to do better and better.
Which means that as a company, you need to be flexible. Do you think that when you implement a customer experience strategy, you need to apply an agile way of working? Or is it not important how you do the implementation of certain customer experience concepts?
Andrea: I don't think there is a perfect recipe. For me, there are instances where you want the specialist to be only on their own. And then there will be areas where you will have multi-disciplinary teams working together to solve the challenge.
But I feel that it needs to be a combination. For maybe 80% of your CX projects, you should work agile, and then you have specialized areas where you want the specialists to go as deep as they need to. AI is a good example: You really need to have very deep knowledge about this specific area.
What do you see nowadays as the top trends in the CX space?
Andrea: One word: “DATA” with its all different facets of utilization. I think that with the large language models and the utilization of machine learning, deep learning and generative AI, one of the examples is be hyper-personalization. It's the biggest trend we’ll see in everything we touch: health care, sports, shopping, banking… and it's expected by consumers, and it will be even more expected by the next generation.
I believe that this type of personalization will require us to take a different approach to agility: How will you design such customer experiences? Hyper-personalization will need clear data & AI strategies and being able to mine the right data, understand what data you want to keep, connect data, access data and how you adjust it and make the experiences agile. I think that's the biggest trend we’ll see, which will define a new era of customer experience.
I also believe that blockchain will play a massive part in customer experience within the virtual world. Companies today need to be able to cater for experiences in the real world and in the WEB3. Blockchain with smart contracts, CBDC (central bank digital currency, Ed.), provenance, will play a massive role in it. In the future, you will have your tokenized Identity with some data aggregated that you can expose in the physical and in the digital world. So I think all of these things.
Do you see generative AI as a real game changer?
Andrea: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Many companies have been using machine learning, deep learning and large language models for many, many years.
I think that generative AI will have a big impact on learning and development. By applying AI, you should be able to determine a specific curriculum for your children which will maximize their abilities to what they're capable of. Also in healthcare, the predictability of data will help us to live longer and healthier.
With my team, we are now experimenting by using AI with a full design thinking process. The goal is not to automate the design process but to augment it. If you assume that about 60% of our tasks will be automated, a lot of jobs will go away. But there will be another percentage of tasks which will be augmented and will help you to do your job better. And then there will be completely new jobs that will be created. So, from an experience perspective, the augmentation of user experiences will be very significant.
We must be aware of the dangers too – deepfakes, cybersecurity and so on. But I think that on the positive side, it will change our lives for the better.
I saw that you're also responsible for ESG. Has it to do with the fact that a lot of companies see social responsibility as something that is closely related to customer experience?
Andrea: No, it's just a coincidence because I'm passionate about it. But, of course, it's an area where you experiment more and do new things. There is a close correlation with innovation, customer experience and research and design. Sustainability needs to be woven into every solution and experience design. Not only from proposition perspective, but computing power, impact on resource and much more.
With ESG, you have three components: the environment, social responsibility, and governance. But from an experience perspective, you are also required to give your customers a lot of information: the use of chemicals, the impact on the environment, the provenance of certain ingredients. A lot of times, you need to design this from an experience level for your customers. Enablement and education of consumers is important in this.
On the other hand, a lot of the sustainability efforts are not standardized yet. Europe is trying to put some kind of standards in place, and the UAE announced that they will introduce standards for SMEs, which I think is super important.
Tomorrow, I’ll have an interview with Grégoire Charpe-Civatte (Group Director, CX & Innovation at Majid Al-Futtaim, Ed.). Do you have a question for him?
Andrea: Yes, he is amazing – I met him at a conference once. He’s an ambassador of great innovation/customer experience. I have a question for him as a consumer: How, from an experience perspective, will they bring the sustainability part into the shopping experience at the malls? Because today, it's a lot about consumerism, and there is a massive amount of waste, so how do you build experiences from there on, and promote more sustainable consumption?
A last question: What's your take on personal branding? Because I see a lot of companies where the CEO, who was always wearing a suit, now has a whole new image. For instance, at Siemens, where the CEO (Roland Busch, Ed.) wears a leather jacket instead of a suit. So what's your take on this personal branding?
Andrea: It's interesting that you call it branding. I see it from a slightly different perspective.
Let me give you an example of a banking branch. When I grew up, when you went into a bank, you were a bit scared: There was marble, glass, police officers… It was intimidating. So banking was not a nice experience. Today, it’s more open – people are welcoming you, which is a very different experience.
The same happens in the C-suites. You want to humanize yourself, be authentic and remove barriers. People are very attentive to the way they are perceived. For me, personal branding is about being true to oneself, as exemplified by my preference for the 'woman in the red dress' persona. This evolution in corporate and personal presentation aligns with a more engaging and approachable customer experience.
Thanks for the interview, Andrea!