Scott Fitzgerald once said there are no second acts in American life but he never knew the software industry or modern business. Today, the story is all about second, third and nth acts. Consider customer experience, for example.
I remember talking about customer experience a lot about ten years ago with Paul Greenberg. Back then — and it is interesting to note that what we mean by customer experience has morphed a bit since then — B. Joseph Pine’s book, The Experience Economy, was the manual that we all looked to for defining just what a customer experience is and how to pursue such a strategy. Pine and his colleagues have done very well on the lecture circuit giving dramatic demonstrations of “experiences” in their talks.
To cut to the chase, Pine defined it principally as the ultimate cultivation of business deliverables best exemplified by, of all things, coffee. You may have heard this. The raw coffee bean is a commodity; a bean roasted, ground up and given a brand and a label is a product; a cup of coffee at a restaurant is a service; and a cup of something steamed, foamed and caramelized is an experience especially when consumed in a comfy chair with nice lighting, your laptop and some cool music in the background. But a customer might also prefer a low cost cup of java and a smile from a familiar face taken to go in the car. CX is like that, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Everyone wants to provide experiences but few do a good job of it. Not to worry though, it’s time for the second (or possibly third) coming of customer experience with its new moniker, CX.
Customer experience is a great thing for the bottom line. It enables us to charge more than the cost of the underlying commodity would suggest ($4 for a cup of coffee…) and while the deliverables might be very similar to the commodity version of the experience, it costs little to create an experience in a customer’s mind.
What’s interesting to me though is that roughly ten years down the road we don’t appear to have made any progress. Last week, pal Brian Vellmure published this post “Everybody’s talking about Customer Experience. Customers still not getting what they need” Ouch! It quotes a Harvard Business School blog with the provocative title “Stop Listening to Your Customers” by researcher Steve Martin. And on Monday, Oracle released the results of a survey of more than 1,300 executives that showed we still have a very long way to go. What’s going on here?
I think Martin was saying that customer behavior data might reveal something very different from the rationalized answers given on a survey and Oracle collected some interesting data on CX that shows we haven’t progressed very far down the experience path.
Good ideas lead practical implementation sometimes by years and often much longer. The basic understanding of how to launch a moon mission was figured out by the early twentieth century but it took many people including Robert H. Goddard and Wernher von Braun and a world war to work out the technology. The same thing is happening with CX from what I can see. Theory leads practice by a fair piece.
Almost anyone with a little business savvy “knows” the value of generating an experience that customers can resonate with and luxury brands have been doing this forever. But replicating the luxury experience without the high overhead of minions dedicated to the task takes a good deal of technology to get right and that technology wasn’t available even as recently as ten years ago.
But things are changing rapidly. Almost from the beginning of the year it looked like customer experience was going to be a big deal and companies like Oracle appear to be placing strategic bets on some of the software they’ve bought. They’ve been busy hooking together ecommerce, retailing, analytics and other systems to give their large customers the ability to drive CX without the overhead I alluded to. Others like Salesforce continue to improve their social salient into customer service with things like Chatter and the Service Cloud and even at the lower end of the market, desk.com.
As CX ramps up this year I am hoping that other newer technologies like gamification can be used to make service more rewarding for those doing the job. One likely outcome of gamifying service might be incentive compensation models that drive better customer experiences. It’s time to give that a thought.
(Cross-posted @ Beagle Research, LLC.)
Nice article, Denis.
CX is such a complex animal, and there are a lot of components that go into it, as you know. The right technologies, processes, systems, etc. are all critical.
One thing I know for sure is that organizations will have difficulty creating great experiences for their customers unless and until the behaviors and actions of all employees align with the organization’s vision for the customer experience. Employees have be shown what to do and how to do it. From what I’ve seen and experienced, employees generally WANT to perform better, they WANT to improve, they just don’t know how.
There is a particular set of skills, methods, techniques, and even more important, attitudes and behaviors that need to be learned, then coached, coached, coached on the job. It just can’t (and won’t) happen as a result of a one-time seminar, or off-the-shelf standardized training program for 2 or 4 hours, etc. It may take a week or two of consistent coaching before the new skills work their way into the customer interactions on a regular basis, and it takes follow-up and the right kind of performance management system to keep it going.
And the front-line employees are not the only ones who need it. Supervisors, quality assurance, team leaders and yes, even managers need to learn and know the skills well enough to be able to coach them to the front-line on a daily basis and keep it all alive. They also need to be on board (supportive) at a high level, which takes the right kind of leadership skills. Without that, no improvement effort can be effective for more than a short period of time. I would submit that any meaningful performance improvement initiative for customer service/customer experience will die a certain death eventually without the support of leadership, from the C-suite on down.
Look at how companies like Amazon or Zappos approach, train, implement and support their customer service / customer experience. It’s a thing of absolute beauty, and their efforts reap huge bottom line rewards for them. Moreover, from what I understand, those companies are simply awesome places to work. Everybody wins – company, employees and customers!
Hi Denis, I liked that one: “CX is like that, it’s in the eye of the beholder.”
And the beholders are often willingly to share straight away what the like or don’t like from their personal experience, but we still don’t have that in place. I say it to the nicely smiling waitress – but the message will never reach any database, big data or BI driven manager decision.
From my point of view, getting connected in a more personal way to the company itself is already a plus for customer experience.
Thanks for your good article! Its an inspiration to go on doing, what we do.