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

The experience economy celebrates the human spirit, especially for those who set out to change the world and do good. Why? Simple.

Saying what we mean and meaning what we say, that’s authentic. Never before has the influence of authenticity been so pronounced; its ripples to the entire ecosystem of (our) customers, suppliers and partners. Never before has one person’s “aura”, and influence radius emanated so clearly. Today, we can truly change the world, one experience and one heart at a time.

The science and quantification of customer experiences allow for the ultimate optimisation of it. If we tie the sum of experiences and convert it into an equity, we have a proxy value for our customer franchise. Everything else is then, like in the open markets, to maximise the value of the said franchise, using experience (experiential improvement opportunities to be exact) for steer – and to do that, organisations need to speak the same language (internally and externally). What’s “painful” to customers, whats not frictionless, has to be weighed; is it a random rant, or is it normalised across time? Then there’s perception and optics. What’s “important” to an organisation internally may miss the bus when it comes to delivering magical customer experiences. Customer expectations and our ability to deliver is naturally a divisive topic; but ask this of ourselves, who’s the the real stakeholder? Who are we benchmarking against? Who are we improving for? That’s a tricky one. The right answer should be = ourselves. For the ultimate betterment of ourselves, living our Purpose. And when organisations do, their experiences are elevated; measurement becomes a mere metric to describe how well they do what they do.

For these organisations, the current set of metrics for experience will blur, and more will be internally/ people (heart) focused e.g. employee effort scores, and engagement levels. The valuation of the humanistic, personal experience will treble in the next few years, and inadvertently, companies will be faced with pain-points from “new” customers – it’s own employees! Treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. Ever more true in the experience economy, when 95% of your “assets” checks out when they leave for home – bringing along with them all the ideas and motivations in their heads. You never know if they’re coming back tomorrow. Worse, some might be physically with you, but their hearts aren’t, which could be toxic.

Again, using the same experiential fabric – led by design but powered by digital and analytics, we are able to deduce a lot of these. Brand’s equate their value and equity with consumerism “likes”, much as how engaged your employees are can be a proxy for high-performing metrics. They’re all inextricably linked.

Customer journeys, through journey mapping, are a discreet set of interactions that a subscriber has with an operator to fulfil a transaction, e.g. pay bills. Think about all the ways we interact with the opco when we’re setting up cable service, or worse, when relocating! — that’s a journey aite. Understanding and addressing those journeys, specifically the pain-points within each (sub) journey, distills (real, positive) economic value for opcos, significantly more than (tactically) fixing the performance of individual touchpoints/ channels.

There’s a myriad of paths each journey can take as subs move between different/ Omni-channels over time; zeroing in on which paths are getting in the way of growth, customer experience and loyalty is a big data and analytics challenge.

Here’s the irony; the idea of journeys vs. individual touch point interactions (i.e., moments of truth) is monumental. Even though individual interactions (often the final interactions before defection) seem to go well based on customer feedback, stringing these interactions together as an “episode” often reveals an ugly truth most opcos are not facing up to today. Great NPS scores at the channels, here and there, sporadically. But true Episodic NPS is Journey wide, and requires all interactions (not just where your owned “flagship” shops are humming) to do well experientially.

Not an easy feat, given the siloes in most organisations today. The purpose, clarity and unison in discipled execution is sorely lacking.

Clearly, data can help pivot and improve the customer journey, but only for those of us who are willing to be led where the data tells them to go. Those focused on holding on to legacy structures, or even past visions or products, will not find as much success in CX enhancements, simply because of their resistance to change. If we want to succeed in today’s market, 1) embrace data and 2) follow where it leads us. Remember: your customers are on the journey right along with us!