**COVER STORY** | CIO 100
Illustrations: Brian Stauffer
Signet Jewelers was determined to leave no stone unturned in its mission to become an omnichannel retailer. To deliver on its vision of connected commerce, a seamless customer experience that transcends both in-store and online channels, the company spent months polishing a strategy and perfecting its IT roadmap. Then COVID-19 hit in March 2020, shifting a methodical, meticulous digital transformation plan into high gear.
“When COVID-19 hit, we were ready,” says Howard Melnick, CIO at the jewelry giant, which encompasses brands such as Kay Jewelers, Zales and Jared. “Our strategy didn’t change, but COVID became the massive accelerant for our digital investments.”
This past year of pandemic-induced lockdowns, supply chain disruptions and remote operations put IT to the test. As companies scrambled to keep business going, IT was retooling systems and networks to support remote work, redesigning online shopping experiences to keep customers buying, and reimagining products and services for a new era of customer and employee engagement.
Many IT organizations found themselves starting from scratch, having to spin up completely new digital initiatives in a matter of days. Others, like Signet Jewelers, had a head start and could fast-track initiatives already in the works to keep the enterprise moving forward and revenue coming in. Whether digital initiatives were new or fast-tracked, for 82 percent of companies, IT was at the heart of the pandemic response, according to CIO.com’s State of the CIO research. In fact, 65 percent of survey respondents confirmed technology was instrumental in delivering alternative face-to-face communications, while nearly half (47%) saw an opportunity to adapt products and services to meet new demands, and 45 percent were able to wield technology to deliver products and services in new ways.
Not only were the COVID-19 digital changes sweeping, they were swift. A McKinsey & Company global survey of executives found that companies accelerated digitization of their customer and supply chain interactions as well as their internal operations by at least three to four years, with the number of digitally enabled products in their portfolios sped up by a dramatic seven years. The McKinsey research determined that companies acted 20 to 25 times faster on digital transformation efforts than they expected, and 43 times more quickly to accommodate remote work than they would have thought possible prior to the pandemic, cutting a typical year-plus process down to an average of 11 days.
Customer and employee experiences that sprung up overnight during the pandemic are now firmly entrenched avenues of engagement. Nearly 62 percent of McKinsey survey respondents said changes made to accommodate new customer experiences will continue post-pandemic, and more than half (54%) said advances to support remote work will evolve as companies move into the next chapter.
With remote and hybrid work models now entrenched, experts expect IT investment to be channeled into new mobility enhancements, better forms of connectivity and innovations such as augmented reality, digital white boards and AI-powered automation. “In the past, flexible remote work was seen as a perk or a check box on a list,” notes Andrew Hewitt, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “Now, the question will be: Do you do remote work well, and is the company investing enough in technology, cultural and organizational resources to enable anyone to be successful under these conditions?”
Here are the stories of how Signet Jewelers and four other 2021 CIO 100 award winners turned short-term pandemic projects into digital innovations destined to have lasting impact on employee and customer engagement.
On March 23, 2020, when Signet Jewelers realized it would have to shutter 2,500 stores for the foreseeable future, the No. 1 issue was figuring out how to reach customers and keep business going.
Execution of the company’s vision to create connected commerce experiences as part of its omnichannel retail strategy was already under way, but the stakes rose considerably as store closings and work-from-home sales reps created fresh urgency to pull the trigger on work-in-progress changes. The jewelry company needed a creative way to engage customers and replicate the one-on-one “see, feel and touch” in-store experience remotely. It also needed to furnish 2,000 of its jewelry consultants with digital tools to help forge customer relationships and continue selling products.
The resulting Virtual Jewelry Consultant initiative—which leveraged technologies such as chat, video, co-browsing and a streamlined and secure network login capability—reimagined the jewelry-buying experience while empowering employees to work effectively from home. “We wanted these individuals to provide a personalized experience, but it had to be ubiquitous for any customer in any location when they started talking directly to the virtual concierge,” says Jeff Monteforte, Signet Jeweler’s senior vice president of IT store and field solutions.
In partnership with stakeholders from merchandising, supply chain and in-store operations, Signet IT laid the groundwork for a holistic digital-first strategy in a new retail environment. The first step after the store closings was to ensure a safe and seamless work-from-home environment. This started with equipping sales reps with a mobile tablet that dynamically connects via a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection as opposed to using the team member’s home network. Next was modifying and refactoring in-store legacy apps such as its CRM system to work securely from the remote environment while simultaneously supporting the new virtual consultant features.
As the capabilities evolved to include customer-initiated calls with video, AI-enhanced chat and customer to virtual jewelry consultant co-browsing functionality, the team was equally focused on the customer journey and the employee experience. “We didn’t want jewelry consultants to have to figure out how to log into the tablet and connect to the VPN—we built it in to make it seamless so they could focus on selling,” Melnick says.
Howard Melnick, CIO, Signet Jewelers
With brick-and-mortar stores now open, Signet Jewelers still sees strong demand for online shopping, underscoring the significance of its connected commerce strategy and the importance of refining its Virtual Jewelry Consultant experience with even more features, such as augmented reality “try-ons” and AI-fueled search for finding similar jewelry, Melnick adds.
Competitors are pursuing many of the same virtual capabilities individually, Melnick says, but Signet Jewelers’ omnichannel approach is what sets it apart. “People want to view online and in-store as one experience—maybe they start online and end up in a store,” he explains. “We meet each customer the way they want to shop, and from the customer perspective, it’s still one journey.”
Even before COVID-19 hit, reinsurance company Everest RE increasingly found its underwriters drowning in mundane tasks and laborious paperwork to gauge financial and risk exposure across its extended portfolio. But then it faced major loss events such as wildfires, nationwide riots and the global pandemic.
Traditionally, business executives, underwriters and legal teams would spend weeks or months reviewing and searching through thousands of pages of contracts to understand and forecast financial risk exposure on events. Those efforts took time away from revenue-generating activities such as writing additional business, degrading productivity and undermining clear risk analysis, according to Sumeet Maheshwari, Everest RE’s vice president of automation and innovation.
Enter Project EVE, a cognitive search cloud service that uses AI technologies, including voice recognition and chatbots, to recognize industry-specific clauses within the context of a contract while scanning through thousands of documents to deliver real-time answers to questions within seconds. EVE was designed to understand risk financial exposure from a variety of views and personas. For example, property underwriters in Europe or North America both looking for exposure due to the COVID-19 pandemic would be handed search results specific to their geographies or to specific events that led to relevant catastrophic circumstances, Maheshwari explains.
Since its implementation in August 2020, EVE has helped enforce consistency in language across contracts and Everest RE divisions, clarified risk exposure across portfolios and facilitated forecasting to aid in future claims. The system’s human-like ability to process text and understand language is the key differentiator, providing a contextual level of understanding that makes information analysis faster and more accurate. Maheshwari says from a productivity standpoint alone, the system has led to $5 million in additional revenue booked, as underwriters were able to focus on new sales instead of having to search contracts for insights on past business.
The biggest challenge in orchestrating EVE was getting IT to embrace a business mindset that allowed for understanding the critical business terms and contract review workflows. To train the model, the IT team had to build an AI machine that thinks like a lawyer, which required new skill sets. “We had to wear an analyst hat to really understand the complexities behind contracts,” Maheshwari says. “We had to invest the time to understand legally worded contracts and what they mean.”
Couple that with kicking off a high-risk, high-profile project during a pandemic when key players were dispersed, working from home. There has also been a groundswell of demand as every underwriter scrambled to examine every contract to gauge pandemic-related risk exposure. Maheshwari expects requests for EVE to grow among other business units and for AI to become even more entrenched moving forward.
“AI is for real, and it is here to stay to bring efficiencies to work across all domains,” he says. “Regardless if underwriters are in the office or working from home, we are creating capabilities to do more with less.”
In its 40 years of business, Road Scholar has served up educational travel-based adventures to older adults while surviving a slew of world events, from political instability and natural disasters to 9/11 and the 2008 recession. Last year’s pandemic, however, was a different story.
Amid global shutdowns, Road Scholar’s travel business came to a halt for an indefinite period, leaving the company to figure out a new product line that could create an alternative, meaningful revenue stream. Online content was the natural pathway, but Road Scholar was determined to go beyond instructional material to instead design and deliver a product that was consistent with its mission and would appeal to an audience partial to interactive engagement with instructors and fellow travelers.
Using standard Zoom videoconferencing technology, the Road Scholar team created three pilots for the new Adventures Online program, a group learning experience where educational content is paired with opportunities to discuss the themes of the region as well as form bonds with other participants. The courses, now numbering more than 60 with 1,500 enrolled travelers, typically run for three to four hours a day, three to five days a week, and feature extras such as Zoom breakout rooms, in-depth videos of travel locations, and private discussion boards to encourage ongoing and active conversation.
“What’s innovative about this is not the technology itself but how it’s used in this venue,” explains Eric Bird, Road Scholar’s chief operating officer. “We had to create an offering compelling enough to feel like it had the core elements of the Road Scholar program experience—not just education but camaraderie.”
Given the pressing need to get Adventures Online up and running, Road Scholar embraced an agile, iterative development approach for the first time in the group’s history. The team worked quickly to bring a minimum viable version of the product to market, subsequently refining and evolving it with feedback from the three pilot programs. “We put a team together, empowered them with all decision-making rights and kept senior people out of the process,” adds Ruth Hanks, project manager. “We ran a highly cohesive team that learned how to trust and work with each other.”
Even as international travel picks up again, Road Scholar expects Adventures Online to remain active and continue generating an additional revenue stream. Specifically, the program is appealing to seniors with disabilities who can’t travel and those who have a desire to visit far-flung destinations without the cost or hardship of extreme travel.
“Adventures Online assuaged some of the bleeding as we managed to reach a new audience that we hadn’t reached before,” Bird says. “It also appeals to people who seek out destinations like Antarctica but who are not able or don’t want to spend the money. This lets them feel like they were there.”
Problem solving is a heavy lift in pharmaceutical manufacturing, often requiring scientists and researchers to fly around the world to provide help and troubleshooting—an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.
Starting in 2019, Merck began to execute on an idea developed by IT in tandem with manufacturing and R&D. The concept was to put an expert in the room with someone experiencing a problem within an hour of it being discovered regardless of location. Using smart glasses and extended reality technologies, the team pulled together a proof of concept with plans to roll out Remote Assist capabilities to all company sites by the end of 2022.
Merck headquarters in Kenilworth, N.J.: Merck hopes to roll out Remote Assist capabilities to all company sites by the end of 2022—the initial concept was to put an expert in the room with someone experiencing a problem within an hour of it being discovered regardless of location.
Initially, Remote Assist was meant to solve problems in real time as quickly as possible on the manufacturing floor. Typically, if there was an issue, Merck would send teams to those sites to troubleshoot and it could take two to three days just to start the diagnosis. “We wanted time to fix to be a constant and get operations up and running as quickly as possible,” says Douglas Arnold, program director for the XR ecosystem at Merck, confirming it set a one-hour KPI.
When COVID-19 hit, production was brought to a halt, employees were sent home to work remotely, and the project was immediately fast tracked. “It was clear we didn’t just need Remote Assist for problem solving; we needed to get it out to every site for a variety of applications,” Arnold says. “We had planned to launch it internally within our own four walls, but with COVID-19, we determined we needed to use it with external partners and vendors who were critical to our overall network and supply chain.”
Now deployed at more than 70 sites across six continents, Remote Assist spans multiple divisions with more than 3,500 users leveraging the tool for technical transfer, audits, virtual tours, remote training, second-person review and other common functions. Take factory acceptance tests, a process in which production equipment is validated at a vendor’s site before it is shipped and set up in a Merck facility. Typically, the company would send a team of five or more to participate in the vendor’s test application, which was time consuming and costly. With Remote Assist, the process is done virtually and critical projects are kept on track, Arnold says.
The expanded Remote Assist initiative, which typically would have taken a Merck team 22 months to complete, was finished in nine months thanks to agile development practices. The team set up minimal guidelines and goals for initial stories, prioritizing sites from a value chain perspective and defining what and how to measure and capture value.
“We had to get people using it and from there understand the user experience and how things were working to add on features,” Arnold explains.
Remote Assist has helped save more than $3.6 million in travel-related expenses and over 50,000 hours of travel time. It has also laid the foundation for future innovation in part by helping the firm evolve its Industry 4.0 architecture. “Remote Assist will change the way we collaborate on a regular basis,” Arnold says.
As with so many customer experience innovations that took root during the pandemic, Align Technology turned a proof-of-concept mobile app for patient-doctor collaboration into a full-blown contactless engagement platform as offices shut down or were operating with restrictions.
Developed during a company hackathon, Invisalign Virtual Care, integrated into the My Invisalign app, enables doctors and patients to engage on everything from remote consultations to assessments of treatment progress. As the six-month pilot project among 10 doctors entered its final months, pandemic lockdowns took effect, prompting IT to scale Virtual Care to accommodate a global network of doctors and patients. “The imperative of a digital collaboration platform was no longer a nice-to-have feature but now a must-have feature,” says Sreelakshmi Kolli, Align Technology’s senior vice president and chief digital officer. “We wanted to ensure doctor and patients were still able to communicate, and visual communications became more important.”
Sreelakshmi Kolli, senior vice president and chief digital officer, Align Technology
Key to that visual communication is the Advanced Camera Module, which provides patients with guidance directly from the My Invisalign app on how to take a high-quality image of their liner and treatment progress. The Advanced Camera Module uses AI and machine learning models to study facial recognition, smiles, darkness, blurriness and brightness to assist patients in capturing a high-quality photo that the doctor can examine to ensure treatment is progressing as intended. “Good quality images are needed for the models to help doctors diagnose whether a patient is tracking to the treatment plan or not,” Kolli explains. Because every patient takes cell phone photos from their car or in the home, there was a lot of variability in the surroundings. “Think of it as an AI-based buddy system that as the patient takes a pic tells them if the lighting isn’t good or how much of the jawline to capture,” she says.
In addition to the camera feature, Virtual Care includes features to foster patient engagement and increase patient-doctor communication, among others. The platform enables bidirectional communications so patients can get answers to questions. It also allows virtual appointments to be scheduled and ensures a channel for anytime, anywhere communication. The decision was made to build Virtual Care inside the My Invisalign app to create stickiness for the platform, Kolli says.
Align’s investment in cloud infrastructure, its use of platform as a service as a backbone for all API services, and its embrace of agile development practices and dedicated DevSecOps tools enabled the team to launch Virtual Care in 54 countries in six weeks, as opposed to the original 18-month rollout plan.
While Virtual Care was a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic, its utility is ongoing. “We see this as an extension of care that will continue on,” Kolli says. “I have belief in the promise of these tools and the positive engagement they generate between the doctor and the patients. Seamless engagement is very important whether it’s through an app or in the patient chair in the office.” //
Beth Stackpole is a regular contributor to CIO.com.