Customer Experience, a key driver for the “New Normal”

We all perceive that the World will never be the same after these times we are living, neither our personal lives nor our businesses. I was talking to a friend recently about how life would be now in Spain without current restrictions, just like it was just a year ago. Weather is already warm in Madrid and we love going to a terrace with friends to take a drink on week-ends just before lunch, the famous “aperitivo”. My friend told me “what’s the deal on going to a terrace, watching a 2 m distance with your friends, wearing a face mask that you have to take out just to drink your glass?; I’d rather do it at home!”. And suddenly I visualized the whole picture and I thought he was right, it’s a nonsense! Why? ...well, because going to a terrace with friends is not about having a drink but a social act, it’s kind of a ritual....it is definitely an experience!

So if I had to put myself on the shoes of the bar owner what would I do? How can he redefine the experience of his customers in the “New Normal” while fulfilling the current (and future) health regulations? It made me as well remember a sad experience we had in Spain a year ago, where taxi drivers demonstrate against über and Cabify (a local competitor of the first), sometimes in a very violent way. The taxi drivers stopped their own business to protest against this new entrants, loosing lots of money as well as their reputation. I just thought at the time that they should have rather invested this money in a good Customer Experience project and they payback would have been much better. You guess it, we are going to talk about Customer Experience (CX), a key driver today that will be even more important in the future to come, for sure. And we all know that CX is ultimately about creating a competitive advantage for your company in the market!

Before starting any CX program or approach you have to understand the experience of your clients. Ultimately when you go to a terrace with friends is not about the transaction “refreshing yourself from the hot temperatures in Madrid”, just as when you take a taxi it’s not only about “transporting you from point A to point B”. The key with the new economy, that the pandemic will even transform more into what is already known as the “New Normal”, is that people have shifted their needs while at the same time the environment is changing; therefore you need new operative models to respond to both elements. Personally I prefer the Experience Management (XM) concept to the CX approach, as I believe that the full company has to be embedded by this way of working, and that limiting the approach to customers can reduce the benefits. You need to integrate all the experiences of the business into a discipline: Customers, Employees, Products and Brands.

In large companies, where we benefit of information systems that can help us with either the so called O-Data (Operational information generated by the daily business) and the X-Data (Experience information coming from your qualitative research on customers and employees), this is an operation we can already plan, but in smaller businesses, like bars and taxis, there is as well information we can already gather, even though it may come more from intuition and observation. The most important elements to define how you will approach a XM framework are then the Technology (to collect the data), the Competencies (your determination to establish this as a discipline) and the Culture (how you will transform your whole company towards this new operating model).

From these four pillars that conform the XM framework I think that the Competency is where you will make the difference in any approach. Eventually it’s the core element where the implication of the senior management is crucial because it’s about the skills and actions that will establish XM as a discipline in the whole company so it becomes the new operating model. To be aware of its importance just consider a CX program where you would not involve changes in the other areas, such as your personnel (People) or your Products or Brands. How can you make the difference if you just focus on the Customer? Do you think that unmotivated People would be able to translate the benefits of the new experience to the Customer? It could be even worse than doing nothing...

So if you want to establish XM as a discipline there are six areas you would need to develop: Focus & Leadership; KPIs & Results; Tools & Training; Actionable Insights; Immediate Response and Design Thinking. Focus & Leadership is about how you lead the program so the whole organization is fully aligned; it will involve skills such as Vision, Strategy, Planning and Governance. KPIs & Results is about how you realize value with your program, what behaviors you want to change and how you measure success through appropriate metrics; hence, it involves skills such as Value Planning, Value Delivery and Metrics Management. Tools & Training is about activating the support you need in the company for the successful implementation of your program; it will involve Communication, Expertise feedback systems and training Enablement. Actionable Insights is about hoy you enlighten and provide these learnings through the organization; it will require Integration of the information, Monitoring all the processes, use Analytics and the Distribution of these insights to the right people. Immediate Response is about how the company uses the information gathered and transform it into tangible Results; here you will focus on your capacity to Close the gap with Customer’s concerns, to Diagnose the cause of these concerns and the Decision-making process you will use to integrate these insights. Last, Design Thinking intervenes in how you create new experiences that ultimately will differentiate your organization from the competition, so you are actually creating a Disruption in the market; here you will focus on creating the Vision on how you want your company to look like in the future, from an experience point of view.

So let’s come back to our initial examples, the bars and the taxis. Don’t we agree now that it’s more about a full experience than just a commercial transaction? über has understood it and all the elements of the Experience Management are there: Customers (online ordering, no need to pay directly, etc.), Employees (who care after the customers; good presence, etc.), Products (nice and clean cars, other services offered, etc.) and Brands (identification and aspirational for some targets, etc.). Maybe it’s also time for the traditional taxi service to understand the changes, and so it’s as well for the bars and restaurants that will compete in the “New Normal” with the alternative of having a better Customer Experience at home. The World has never learned as fast about anything, ever.