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

Businesses can tell themselves they’re monitoring customer experience because they know their net promoter scores and churn rates. However, these data points don’t tell us everything we need to know about the prevailing approach to customer experience accounting. They’re simplified, generalised and detached from the actual experiences that contribute to them. We tend to see these metrics as abstract expressions of the performance of the business as a whole, rather than products of particular types of experience that we should be optimising around. And we only connect them to revenue when they detract from revenue (i.e., when a customer leaves). They’re not actionable in a way that motivates the business or makes a difference to each individual customer/employee journey.

If we start accounting for the Human Experience  in the same way we account for ‘traditional’ P&L and balance sheet entries e.g.  sales, service and marketing, what do you think we’d find? If we start quantifying the value that the experience of being a customer delivers for people, what patterns might emerge? We’d likely discover very quickly that cumulative value for the customer increases value for the business; a whole area I just call Experience Economics.

I argue that we’ve fundamentally ‘measured’ and benchmarked businesses for hundreds of years predicated on short-termism (present-forward) much more suited to the Industrial Age. In fact, our entire org designs have been adapted from the same construct in the 1960s (yes, we’ve layered on new stuff over the years – but only to ever optimise yields!). 

 We’d be able to identify the (creation of specific) Human Experience  that synthesise the stablest ROX upside returns i.e. correlates most consistently with ‘traditional’  push/outbound marketing terms such as upsell opportunities and reduce the risk of churn – for the observant ones, terms such as upsell, x-sell, retention and churn are passe and are borne from proactively shaping the customer  lifecycle (these ideologies lasted till the early 2000s, before the concept of journeys gradually became mainstream). And we’d start to quantify the very powerful way in which advocacy born of Human Experience drives sustainable, consistent growth. This is especially true as we begin to navigate the Web3 and Industry 5.0 era; we’ve arguably kept our heads ‘above water’ during the last decade wading through the Experience Economy (transitioned from the Service and Industrial Economies before that). The author firmly believes the tokenisation of the Human Experience most probably through the altcoins (Human Experience Coin HXC or similar variants) will be a better store of value for time and effort sunk/spent in creating enduring/magical customer/employee experiences (HX) – in summary, ROX value will persist and be substantiated using crypto, which the author believes, is the natural #1 choice with the advent of the metaverse. 

If we believe (with high probability) that the HX will become scarcer – with the cost-take out in macroeconomics, displacement of jobs with robotics and automation – then a good store of value would be crypto. Also, with the advent of new  economic models e.g. Network Effect and Metcalfe’s Law; we might be wise to embrace crypto faster – after all it’s a ‘natural’ extension and exchange of value in the metaverse!

We might just call this point in time onwards, the Presence/Immersion Economy (in the Exponential Age). 

What;s more important, a few things to think about: 

1. The measurement/metrics (base layer) to devise/include the One-Ring e.g. ROX/ExperienceEquity (we will need to tailor-fit or retrofit but this is the easy part)
2. Spending more time initially  ‘thinking’, then acting out higher probability HX strategies in alternate realities
3. The tokenisation of the HX – through something like a HXC (altcoin) as the HX becomes scarcer

How investors choose stocks/equities we still predominantly use/rely on present-forward metrics; these are undoubtedly important – however, we need to spend (increasingly) more time ‘in the future’ esp with growth and innovation  stocks. How fervently and sustainably a company innovates will increasingly influence how it thrives (not just survive!) in the near/distant future. What we’re really saying (underlying) is that how these companies generate ROX is an imperative in the Web3 and Industry5.0 era. 

Much like how ARK’s ETFs outperformed most others by 100s of %  in the preceding years (this year 2021 they receded 30%) – we might imagine a new ‘fund’ that picks out super-growth HX companies, a small but focused basket of hyperscalers emergent and incumbent in the transition of economies. 

While ARK focused it’s actively managed portfolios on Innovation; I think there’s opportunity to go further into HX derivatives in which  I’m sure ROX and Experience Equity will be key indicators. Not financial advice obviously, but this is ONE way of assimilating the future/innovation and taking action! 

Treating HX As An (Long-term) Investment and a new Asset Class

I make these predictions confidently based on my own experience of the growth of my own company/practice. I decided early on that we would pivot on the  Human Experience, specifically to treat CX as a marketing investment rather than a customer service cost. I then took a wide view of all the different ways that HX contributed to growth — and when you start to put numbers on the Human Experience in this way, it’s amazing what you can discover.

It;s best to think about HX = CX + EX as discussed thoroughly throughout this book. 

We;ve established that  CX is the ‘poster’ child for Digital Transformations in the last decade, leaving an EX potential/gap that only got exacerbated in the global pandemic (stymied ROX growth in recent times). This and other macro factors present companies with major decisions; decisions that will sooner rather later result in these companies getting culled, survive or thrive. During the Exponential Age – everything happens exponentially  faster in shorter cycles, the market responds (rewards, punishes) vehemently. Basically, ‘mistakes’ are getting costlier, and not being tolerated. 

With XM we believe the upfront, capex layouts should taper – that’s more bottom-sup Digital Transformation (IT) thinking of ‘old’. Instead we try to ‘sweat those assets’ more; getting more yield, at the very least stabilise RONA (but we really want to focus on ROX). 

Clients typically have existing operating/tech platforms – so we put in the hours to help them sweat those/use those more ‘efficiently’ for free – the shared payouts from  longer-term joint-success aka results, the Transformation program in its entirety, was more authentic for all parties – this is where an alignment of Purpose needs to happen upfront. We call this front-loading the HX. It’s perfectly fine to have differing opinions and tacticals (during execution), but we must roll all sprints, programs, up to the overall Purpose. We could easily spend 80 hours moving over an account that may only be paying us $1,000 a year – or we could be in the trenches together with the client generating, preserving ROX . However, when you look at the stickiness of those accounts, it’s extremely high, and the recurring revenue adds up to a return on investment (both RONA and ROX) that I believe we’d have been lucky to get from a marketing campaign.

We’ve (the team) has done thousands of strategy sessions for new clients  and prospects, which has been a significant investment in terms of our resources – to me, this was the epitome of ‘spending time in the future’, something we hardly do enough of. More importantly, this upfront diagnostic was absolutely necessary – not just to understand clients better, but to understand ourselves – and how our Purposes align. This is vital as nothing good can come out of short termism, e.g. taking on jobs that are ‘low hanging fruits’ (RONA) but deteriorates long-term equity (ROX). The process, co-investment of our/customer’s time inevitably unearths ‘real’ pain points that will  contribute directly to the success of both teams (solving for, unleashing higher multiples of value/ROX resulting). The byproduct, side effect and a positive one, is that in location after location where we’ve taken this FutureBack (and Walking the FutureBack) approach, we’ve seen communities of advocates and evangelists  appearing –  they in turn act (oh so importantly)  as ongoing, organic drivers of growth; the very momentum that tips the balance in our favour – we’ve observed that this elusive growth momentum originates from cascading, cumulative small-wins (note: not just ‘quick-wins’ or cherry picked MVPs)

By finding ways to account for Human Experience e.g. coming up with the Experience Calculator asset powering Journey Orchestration, we found that we  unearth repeatable formulas/algorithms driving ROX in a robust, predictable – even preemptive way. There have been many points in our practice’s growth story when we’ve deliberately done things that don’t look good on paper, appear unsustainable and seem like a crazy cost to take on. We realised that the problem wasn’t what we were doing; it was the columns on the paper on which most people record these things. We changed those columns, changed how we accounted for Human Experience and helped transform the way we deliver it as a result. Remember, transformative experiences must be sustainable, consistently – clients are aspirants looking for the ‘end-state’ = ‘steady-state’. There’s no point e.g. using a chiropractor as an analogy – to get them coming back again and again. 

I’d urge any other business to do the same. We all suffer from a natural bias to pay more attention to the things we can quantify. When something’s as important to your business as the Human Experience, that’s all the more reason to account for it properly.