3 Questions For Guilherme Rodrigues

How is the market changing from year to year when it comes to customers? What are the biggest challenges industries need to deal with?

I’d say that customers are not changing much. They are still people! Now, let’s look into behaviour and environment. What have actually changed around us? We have to be careful when we are walking in the mall as someone can just bump on you because he or she is messaging other one via WhatsApp etc. So, that has drastically changed the entire industry, top to bottom. Is there a problem? Something is not working, or your customer is not really aware of a service or product that you offer? They want to get in touch with you asap, regardless of the channel (Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, visit a physical store, you name it). In my opinion, this is the biggest challenge. Be meaningful and available when customers want you to be available for them, at their preferred channel to communicate. Bots can’t do it yet. Humans can’t do it yet. But both together can work towards a solution for that.

How to successfully create the ultimate customer experience? Is there an easy way?

There is never an easy way to the excellence. Firstly, listen to your customer. Run surveys and map your customer journey. Map it and make the customer journey visible to your colleagues, so that they can help and ideate as well. Secondly, list down what are the internal challenges the company faces. Service design blueprint may help here. Having this in place, business teams as well as CX teams will have the tools in place to identify what’s needed to excel in CX and provide customers with the product or service that is useful and meaningful for them.

How do you imagine a successful strategy for your business? What are the main attributes to focus on?

A successful strategy is the one that puts people at the centre of the business. The one that gives the opportunity for employees to speak. The one that listens to customer and reacts as fast as possible upon their feedback. And to orchestrate all this, an agile environment that allows employees to fail fast, learn and try again.

Guilherme is a User Experience Designer with more than 12 years in the IT field. He started working with UX back in Brazil, at HP, when he was part of the R&D team for Walmart digital products. In 2012, he moved to UAE and since then he has participated on relevant projects, such as the 2nd generation of SmartGates for Dubai airports as well as the Digital transformation for Etisalat, which gave Etisalat the valuable brand in 2017. Today, he focuses his time on Customer Experience and Service Design activities for payit, the first UAE’s fully feature digital wallet powered by First Abu Dhabi Bank