The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

The balance sheet impact of (positive) customer experience has been well documented.
Forrester Research claims 90% of the firms they surveyed recently indicated that customer experience is a top strategic priority; in fact some have tried to find correlation and causality between CES (name your metric here), shareholder value and financial impact. With the digital customer hype, non stop Customer Experience (meaning, no start, and no end, it’s always asynchronously ON) is suddenly a mantra chanted in every Boardroom. Suddenly CE is the next best thing since sliced bread and the promised land where marketers, sales champions and service professionals unite and put the customer first.
It’s quite interesting really. We hear a lot about focus groups and in depth research methodologies. To be inclusive we need to marry structured and unstructured data dimensions.

Data-driven prioritisation of customer journeys using input spectrums such as market research, Voice of the Customer analyses, Sentiment engines and internal channel transactional volumes – nothing new.
But oh what fun,
😴being able to link customer journeys to pain points and key experiences and interactions. Moments of Truth indeed. If you want to expound on the concept a little more, we arrive at ZMOTs. Something that was made popular by xxx. But exactly which interactions require real-time instant gratification?

Maybe being preemptive about service design matters more as a CE imperative? The best part is, our thinking and approaches are malleable.

Execution is truly key. Everyone says the same, they want “unmatched” CE but how come results and trajectories to success are so vastly different across brands?
Cultural differences, much like how some people will never fully grasp fuzzy nuances, is another factor.
CE programs are as much about people as they are about processes and technology.
In fact, I’d say getting employee engagement up sounds like a good measure on the interim. It helps when everyone is chanting the same mantra. And it pays when they’re remunerated accordingly. They start behaving like the customers are really #1. Easier said than done.
Many a client have attempted cultural and training academies, and constructs such as “Centre of Excellences” to innovate sustainably. Have you been lucky enough to help institutionalise one of these? Truly a rewarding experience.

I’m sure everyone has done journey maps and VoC, but rarer, prioritisation of key events, interactions and atomic experiences within these. Getting the basics right is worth the hard work: start linking financials to every plausible journey, what’s desirable, what’s encouraged and what’s discouraged. Marry outside in and inside out perspectives, underpin some of your hypotheses with facts and figures. What’s the complexity, what are we solving for? What’s the business impact? Your 2×2 and 3D matrices prioritising your CE initiatives will start getting a whole new lease of life!

This ain’t a Data driven engagement though, so strike a fine balance. If you hear the execs calling this ‘art’ they’re not entirely wrong.

I leave you with a conundrum. What’s worse: a purported egghead / academic that tries to (over) sell, or a sly sales fox that relies on one? 🙂