The #1 customer experience lesson I learned in 2021

I have a three-element mental model for what makes a good day. Only one of the three is relevant here on LinkedIn: I have to have learned something new every day. It does not matter what the subject matter is. I love cooking, so it could be something there, for example. Learning makes me happy, and being semi-retired means my learning opportunities have expanded greatly.

Always on my mind

However, retired or not, I don't believe I will ever stop thinking about customer experience. For me, it's completely unavoidable. I live it. I feel it all around me. I experience it every day. And I can't get away from what I can only call the technical aspects of it. What strategies, initiatives, and processes do companies use? What works? What does not? What's the scientific evidence that favors one approach over another?

Let me get back to my personal three-element model. At we reach the end of 2021, I am applying the model to the whole year. Yes, Covid aside, I have been reasonably happy with my year and have learned a lot. Now I am asking myself what my number one lesson learned was. While I have another week or so to reach a final decision, I think I know. And it is in customer experience strategy. Let's see if I can express it reasonably concisely.

Before and after 2021

My beliefs about how to best improve customer loyalty changed radically during 2021. Here is how I think of it in ‘before and after’ terms:

• Before: I believed that the only effective way of measuring and improving customer loyalty was to survey customers at brand or product level, and to implement their top improvement suggestions. I did not believe that any reasonable alternatives existed. I believed in ‘trickle down’, meaning that improvements implemented for survey respondents would leak out into the general customer population.
• After: While still believing in the general principles outlined above, I now know what superior alternatives to survey-based CX exist. By ‘superior’ I mean solutions that cover all customers and provide real-time feedback. The result is far better ability to predict customer retention and to act early, before customers leave you.

To use a driving metaphor, the old approach is like driving down the highway and adjusting the way you drive based on the traffic you saw around you last week, since that is the last time you looked for input and you have closed your eyes since then. That is pretty certain to be a disaster. The new approach combines what you can see around you, what has happened in the past, and information about what is happening far ahead of you. You may be better off choosing a different route to get to where you are going. You do this based on science, not guesswork.

Let's make it happen in 2022

In summary, my top lesson learned is about the power of AI and Machine Learning, specifically to predict customer futures. And by ‘futures’, I mean money. The sad fact is that the CX methodologies most of us have been using up to now have failed to make a meaningful difference to financial results. The new tools fix this problem. Let's work together to make a real difference in 2022!

Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough SaaS solution, Spectrum AI, lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down silos, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more that 15 years of CX-focused expertise, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at?www.ocxcognition.com.

Maurice FitzGerald is a retired VP of Customer Experience for HP's $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, and a fourth book that focuses on Peter's cartoon illustrations for the first three. All are available from Amazon.

The author can be reached here on LinkedIn or at?[email protected]. Please let me know what you think and what sort of content you would like to see here.