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

#HolyGrail of #CE Customer Experience. The marketer’s search for Mary Magdalene..

We all want seamlessness, we want timeliness, we want personalisation, anytime and anywhere.

Easier said than done!

First of all, does going Omni even make sense? Are we frontloading CAPEX and investments to hasten the race to Omni, only to be met with cost pressures (read: reality) that will inevitably sink such grandiose a  vision? Maybe Multi will suffice, there’s no need for Omni just yet.

Regardless, the question begs. What’s the so-what with Omni, and what are we solving for?

Surely, receiving rave reviews from a (select) group of customers that are able to – cue: seamlessly – pick up orders that they bought online at physical stores doesn’t cut it! Wait, unless that’s all your customers. The marketers would have us believe that Omni is about persistent and contextual memory across channels. John shows interest online and then gets a call offline to follow up. On the flipside, Mary that just complained about bill-shock / roaming charges in the morning via the contact center, should really not receive a sales offer in the near future – until the problem / dispute is resolved.

From a service design perspective, it could mean Michael being able to solicit peer reviews on the Telco’s latest broadband offerings, before being pushed a chat via a virtual agent when browsing through device plans online the next day.

Whichever the definition of Omni, we need to go back to basics. It’s about optimising the customer experience with organisational goals (we all need to make money) with known constraints. What constraints you say? Real ones, like a finite budget – which almost always is too small, man-power shortages and staff requiring re-skilling. What about investment demand? Who shouts the loudest internally typically!

The customer journey and pain points indicate what matters most to them – and it’s strange how sometimes it’s totally counter intuitive to what an internal inside-out view looks like. We get carried away thinking how the next cost take-out exercise will boost profitability, and window dress numbers for the ‘leadership’, but that’s as internal / myopic as it gets…

But how do we optimise – how do we assign ‘weights’ to the 3 vectors (customer pain points, revenue goals, cost pressures)? Will being too customer centric, if there’s such a thing, dilute revenue yields? For the Banks, will it trigger  NIM compression and ‘negative jaws’? If we did just ‘enough’ to keep customers happy, how would the bottom line look like?

Without inundating the reader with details, my preference would be to look at atomic (or granular enough..) transactions and color each with cost, revenue potential and see them through activity based & lifetime value lens. It’s about time we took the fluffiness out of Customer Experience. Draw a line in the sand, and choose a side – any side!

I leave you with this conundrum again: what’s worse: an academic that that oversells without proven delivery / business / end-user / consulting expertise, or a sly software sales fox that relies on one? 🙂