How Big Data is of Value for Improving the Customer Experience at AARP

By Curtis Generous
VP and Chief Technology Officer
AARP






With nearly 38 million members, AARP serves a wide array of customers:  caregivers, policymakers, advocates, digital communities, volunteers, and many others.  We produce the world’s largest circulation magazine and run the country’s largest refresher driving course.  We help older adults fight financial fraud and help them save money on their home energy bills.  Through our Drive to End Hunger, we have helped donate more than 30 million meals to hungry older adults.  We provide community-based technology training.  We advocate for people 50-plus in public policy.  We advocate for them in the marketplace by selecting high-quality, high-value products and services that carry the AARP name.  We help our members get discounts.

With so many offerings for so many customers, it is critically important that we use Big Data related technologies to enhance our customer experience.

Traditional Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) technologies are focused on providing reports and dashboards for operationally- based reporting.  Today, to provide the best customer experience, we need to go further.  Executive leaders and marketers want to gain more insights about the data to understand customer sentiments, analyze voice or chat data, understand current topics of interest or trends, and combine and analyze data from a wide range of IT and external business systems.

Here are some of the ways we are meeting that challenge at AARP:

• We are linking behavioral, transactional and customer interactional data to better understand customers’ expectations so that we can deliver the best possible value to our members.
• We are using in-depth data to personalize our members’ experience and what we can offer them.
• We are measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of our Contact Center agents and operations to continuously improve and deliver the best experience for our members, volunteers, and others who are seeking information from AARP.
• We are discovering what types of services and discount offerings are most valuable to our members so that, when necessary, we can redesign our offerings and services to make them more relevant.
• We are using Contact Center agent notes to constantly improve the ways in which our agents interact with our customers so that we provide a better customer experience and grow our relevance with our members.