Customer as Competitive Advantage

Are we doing the same as our competitors expecting different results?

Are we using the same research formats to ask the same questions of the same customers, the same tools or models to make sense of the same data and insights, the same channels to interact with them, the same metrics and measures of success?

Are we using the same strategy tools and frameworks, are we setting up the same types of teams with the same experts working in the same way as everyone else?

Are we still expecting to be differentiating, innovative or to increase market share? How?

I mean .. Einstein was so close, but he should have said:

Insanity is doing the same thing as everyone else expecting different results.

The customer is the most underutilized resource in any organization. not because they are not already visible, listened to and included, but because we are utilizing at most only a few percentage points of the potential they are offering us. We are neither innovating, imagining or pushing the boundaries when it comes to the customer. We are going backwards*

*several research reports suggest customer satisfaction and cx quality dropping over the last few years (1).

We are not getting better at our customers. We are getting worse.

A few examples to challenge the thinking

(please remember that most of these tools / approaches were very good ideas at the time of their invention, but that they still mirror the environment and technology limitations of that time):

• We still use surveys to learn about our customers
• We treat people as if their purpose is to buy things
• We still use events / ceremony based innovation processes
• We filter and bias our insights through tools that limit us
• We are using digital and data to do more of the same only faster and cheaper
• We measure experiences in terms of engagement
• We see the customer as charity
• We assume customers care about efficiency as much as we do
• We treat customers as if they are algorithms that we just need to get to do things: open email, click on link, visit website, sign up for webinar, join, repeat

The point here is to be provocative. Everything can be improved, even if we don’t see it yet (then it’s usually because someone else is already doing it). We need to ask more questions.

Let me take a few of these just to demonstrate my point that we need to keep pushing the status quo to do better.

• Surveys: when was the last time you cared while filling out a survey? The last time you felt a survey captured some important insights or the last time you felt you were able to share something important? The reason we use surveys is not because they are very good at learning important things. They are simple scoring mechanism for ranking our own thinking mostly appreciated for their ease of use and scale (I also use surveys). What’s the better option? Design your online experiences to learn what you need to learn. People who are online moving around don’t feel surveyed, they are just trying to find what they need. Their behavior is remarkably honest. Identify what assumptions you want to test and design the experience having the customer’s interactions produce the learnings you need (2)(3)(4).

• Journeys: research proves that no two customers have the same path to purchase (5). And nobody buys something just to buy it. A journey pushes a narrative that the most important lens through which we can understand a human being is how they become customers. But I’ve seen how much this removes from the insights teams engage with in order to understand opportunities, every problem becomes simple, and every answer the same. E.g. almost every problem becomes a problem of content, efficiency and price where talking about the product and getting in front of the customer (attention) is the biggest opportunity. Instead of journeys I’ve also seen how system maps broadens the view of the team, how new opportunities become visible through a new understanding of how the goal is not at the end of a linear journey but moving the pieces around the map increasing or dampening different forces of influence leading to the goal. I’ve also seen how real-time journeys work where there are only signals, actions and reactions. They only thing we need to know is what is happening right now and where to go next .. this produces individual experiences for customers fit to their personal journey towards solving their, not our, need.

• Engagement metrics: If you use the same engagement metrics as everyone else you will create engagements similar to everyone else. Instead the team should identify customer value and measure its ability to deliver on the customers ability to get what they need that delivers value back to what the business needs. E.g. people are visiting an experience to learn something, are they learning? And is the learning experience what they appreciate (do they get energy/flow from it, is it collaborative or are they learning fast/slow? Is the learning a connected sequence of experiences or.a single event? Of course you use engagement metrics to optimize conversion. But if you want to design something for your customers, then what is important to them is far more important than what is important to you.

Everything depends on what we want to achieve. But my point is that we are not asking the right questions anymore.. if we are asking any at all.. it seems that there are these things your supposed to have to do to do good customer work and I can only see that many of them are not there for the customer, but for us. They are making us eerily similar to our competition and because of this the customer has stopped delivering on their promise to help companies outperform. They’ve become a cost and not an opportunity.

It’s not their fault .. it’s ours.