Blockchain — Making customers feel like true kings!

Addressing the consumer experience

You can’t run a business without customers. In today’s world of rapidly increasing customer demands, almost every business swears by the adage, “Customer is King”. Someone might argue saying, “Employee is king, not customer”. I’m not getting into that debate. Sorry!

This blog is about how businesses are struggling to make customers feel like kings. How can Blockchain make a difference in this area?

Every business has a few key functions that impact customer experience -

1. What process to follow to sell?

2. How we market to our customers?

3. How we share information with the customers?

4. How do we get feedback from the customer and iterate?

While all this is good, in the recent past, several episodes of customer privacy issues have surfaced up. The “Cabmridge Analytica” debacle is a classic example. In these times of uncertainty, a few key questions have to be addressed to revive the confidence of our customers -

1. How do we protect customer data?

2. How do we take the burden off the customers to show proof for inferior service, product quality or privacy breach?

3. How do we seamlessly incorporate and automate the consequences of non-compliance by a player?

Now these are the questions that Blockchain addresses in the customer experience segment. It’s a business agnostic technology which is driven primarily by the interests of the end consumers. Blockchain has enormous potential to improve customer experience especially in the areas where we need to -

1. Improve access for disadvantaged customers

2. Make business more accountable using and managing customer data

3. Increase data security

Let’s dive into a few important use-cases

Payments — Decentralisation and tackling double-spending

At Starbucks, you pay cash and the cashier confirms your payment. This is verified by a human. With digital currency, the verification mechanism is a little tricky. Person A can transfer $100 to Person B and still keep the value of 100 in their digital wallet. Bitcoin tackles this double-spending problem with the help of blockchain technology. It employs a confirmation mechanism and maintains a distributed, universal ledger.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin use blockchain to send money from one person to another. It’s a secure, transparent system that operations with no need for a central bank. Any two parties can transact without any need for a third party to track the transaction. The details of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is outside the scope of this article.

If you’re interested in understanding the very basics of Bitcoin, you must read this post written by one of my favourite writers, James Altucher — https://medium.com/the-mission/everything-you-need-to-know-about-bitcoin-f2a3be247a5b

Supply Chain — A blameless postmortem and improved service quality

With IoT, goods can now be tracked at each point of the supply chain. We can monitor the status of a package as it is moved from vendor A to vendor B and the payments at each transit. By recording all this information in blockchain, we can have a blameless postmortem when things go wrong.

No party needs to prove the delivery of a package in case of a loss or delay. The status of the transaction will be registered in a distributed ledger. This record is also tamper proof and a single source of truth. From an operations standpoint, this system also lays the foundation for proactive serviceability. We don’t have to wait for the customer to file a compliant for fixing issues in the backend.

Blockchain can also enable contractual obligations tied to specific actions through an “if/then” model. In this way, we can check if a contractual condition has been met or not. This system not only digitises paper work, but also automates the consequences of contractual non-compliance.

E.g. A customer signs a contract with a gas agency. The gas agency agrees to have the service available by a specific date. This condition is held in a smart contract. Then, we put in place the following if/then model in the blockchain network and the consequences are taken care automatically in the background.

If (the deadline is not met for service delivery) {

          initiate\_advance\_refund()

}
else if (service delivery happens on or before deadline) {

          complete\_customer\_payment()  

}

In today’s world, the real burden is often put on the shoulders of the customer. For e.g. Proof for poor service quality is often expected from the customer. Adding to the woes, third party intervention is usually need to verify the claims of contractual wrongdoings. Blockchain alleviates this problem with the help of these smart contracts.

Record Keeping — Consumer Preference Records

Customer data is increasingly getting sensitive. This could be PII, passwords, health records, sms preferences, political preferences etc.

There’s also a growing need to consolidate the disparate systems of records and maintain a single tamper-proof system.

A regulatory body of industry A may need to regulate the monetisation of consumer data, consumer privacy and taxation. In this use-case, Blockchain works hand in hand with the regulatory body. It enables consolidation, consistency and tamper-proof data recording.

E.g. A tele-marketer who’s a subscriber of ISP A wants to send an SMS to a subscriber of ISP B. If the records are shared with all the ISPs on a blockchain network, ISP A could prevent pesky calls and SMSs at the first hop itself.

This will save a lot of bandwidth and unnecessary backend calls. Any non-compliant vendor or tele-marketer could be easily tracked and penalised.

Penalising non-compliant players and transactions can also be automated using the smart contracts logic. Auditing exercises also become a straight-forward drill with the distributed ledger system.

In conclusion, I would like to highlight that Blockchain as a technology is here to also protect consumer interests and privacy. This is often overlooked. It has the potential to truly make customers feel like ‘kings’.

We’ll see more about the technicalities of Blockchain in the upcoming posts. The topics that you can expect -

1. Setting up an Enterprise Blockchain Network using the Hyperledger backbone

2. Writing a smart contract in Go lang for a system of consumer preference records

Thanks for reading. Happy block-chaining!