Personalization at Amtrak
Leading 50+ cross-functional leaders to create Amtrak's North Star Vision for personalized experiences.
Background
Personalization, in the simplest terms, means tailoring products and services to users.
It's a strategy used to develop stronger relationships with customers by considering their individual needs, thereby increasing customer engagement and satisfaction.
...Why?
56% of consumers across several industries say they will become ‘repeat customers’ after having a personalized experience — a 7% increase YoY compared with 2022 (Twilio State of Personalization report, 2023). Increasing expectations of personalization from customers validates the need for investment.
Some Personalization efforts are underway at Amtrak:
• Ongoing customer segmentation effort
• Monthly Product Discovery Sessions
• Customer Experience journey mapping
…and many others.
The Innovation Team was engaged at the executive level to unify these efforts.
We leveraged this as a flagship initiative to champion strategic foresight, service design and product management concepts, tools, methods, and governance to the enterprise.
We collaborated with multiple functions across the enterprise including Product Management, Commercial & Marketing, Experience Strategy Design, Digital Technology, and other stakeholders which we identified throughout the process.
🔍What problem are we trying to solve?
Amtrak’s services are mostly generic with minimal differentiation in the experience delivered across customer segments.
Amtrak does offer different classes of service — Coach, Business, and Acela — but the customer journey is relatively standard, irrespective of personal needs or demographic background.
While some efforts are underway to enable personalized customer journeys, these initiatives lack an overarching strategy as they occur within our highly siloed organization.
The enterprise as a whole doesn't have a good view into what different teams are working on around Personalization, or what their approach is.
🎯How are we solving it?
Create a Personalization North Star Vision at Amtrak by leading a cross-functional team of stakeholders to imagine a 10-year-out, aspirational view of a personalized customer experience, then identify the gaps between the future and current state to guide solutioning.
We'd need to bring everyone together to understand what's in-flight, where we want to go, and how we'll get there.
HOW DID WE GET THERE?
Leveraging user research, service design, and strategic foresight methodologies to bring the future in sight.
Process
Problem Space Discovery
I began discovery research with a literature review and desk research to gain context on the problem.
We needed a strong understanding of the topic, market, industry trends, and relevant work at Amtrak so we could be more targeted and efficient during primary research later.
I uncovered four major efforts which I defined as the current landscape of Personalization at Amtrak:
01. Monthly Product Discovery Workshops
These exploratory sessions held by Product Management are structured around value streams (e.g. 'Choose my Trip: How might we make the booking process more delightful?'). They aim to surface opportunities for teams to independently build on but lack a strategy for cross-enterprise alignment and continuity.
02. Customer360 Strategy
The Commercial team is developing a strategy to identify and improve all touchpoints with the customer — but it's unclear how we'll create a seamless experience across these.
03. Customer Experience x Teague Journey Maps
IN Q4 2023, the Customer Experience team collaborated with the design agency Teague to conduct an evaluation of the current digital experience and ideal future states. Capacity has stalled further implementation, and the opportunities identified are limited to the digital experience.
04. Customer Segmentation Analysis
Product and Marketing recently wrapped up a segmentation analysis of the customer base with McKinsey & Co. to understand who our customers are. Clear use cases have not yet been determined.
I found that personalization efforts were distributed across multiple disciplines and stakeholders — often with little coordination. These key players would be critical to engage when developing Amtrak's Personalization strategy.
In anticipation of upcoming stakeholder interviews, I assembled a stakeholder map with the individuals I preliminarily identified.
Industry reports and previous work at Amtrak were abound with insights.
I synthesized these into a 'Personalization Brief' as a starting point for executive leadership and key stakeholders to ‘get in the right mindset’ – with context on the problem and what upcoming work may look like. Highlights:
Click here to read the Personalization Brief.
I assembled this report with the help of our Service Design and Strategic Foresight Interns.
01. Personalization Goes Beyond Digital, But All Meaningful Personalization is Enabled by Data
Personalization is often thought of solely in digital contexts, but opportunities extend across service channels. Amtrak customers interact with staff to reach their destination — this provides a unique opportunity to explore ways to increase personalization for person-to-person interactions.
02. Personalization Presents a Privacy Concern to Most Customers
Personalization requires access to customer data, but they're increasingly wary of giving it up. 76% of customers are concerned about how companies use their data — however, 40% are more willing to share it if companies offer transparency and protection (KPMG).
Previous research from the Innovation Team validates this — customers expressed that they would provide certain data for net new capabilities.
03. Customers' Expectations of Personalization Vary by Demographic
74% of Gen Z’ers are interested in personalized products, compared to 67% Millennials, 61% Gen X’ers and 57% Baby Boomers (Salesforce State of the Connected Customer). Increased personalization is key to connecting with Gen Z, Amtrak's lowest ridership group.
Digging Deeper: Stakeholder interviews
I conducted stakeholder interviews to obtain direct, detailed insights from individuals most critical to the project's success — ensuring a deep understanding of needs and the current state.
Knowledge/functional domains of SMEs vary, so I tailored our interview guides to target specific knowledge gaps.
21
Internal interviews to determine existing challenges, opportunities, and desired project outcome.
1
External interview with a competitor to gauge what 'best in class' means for Personalization.
The list grows…
As I talked to stakeholders, I identified more people whose voices needed to be included. I expanded our stakeholder map, refining to denote ‘core team’, ‘steering committee’, and ‘secondary stakeholders’ based on level of involvement expected.
I learned a common issue at Amtrak is that projects move forward without understanding what relevant projects are in flight, and the success of projects can be negatively impacted by not having the right people included early in the decision-making process.
Since this was related to strategy, we felt it was important to make sure we gave anyone touching this space the opportunity to participate.
Primary Research Synthesis
I conducted thematic analysis to affinitize insights from stakeholder interviews into overarching themes, categorized into two groups: gaps in how Amtrak currently operates that pose challenges to achieving a personalized CX and opportunities for operational improvements and innovation in the customer journey.
I then used the insights to ideate and recommend key project deliverables and outcomes that would meet the needs of the business when implementing a cross-enterprise Personalization strategy.
I pieced them all together in an insight map outlining how we would address the gaps and take advantage of the opportunities – via the deliverables – to best meet the needs identified during research.
Industry reports and previous work at Amtrak were abound with insights.
I synthesized these into a 'Personalization Brief' as a starting point for executive leadership and key stakeholders to ‘get in the right mindset’ – with context on the problem and what upcoming work may look like. Highlights:
Click here to read the Personalization Brief.
I assembled this report with the help of our Service Design and Strategic Foresight Interns.
I conducted thematic analysis to affinitize insights from stakeholder interviews into overarching themes, categorized into two groups: gaps in how Amtrak currently operates that pose challenges to achieving a personalized CX and opportunities for operational improvements and innovation in the customer journey.
I then used the insights to ideate and recommend key project deliverables and outcomes that would meet the needs of the business when implementing a cross-enterprise Personalization strategy.
I pieced them all together in an insight map outlining how we would address the gaps and take advantage of the opportunities – via the deliverables – to best meet the needs identified during research.
Highlight: A Story of Siloes
One of my biggest findings here was that Amtrak is an incredibly siloed organization – a case of “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing”. We fall short in clearly defining who is doing what, our tools and capabilities, and how we are approaching problems.
Altogether, this impedes progress on high-level initiatives like Personalization, which require well-coordinated alignment to deliver a seamless customer experience.
Highlight: Data is King
Aptly put by Amtrak’s Director of Analytics and Information Management: “We are only as good as the information we’re getting and as fast as we’re getting it” – whether that’s customer insights or data about our trains. Meaningful personalization is enabled by data, so investing in data governance is crucial.
Service design is vital here – orienting Amtrak around efficient data pipelines will open a host of opportunities for personalized experiences and beyond.
Strategic research often surfaces needs that extend beyond the work of one specific project or team.
When defining deliverables, I assigned the ‘Out of Scope’ status to note efforts that were owned by other teams and in-flight. While we were making strategic recommendations, we wanted to encourage stakeholders to ultimately be responsible for setting strategy, as they are also responsible for driving it forward.
The Innovation team would support these critical efforts rather than owning them.
Defining Our Direction
Synthesizing our discovery research was a critical step in defining the direction of the initiative, as this outlined what we needed to deliver for the project to be a success.
📖
Reach alignment on a definition of Personalization
🌟
Develop a clear, top-down, shared vision and strategy via a North Star Vision service blueprint
🛤️
Develop a roadmap and competitive analysis to identify near-term opportunities
📜
Reach clarity on data governance, standardization, and access through formal guardrails and framework
📈
Identify KPIs that will help us measure success
🤝
Recommendations provided for what successful cross-organization collaboration looks like
📖
Reach alignment on a definition of Personalization
🌟
Develop a clear, top-down, shared vision and strategy via a North Star Vision service blueprint
🛤️
Develop a roadmap and competitive analysis to identify near-term opportunities
📜
Reach clarity on data governance, standardization, and access through formal guardrails and framework
📈
Identify KPIs that will help us measure success
🤝
Recommendations provided for what successful cross-organization collaboration looks like
I uncovered four major efforts which I defined as the current landscape of Personalization at Amtrak:
01. Monthly Product Discovery Workshops
These exploratory sessions held by Product Management are structured around value streams (e.g. 'Choose my Trip: How might we make the booking process more delightful?'). They aim to surface opportunities for teams to independently build on but lack a strategy for cross-enterprise alignment and continuity.
02. Customer360 Strategy
The Commercial team is developing a strategy to identify and improve all touchpoints with the customer — but it's unclear how we'll create a seamless experience across these.
03. Customer Experience x Teague Journey Maps
IN Q4 2023, the Customer Experience team collaborated with the design agency Teague to conduct an evaluation of the current digital experience and ideal future states. Capacity has stalled further implementation, and the opportunities identified are limited to the digital experience.
04. Customer Segmentation Analysis
Product and Marketing recently wrapped up a segmentation analysis of the customer base with McKinsey & Co. to understand who our customers are. Clear use cases have not yet been determined.
Aligning on Opportunity Space
A single project to design personalized experiences for the entirety of Amtrak’s diverse customer base would be biting off more than we could chew. We needed to narrow our scope for the project.
So, we discussed with key stakeholders and leadership to understand what made sense for the business – who are our biggest revenue-generators, and what aspect of the customer experience would be an impactful starting point to personalize?
We chose to narrow in on personalizing the communications we send out to customers.
• Personalized experiences requires significant infrastructure, so developing our ability to deliver targeted messaging is foundational to building and advancing towards the necessary capabilities.
• We expected that future engagements might focus on personalized experiences.
We considered past Amtrak customer segmentation work from McKinsey to prioritize Customer Segments 1 (Premium Frequent Travelers) and 3 (Group/Family Travelers).
• Segment 1 is our biggest group driving revenue.
• Our existing technology and capabilities allow us to communicate more easily with Segment 1.
• Segment 3 is unique from other customer segments in that it includes multiple customers travelling together; this broader opportunity space allows us to reduce overlap when ideating alongside Segment 1.
Before imagining the future, we had to understand our starting point.
We gathered 25 subject matter experts in a service blueprinting session to map out the current state of Personalization and Customer Communications for the chosen customer segments.
By engaging leaders from across disciplines, we wove together a comprehensive view of the experience we currently create for customers and how we operate as an organization to deliver it.
Journey Management Pilot via TheyDo
The Innovation team recently conducted an internal Proof of Concept to demonstrate the value of Service Design and Journey Management, enabled by the TheyDo platform.
We used Personalization as our first use case to pilot the journey management operating model with TheyDo.
Our service blueprinting session culminated in the creation of the As-Is Service Blueprint – a living artifact in TheyDo viewable to any of our stakeholders.
The blueprint revealed just how complex – and often inefficient – the operations behind Amtrak’s services are. Key findings:
01. Confirmed how little personalization occurs in Amtrak's customer experience today
02. Highlighted the significant reliance on manual processes throughout Amtrak’s operations
03. Revealed the breadth and non-standardization of our communications processes across the enterprise
Filling in the gaps.
After the workshop, we noticed gaps in our customer journey. We conducted additional research via consultation with SMEs to further build our understanding.
Simplifying the complex: three more artifacts.
The As-Is Service Blueprint led to the creation of three new deliverables key to understanding the current state: the Outbound Customer Communications Taxonomy, Universe Map, and Inventory.
