Which Customer Experience Path Is Your Organisation Travelling? Is It the Right One?

What Customer Experience Paths Are Organisations Taking?

It occurs to me that under the Customer Experience umbrella one can pursue several distinct paths. What might these paths be?

One, there is the let’s suck less path. This almost always involves looking at way of reducing customer effort at specific touchpoints e.g. call-centre, or specific customer interactions e.g. when buying something. Arguably some, perhaps even most, of the effort that the UK government has put into its digital services programme is about sucking less, reducing customer effort, and in the process decreasing costs.

Two, there is the data-technology path. Let’s make use of the latest technologies (internet, social, mobile, mobile apps, kiosks, marketing platforms..) to do interesting/sexy stuff. And in the process collect-harness data on the end consumers – who have to date been unidentifiable. Take a look at just about any high profile B2C brand. For me, several automotive brands come to mind immediately. This is the path pushed by the technology vendors and the more IT-oriented consultancies.

Three, there is the customer journey / business integration path. By this I mean let’s glue up the organisation – business units (online, offline), interaction channels and business processes – so as to provide a harmonious (as a result of the integration) customer experience. What is in it for us? Higher revenues (customers stick around more, attract new customers through word of mouth, and existing customers buy more) and reduced operating costs. A great example of this is the John Lewis Partnership in the UK.

Is this all there is? Making that which is, work better? And using the latest shiny technology to collect data on customers, potential customers, and push out marketing messages? Is this the extent of the possibility of Customer Experience?

What Is the Truest / Fullest Expression of Customer Experience?

Bring new light to what life might be.

– Hugh MacLeod

I say that the true-fullest possibility that is inherent in Customer Experience is that of bringing new light to what life might be. Think Amazon. Have the folks at Amazon not brought new light what the experience of searching for, finding, reviewing and purchasing products might be? Have they not set the benchmark for what constitutes an online store and the associated experience?

Think Apple. Some say Apple is phone company now, given that this is where the bulk of revenues, profits and growth is at for Apple. How did it get that way? Did not the folks at Apple ‘bring new light to what life might be’ with a touchscreen intuitive (to use) phone? And is it not that possibility that has been pursued consistently such that few of us would now consider being apart from our smartphones?

Think First Direct. Did the folks there not bring new light to what telephone and online banking might be?

Think The John Lewis Partnership. Did the folks there not bring new light to what life might be for the folks that work in the business and those who are served by those who work in the business? The genuine partnership model where there are no employees. Only partners, who partner with one another to deliver great service to customers.

Think giffgaff. Have the folks at giffgaff not brought life to what life might be like for customers of mobile phone networks: life as a community? The experience of membership, of community, of being in it together, of participation, of loyalty, of honest dealing between network and its customers?

It occurs to me that the folks that were at the helm of these companies were pursuing a vision of what life might be. Not just in pursuit of making the numbers. They chose to tread the bold path rather the safer one of incrementalism or following the latest fashion. They led in the truest sense of leading: they invented a possibility, they enrolled people into that possibility and got busy giving birth to the unborn: what life might be.

I am finding myself becoming more and more dissatisfied with Customer Experience as practised. Why? Because what calls me is the possibility of ‘bringing new light to what life might be’: honouring, enriching, elevating, the life of my fellow human beings. Perhaps my interest is in innovation rather than Customer Experience. Or perhaps my interest is in innovation in the form of the total customer experience : Customer Experience Innovation. What about you?