Customer Experience Matters #CX #DigitalTransformation

Experience Matters, and this is an era of an experience business.

“Humans don’t buy products, they buy experiences, and experience has many forms.”

Do you know in CES 2017, a major trade show in Las Vegas, which home appliance won best home appliance award? It is not your fridge. or washing machine, not even vacuum cleaner — it is a mattress, the sleep number. ‘360 smart bed’ was named the CES innovation awards ‘best of innovation honoree in the home appliances category. I was amazed when CEO of a mattress company — Sleep Number said, she’s building a technology experience company and not another mattress company. Business which are serving customers need to delight and amaze. Design can be a source of experience as a collaborative practice, now experience is becoming a key element of business, and due to this, role Marketing and IT are shifting together.

Every organization needs to become empathetic and ethical at the same time, to do so underlying technology, and its adoption plays a key role. Markets are no more judging companies from shipments sold, but ethical meaningful data collected, which can be a future business model for the company while adding great value to customers life. You need CX in way customers wants them, not what’s feasible in your company or division. There is technology, feasibility, and desirability. A lot start with feasibility or technology. I suggest start from Desirability.

There are 2 critical points to note

1) “Design choreograph experiences”

2) “Experience transcends product.”

Design function and operational function is key to very business. Marketing as a phrase is an old term to think experience, and force you to think in a traditional way — cross functional design thinking is need of the hour to create experience based business and revenue model. Most companies think themselves as a product company and they try to do a layer of experience, true experience design is when you are able to modify the experience itself, personalize it so you don’t have to market them. Experience is an opportunity to accelerate advance marketing.

Making experience is not only what marketing department can think can own alone now, in 2017 Technologist will play a key role so as your CIO. Word of mouth is taking a new shape, marketing needs reformatting of experience, and technology is the underlying layer.

Focus design thinking from all senses (Visual, audio etc), and across all touch-points. It’s not only about a screen interface. A portal or an app cannot be your only experience now. Design thinking is not what designers do, it’s something leaders at CXO level needs to take ownership of.

Think — Is your marketing trying to fill a gap which your product is not delivering? Take an example of Airline business — becoming an experience business. It’s not always how is your marketing performing but it’s also how your product is delivering and what experience are your consumers having. Airlines have invested a lot in redefining experience of the business class. Economy is still in the queue for receiving an experience touch. (P.S while writing this article horrifying unimaginable act happened via UnitedAirline on assaulting a customer in an over-boarded flight, now leave CX that’s an extreme horror) Another example — For a telecom company — the monthly bill is a most important piece of communication, it should not be just billing details but to be used as important utility tools.

Fundamentally a business is there to make profits — but it’s important to have a line of sight on experience which ultimately effects your Net promoter score.

Customers love experiences not your marketing, or technology stack you have bought. Are you using your stack to full potential? How is the adoption of your tech stack within various business functions, which version are they on, do they know what is in the new version and are they making use of it? Who is training them, what about training new people who have joined the team and people who were trained and have moved on? Have you captured knowledge and best practices? These are few of many questions you can think of as a starting point.

In the age of Big data, big experience matters most and more importantly what you do with that big data. AI is driving automation and personalization — it’s not just about delivering a piece of personalized content, its how top-down company shifts its focus on personalization. Think how to connect your business across your experience chain.

Look at American airline — you can’t create an experience without partnering with Uber, Telecom provider for Wifi, food and beverage partners, delivery companies and adding a layer of personalisation. A partnership is very important and provides big value via related data, thereby increasing the quality of your current data sets and supporting better personalization experiences.

So how to spot right experiences?

There are always missing layer that nobody is delivering an experience on — look at your data — its speaking — are you listening?

Experience is a collection of positive human emotions driven by smell, aroma, colors, satisfaction, time or price/benefit perception, & service. Apple, for example, mastered marketing the experience where the product/device was not necessarily the most advanced. We all know Samsung specs are way better always, still Apple has aced the experience business. Conversion rate is the key, if you focus on your customer’s experience as a marketer, all your stakeholders will be happy and happiest will be your sales team.

“Content is not an asset, audience is the asset. So go build an audience via delivering a great customer experience”

Rahul Avasthy

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Disclaimer: Opinions mentioned above are my own, in a personal capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.