This white paper highlights the business value of customer experience as a differentiator and explores three critical enablers to guide organizations embarking on the transformation journey.

1. ACHIEVE MORE.
Transform the Customer Experience
to Increase Lifetime Value

2. CONTENTS
Introduction
Customer Expectations Have Never Been Higher
The Business Impact of Customer Experience
Reimagine the Customer Experience From the Outside-In
Managing Customer Value From the Inside-Out
Marrying the Outside-In to the Inside-Out
Enabling Experience Transformation
Three Capabilities That Drive Customer Experience
Capability One: Disciplined, Integrated Approach to Data and Analytics
Capability Two: Unique Experiences Through Personalization and Innovation
Capability Three: Customer Closeness and Agility to Support Continuous Improvement
The Self-Learning System: Bringing it All Together
Embarking on Your Experience Transformation Journey
Microsoft Customer Experience Transformation
This whitepaper highlights the business value of customer experience as a
differentiator and explores three critical enablers to guide organizations
embarking on the transformation journey.

3. In today’s business environment, classified as the “Era of Experience 1
” (Forrester), customer
expectations have never been higher. Customer experience is viewed as the “new competitive
battlefield” (Gartner)2
, and research shows that 89 percent of companies expect to compete
mostly on the basis of customer experience by 2016, compared to 36 percent four years ago.
An exceptional experience that continually meets evolving customer expectations drives
revenue growth, facilitates operational efficiencies, and strengthens relationships with
profitable customers. However, achieving market-leading customer experience requires more
than just a customer-centric approach. It requires organizations to embody a complete
transformation, reimagining the experience across the customer lifecycle both from
the ‘outside-in’ perspective of the customer and the ‘inside-out’ view of the organization.
Without an exceptional customer experience, many organizations run the risk of losing
customers to their competition.
According to research by Bain and Company3
, only eight percent of the 80 percent of brands
who think they are delivering a great customer experience have customers that actually agree.
This creates a gap between customer’s expectations and what a brand is actually delivering.
Organizations are failing to optimize the customer experience simply because they don’t
understand their customers. This is mainly caused by multiple touchpoints, such as websites,
social media, mobile apps, and call centers and the fact that customer data is not being
collected and/or integrated into the organization’s business processes. In essence, the brand
is not centering around the customer. Also, many organizations are not structured, measured,
or rewarded around sponsored customer experience initiatives which further complicates the
issues. The effect is a customer experience that is not personal and is inconsistent across the
organization’s business channels, resulting in missed opportunities in critical ‘Moments of
Truth’ along the customer journey. We define a Moment of Truth as a unique experience
(either positive or negative) that defines a customer’s lasting perception of their interaction
and relationship with a brand. The phenomenon we are seeing is that traditional businesses
are being overpowered by agile start-ups and industries are being completely redefined
primarily on the forefront of customer experience. Not thinking disruptively about how you
will compete through differentiated customer experiences will put your relevance in the
marketplace at increasing risk.
In the following pages, we will explore the advancement of customer experience, highlight a
holistic approach to managing customer value, and explore three key capabilities that
organizations must incorporate to achieve superior customer experience: data and analytics,
personalization, and continuous improvement. These three capabilities can be addressed by
using and integrating existing technology platforms to create unique customer experience
transformation. We believe that making an incremental investment to support the core
capabilities of customer experience through technology will pay off in exponential returns by
increasing customer value and loyalty.
1 - https://www.forrester.com/How+To+Prepare+For+The+Era+Of+Experience/-/E-RES57663?docid=57663
2 - http://www.gartner.com/document/3069817
3 - http://bain.com/bainweb/pdfs/cms/hotTopics/closingdeliverygap.pdf
Introduction

4. Technology innovation is accelerating at a rapid pace and customers are more connected
than ever before through a proliferation of media, devices, and networks. Because of this,
they continue to grow more empowered through near real time and widespread access to
information. Customers are in the driver’s seat. You want to attract and retain high-value
customers by creating an experience that is exceptional and differentiated. An exceptional
customer experience will have a personalized interface customized to meet specific needs.
It will have dynamic pricing in place to help make sure the price of goods aligns with
varying market conditions. It will enhance the experience through product or service
recommendations based on the customer’s unique needs and market demand, as well as
ensure that proper inventory levels are in place to meet those demands. This helps brands to
be more responsive to what customers want. In the age of empowered customers, addressing
all facets of the interaction is important, not just the front-end experience. If not, customers
will gladly move to the competition.
We define customer experience as the accumulation of interactions a customer has with a
brand throughout the full lifecycle of their relationship. In short, customer experience is about
engaging with your customer in personal, meaningful ways that are consistent across
channels. This type of interaction creates great experiences that keep them coming back.
Take a moment to think about the last time you conducted business with a brand that was
challenging to engage with. Maybe it was difficult to find the product you were looking for, or
you purchased the product only to find out after the fact that it was out of stock. Or perhaps it
was a face-to-face experience with an uninformed representative that left you feeling like just
another number. Would you go back to buy from them again? Many people do not.
Organizations that are able to identify where these misalignments or Moments of Truth
in customer expectations occur and take action to fix them are more likely to succeed
in today’s marketplace.
Customer experience is not just about cutting-edge, front-end user experiences and activating
new channels to engage customers, but is more about a holistic approach to connect people,
processes, technology, and information to effectively serve your customers.
Customer Expectations Have Never Been Higher

5. One of the major potential benefits of creating an experience-centric brand is the ability to
drive loyalty and increase the lifetime value of the customer. Transforming the customer
experience and tuning it for your profitable customers helps organizations to capitalize on the
opportunity to capture more wallet share and expand that customer base. It creates an
opportunity to increase the profits of less profitable customers by introducing innovative
ways of engaging with the brand that are more cost effective and preferable for them. It also
creates a level of “good” churn of unprofitable customers who prefer to engage in ways that
are expensive and unfavorable. This all affects the bottom line. According to Forrester,
the impact from a 10 percentage point improvement in a company’s customer experience
score can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue.
Many organizations struggle with understanding how to approach their customer experience
transformation. Their questions include: “Which customers should we focus on? Which
experiences are important to my valuable customers? Where are my customers’ experiences
already good enough? How can I increase the impact of my investments?” To increase profits,
an organization must design experiences that are in sync with their valuable customers’
expectations. If they under-deliver on their expectations, the business will lose those customers
to competitors. Over-deliver and the company risks driving up its cost structure. A balanced
approach is required, which requires market-leading brands to take a holistic, outside-in and
inside-out approach to customer experience transformation.
“Too often CX experts say that their companies must design customer
experiences that exceed customer expectations, and they don’t recognize
that they’re driving costs up and potentially driving profits down. They
have to strike the right balance. If you continue to deliver experiences that
way exceed your customers’ expectations, you reset expectations and you
change the cost structure. And unless you can capture revenue increases
or economic returns for that, you are losing profits.”
Julio Hernandez, Principal
KPMG Global Customer Advisory
The Business Impact of Customer Experience

6. Customers’ expectations and perceptions are effected by a variety of factors which can include
past interactions with your brand, experiences with other brands, public perception, and
word-of-mouth through their networks. Brands can learn their customers’ expectations,
behaviors, and motivations through data-driven decisions about their unique experience.
Designing the experience from the ‘outside-in’ through the customer’s perspective requires
gaining an understanding of your customer’s reality through the end-to-end journey,
including pain points and Moments of Truth (Figure 1). These are the critical interactions
throughout the lifecycle where your customers invest emotional energy (both positive and
negative) in the outcome. They can include awareness and social discovery (Zero Moment
of Truth), consideration to purchase (First Moment of Truth), the core product or service
experience (Second Moment of Truth) and the true test of a shared experience
(Ultimate Moment of Truth).
An example of a positive Moment of Truth would be providing an immersive experience
during the learn phase of the customer journey. It is the opportunity to captivate and convert
using a positive experience that is differentiated and unique. On the opposite continuum a
negative experience during highly emotional touchpoints, such as a poorly handled customer
service inquiry regarding a product failure or defect, could result in a churned customer. These
Moments of Truth are the opportunity to delight or disappoint and represent the ultimate
decision points that define whether that customer will do business with you or not. When a
brand is able to capitalize on these Moments of Truth, it leads to a stronger customer base
and hence an increased lifetime value.
One of the powerful aspects of a customer journey map is revealing the misalignments
between customers’ expectations and the company’s performance in those Moments of Truth.
This helps the company to prioritize transformation efforts and company investments
according to important customer interactions that have the greatest potential to captivate
and convert customers.
The customer lifecycle is how an organization operates and manages its business
processes around the customer journey. It takes an ‘inside-out’ view of the customer’s
experience through the company’s perspective at each stage to identify areas where the
organization can increase the customer’s lifetime value. The lifecycle, illustrated in Figure 2,
begins with the customer learning about your product or services, using them, making
additional purchases, and ultimately leads to brand advocacy as reflected
by the continuous loop.
The lifecycle is traditionally the primary way that organizations view their interactions
with customers. They tend to organize around these stages, which causes rigidity in
business processes and doesn’t represent the complete view of how the customer
is actually interacting with the brand. Aligning the customer lifecycle to the journey
is critical to moving toward experience centricity.
Figure 1: Understanding Moments of Truth Along the Customer Journey
Reimagine the Customer Experience
From the Outside-In
Managing Customer Value From the Inside-Out
https://www.forrester.com/The+Business+Impact+Of+Customer+Experience+2011/fulltext/-/E-RES59072?objectid=RES59072&al=0
LEARN
ZMOT FMOT
TRY / BUY USE
SMOT UMOT
RENEW ADVOCATE
Mobile Phone Ad MediaSocialDesktop In-personEmail

7. The crucial part of transforming the customer experience is to map the ‘outside-in’ view of
the customer journey to the ‘inside-out’ view of the customer lifecycle and understand the
Moments of Truth where organizations can take action. The key is not only to identify
misalignments between expectations and delivery but also to understand why they might
be occurring.
For example, the customer journey map might expose an emotional low point in the First
Moment of Truth, when the customer purchases your product or service. The failure in this
example is triggered by the interaction with both the web and mobile channels. On further
diagnosis, it exposes an experience that is not only inconsistent, impersonal, and not
integrated into the overall flow of the customer journey, but also disconnected from the
business processes, data, and applications. This can result in suboptimal conversion rates as
well as a drop in sales. As part of the customer acquisition process, organizations can use data
and technology to recognize an individual customer’s needs across channels and create a
more integrated and personal experience. This process helps organizations to be
more data-driven in their approach as well as to deliver an improved customer experience
across interaction points in the customer journey to increase potential benefit. Figure 3
shows the overlay of the customer lifecycle onto of the customer journey which illustrates the
merging of the two views.
Companies that do not take a holistic, ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ approach struggle to align
their capabilities and investment priorities with the customer journey and expectations. They
lack the ability to prioritize investments that address the overall customer journey and key
Moments of Truth (including integration with data and interaction points) to increase revenue
growth for the organization.
Marrying the Outside-In to the Inside-Out
https://www.forrester.com/The+Business+Impact+Of+Customer+Experience+2011/fulltext/-/E-RES59072?objectid=RES59072&al=0
Figure 2: Managing Value Across the Customer Lifecycle
LEARN
ATTRACT ACQUIRE
TRY / BUY USE
SERVE
ENABLE
EXPAND RETAIN
RENEW ADVOCATE
Mobile Phone Ad MediaSocialDesktop In-personEmail
Figure 1: Understanding Moments of Truth Along the Customer Journey

8. Use Existing Technology Investments and Grow Through Innovation
Delivering the desired customer experience requires organizations to center around the
customer journey, break out of traditional product and service silos, and alter their business
and operating models to be experience-centric. Figure 4 illustrates the stages of maturity that
organizations pass through on their evolution to market-leading customer experience.
Experience-centric brands start with a well-defined experience vision, design an effective
delivery approach across marketing, sales, and service and fuel the entire effort through a
strong foundation of analytics and technology.
Realizing this goal can seem daunting, but many organizations are making strategy and
investment decisions today that create market-leading and experience-centric brands.
According to Gartner research, fewer than half of companies see their customer experience
capabilities as superior to their peers, however two-thirds expect these capabilities to be
industry-leading or much more successful than their peers within five years. Achieving
a differentiated and mature customer experience is an ambitious, high-value goal that
introduces strategic and operational challenges as highlighted in Figure 5.
Customer experience maturity requires that aspects of the organization revolve around the
enterprise experience vision, and a number of critical capabilities must be in place to
effectively operate and continuously improve on that vision.
Enabling Experience Transformation
Figure 4: Stages of Maturity to Becoming Experience Centric
• Siloed organization
• Product line-driven P&L
• Traditional R&D approach
• Communicate the Brand
promise, uni-directional
• Customer segment-focused
organization
• Customer-driven P&L
• Use of deep customer insights
to develop new services
• Brand promise is evolved and
aligned to customers
• Matrixed & Virtual teams
aligned to defining and
bringing experiences to life
• Customer - AND Product-
aligned P&L
• Open innovation
• Customers experience the
Brand promise
PRODUCT-CENTRIC
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC
Figure 5: Challenges to Becoming Experience-Centric
• Not understanding the customer journey and the impact
of each of the touchpoints and interactions
• Not having leadership and organizational alignment
around common CX vision
• Not understanding how to measure CX for
the organization
• No incentive programs for the organization to
perform around a common CX initiative
• Customer touchpoints not integrated into legacy
systems and not aligned to delivering the desired CX
• Multiple systems of record for customer data with
no single integrated view
• Multiple systems of engagement with no
consistency of experience
STRATEGIC OPERATIONAL
“Business transformation takes more than just layering digital channels on
old business models. It takes a dramatic and sustained new direction that
is oriented to a new world of work, to a new way to use data and analytics
and a new approach that focuses on customer outcomes and desires.”
Chris Capossela,
Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of
Microsoft, The Official Microsoft Blog
https://www.forrester.com/The+Business+Impact+Of+Customer+Experience+2011/fulltext/-/E-RES59072?objectid=RES59072&al=0

9. There are three core capabilities that organizations must acquire to achieve experience
centricity: data and analytics, personalization, and continuous improvement. These can
be addressed both by using and integrating existing platforms and by investing in unique
experience innovations. Each of these capabilities are important in their own right, but they
must work together to create a transformative experience. Figure 6 depicts the importance of
each capability working together to create a data driven, transformative experience.
Capability One: Disciplined, Integrated Approach to Data and Analytics
Delivering experiences that meet evolving customer expectations requires a better
understanding of your customer. Data and analytics form the foundation to assess and
improve the customer experience by providing the fact-based insights required to execute
effectively and consistently. They link the customer-facing experience to the operational
back-end processes and ultimately to proving the profitable results of customer experience
initiatives.
Quite often, enterprises have the technology architecture in place to capture and manage
customer experience data but are challenged to integrate and translate the information into
actionable decision-making across the organization. The application of data and analytics can
transform operations to support the desired customer experience.
Three Capabilities That Drive Customer Experience
https://www.forrester.com/The+Business+Impact+Of+Customer+Experience+2011/fulltext/-/E-RES59072?objectid=RES59072&al=0
Figure 6: The Customer Experience—“Consistent, Personalized, and Self-Learning”
Data and
Analytics
Customer
Intimacy &
Continuous
Improvement
Personalization
Key data and analytics capabilities that enable customer experience transformation include:
• Agreeing on a common definition of the business
elements of the experience such as “customer”,
“interaction”, and “profitable”.
• Offering a single, consolidated view of a customer
by integrating data from customer touchpoints
including website, mobile application,
email, social media, branches or stores,
customer service, and surveys.
• Applying data governance and MDM techniques
for managing customer data
• Integrating and enhancing backend systems such
as CRM, ERP, and inventory to support
consistent business processes.
• Infusing predictive analytics into applications to
provide targeted offers or related products and
services.
• Projecting insights into business processes to
empower employees through customer
touchpoints to provide more personalized
interactions.
• Providing prescriptive analytics to recommend
an effective course of action based on the
learnings from past successes.
Understanding the customer through data is the
basis of a truly transformed customer experience.
By capturing data from every touchpoint and
integrating that into a single 360-degree view of
the customer, organizations are able to feed that
into predictive models to foresee customer needs and interact in a more personal and prescriptive
manner. Using data to its fullest is what will set apart the leaders in this competitive marketplace.
CASE STUDY:
Using Predictive Analytics to
Create Consistent Shopping
Experiences in Retail and
Consumer Goods
Pier 1 imports was seeking to improve
engagement of its customers—both online and
in stores—to deliver a personalized shopping
experience. By integrating data from disparate
sources, the company gained enhanced
insights into customers’ shopping behavior.
The company needed to find a way to use
the insightful data in a meaningful way. By
infusing predictive analytics into applications
they can now provide targeted offers or related
products to support business process and
employees through customer touchpoints that
provide more personalized interactions. The
Pier 1 imports solution will give the company
the ability to get to market faster and in a
more agile way using advanced analytics to
stay ahead of the competition.
Learn more about how Pier 1 is using data to transform
the customer experience.
https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.
aspx?recid=11257

10. Capability Two: Unique Experiences Through Personalization and Innovation
Transitioning from product-centricity to experience-centricity and converting customers into
loyal advocates requires that brands prioritize innovative experience investments based on
unique differentiators. Gartner predicts that by 2017, 50 percent of consumer product
investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations. Immersive experiences
put the customer at the core by applying deep customer insight and blending the digital and
physical realms to create consistent, personal, contextual, and memorable interactions.
Personalization and Contextualization
Brands seeking to captivate customers in Moments of Truth strive to deliver personalization,
which is demonstrated to drive increased conversion and accumulate to longer, more valuable
relationships. According to a report published by Walker Solutions, the customer of 2020 will
be more informed and in charge of the experience they expect. They will expect companies to
anticipate their individual needs and personalize their experience. Immediate resolution will
not be good enough as customers will expect companies to proactively address their current
and future needs. The ability to demonstrate understanding of historical interactions
throughout the course of the relationship is arguably the most visible aspect of experience
for the customer and has a great impact on advocacy and loyalty.
Think about the last time you had an in-person interaction with an employee representing
a brand. Was that interaction personalized? Was that employee equipped with the right
information to understand what offers or services would be relevant to you? This is the power
of data injected into business processes. If used correctly, data can be used to transform the
customer experience by projecting insights into many different channels, not just online.
An exceptional customer experience would empower the employee to understand which
customer they are interacting with and provide information like segmentation, scoring, or
likelihood to convert or churn and actually recommend what actions to take based on those
insights.
Blurring the Lines Between Digital and Physical
The proliferation of technology has changed customer expectations concerning the realm of
experience possibility. With information and technology at their fingertips, customers expect
brands to “know me,” “cater to me,” “empower me,” and “delight me.” Customers today are
less inclined to delineate digital versus traditional channels—the experience expectation is the
same. Interactions should be relevant, contextual, and consistent through any and all channels.
Brands on the leading edge of experience design are driving innovations that bridge together
the digital and physical touchpoints to create even more consistent, contextual, immersive,
and powerful experiences.
Technology, innovation, and deep, data-driven insights help organizations inspire customers
across both physical and digital worlds and drive loyalty along every step of the customer
journey. By tapping into innovative solutions like the Microsoft Azure data platform, HoloLens,
Kinect for Xbox, and the Internet of Your Things, Microsoft empowers marketers to win
customer hearts with rich, connected experiences. A good example of this is the way the Virgin
Atlantic Airlines uses technology to transform their customer experience. Using Windows
10, Virgin was able to innovate on how customers learn about what a travel experience with
them would be like through a virtual reality 360-degree experience. This provides a way for
prospects to experience the brand in an immersive fashion before the Moment of Truth. It
helps Virgin to engage with customers on a deeper level in order to captivate and convert
high value customers at increasing rates. By providing these types of innovative experiences,
organizations are able to transform the core business processes while still providing
differentiated value at the edge in order to compete.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/business-matters/2015/11/10/virgin-atlantic-brings-its-customer-experience-to-life-using-windows-10/

11. Capability Three: Customer Closeness and Agility to Support Continuous Improvement
How will you know you’ve “arrived” at experience-centricity? The ability to measure and
enhance the experience (in near real time) based on data-driven insight, and predict future
demands on customer experience, is a reflection of how close an organization is to its
customers. It also represents how agile and responsive its structures and processes are to
translate insights into action.
Customer experience measurement used to reflect the voice of customer feedback and
periodic key performance indicators, such as the satisfaction level. These concepts have
developed along with our understanding of how to holistically manage and capture value
throughout the customer lifecycle. To effectively measure and enhance the customer
experience, organizations must employ a comprehensive framework across the customer
lifecycle that marries the ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ perspectives. Measures like Net Promoter
Score, Customer Effort Score, and other customer advocacy measurements are some of the
ways of gauging the effectiveness of the experience. These metrics go beyond the notion of
just customer service, but really speak to how easy you are to do business with and how likely
customers are to recommend you to others. To drive business outcomes, these metrics must
be related back to how the organization makes money. Understanding the economics of the
relationship by measuring things like premium price, share of wallet, and relationship duration
along with traditional metrics such as average revenue per customer, average cost, and churn
will help tie effectiveness of the customer experience back to overall business objectives.
As many brands are thinking of innovative ways of engaging with customers, social media
is the new normal for marketing your products or services. Measurements like share of
conversation and sentiment analytics are becoming increasingly important in understanding
how much people are talking about your brand and what the perception is in the marketplace.
The lines between marketing and customer service are getting increasingly blurred with
social media in the middle. Being able to respond quickly to questions and issues which
are communicated on social media channels will position your brand for increased success.
According to Bain and Company , when companies engage and respond to customer service
requests over social media, those customers end up spending 20 percent to 40 percent more
money with the company.
Even more important than measuring the effectiveness of customer experiences is how
organizations react and take action to continually improve. To achieve true experience
centricity, organizations must participate in a two-way dialog with customers to make
informed decisions in a timely manner. This is an art that only mature experience-driven
organizations can perform effectively. It requires the organization to shift in its structures and
processes and adapt quickly to meet recent customer expectations or react to changes within
the marketplace.
Another example of agility supported by technology is cloud computing. According to
Forrester research, cloud computing can enhance customer experience initiatives by helping
organizations to experiment with updated technologies and deliver innovation faster than on
traditional investments. Platforms like Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft CRM Online, Microsoft
Dynamics and Microsoft Azure that augment legacy investments with innovative capabilities
such as CRM software as a service, collaboration, social, big data, advanced analytics,
and application innovation are prime opportunities to capitalize on improving customer
experience.
The Self-Learning System: Bringing it All Together
The final concept and perhaps the most important in transforming the customer experience
is bringing together the three core capabilities in the creation of a self-learning system.
Having the ability to adapt in near-real-time based on self-learning algorithms that monitor
interactions and provide prescriptive methods for reactions are key differentiators in today’s
competitive marketplace. Using data-driven, immersive experiences augmented with machine
learning can bring these concepts to life. Take for example in a, an organization using digital
signage enhanced with a webcam. The camera can be used to recognize faces and capture
emotions such as happiness or frustration. The system can then apply perceptual intelligence
to use these reactions to personalize the content on the signage in a more intelligent way.
Another example is using machine learning to monitor online chats with a customer service
representative. The system can “listen” for words that might signify the customer that is
unsatisfied and would intelligently escalate the inquiry through the right channels to rectify
the situation and possibly stop that customer from churning. Providing customers these
innovative and intelligent interactions creates an improved customer experience, which in turn
will drive increased customer value.
http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_Putting_social_media_to_work.pdf
https://www.forrester.com/Want+To+Improve+Your+Customer+Experience+Turn+To+The+Cloud/fulltext/-/E-RES119107

12. CASE STUDY:
Continually Improving Cross-
Channel Experience in Banking
Metro was a brash newcomer to a seriously
traditional industry. Their competitive strategy
was to redefine the relationship people have
with their bank by innovating customer service.
This helped the bank build a foundation for fast
growth - doubling in size year-after-year to more
than 500,000 customer accounts. Metro Bank
needed information about how customers interact
with the bank’s services across different channels
including branches, online, telephone, and mobile.
To provide innovative service, the bank captures
rich detail from multiple channels including call
center operations, mobile, and internet banking
experiences. “We get a real sense of how the
channels are growing and how they’re being used
by our customers and what services they use once
they are inside that service.”
--Bruce Ricoh, Metro Bank
Learn more about how Metro Bank is creating agility to
transform the customer experience:
https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.
aspx?recid=22883
CASE STUDY:
Using new innovative ways to
change the car-buying experience
in the automotive industry
Volvo’s vision for more human-centric design is
well aligned with the human-centric approach
taken with HoloLens technology – putting people
at the center of the experience. Imagine your
car buying experience at the dealership with the
complete virtual experience of the vehicle you are
interested in. Imagine
customizing the car of your personal
choosing, and viewing it at scale. You could have
access to the full array of options,
features and possibilities associated with every
car mak e and model. Imagine then seeing the
car you’ve configured, at full scale, as a high-
definition hologram projected into your garage
using the HoloLens technology, long before the
car has even been manufactured. This will help
Volvo sell cars at the dealership but also be used in
many other ways that will help Volvo break out of
the pack and compete.
Learn more about how Volvo is innovating to transform
the customer experience:
https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2015/11/19/
microsoft-hololens-and-volvo-cars-explore-the-future-
of-car-buying/

13. We know centering on the customer experience is fundamental to being world class. We also
understand that no individual or paper can tell you where to start. At Microsoft, we have the
privileged position of working alongside and assisting great brands around the globe that have
embarked on this journey. We have also started on our own transformation. From this effort we
have learned much about what works and what doesn’t as well as the roles of people, processes,
and technology to affect change. In introducing the role that information plays and the themes
of consistency, personalization, and continuous improvement we hope some ideas will resonate
for your customer experience efforts.
We’re often asked “what should we do next?” Our answer is that it depends on where you are
and where you want to go. We know it is a journey that needs to be punctuated with clear
incremental and tangible outcomes. In many cases, organizations already have the pieces in
place to start, it is just a matter of pulling it all together.
We would be delighted to share our experiences and look forward to your feedback and
questions. Our approach is to start with a basic maturity assessment with the core topics
introduced here, and work with you to develop a clear roadmap and quick hits to empower
confidence. We accomplish this task by using our experiences and those of our customers that
they share with the community. We want to partner with you to help you improve how you serve
your customers through data and technology platforms to transform your customer experience.
You can find out more at http://aka.ms/cxt or by contacting your Microsoft Services
representative.
Embarking on Your Experience
Transformation Journey
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