The customer experience time warp...

In this so-called digital world, I am flabbergasted to still witness customer experiences that prove many organisations aren’t transforming.

I am one of those people that continuously think about how organisations and government agencies can improve the way they engage with me. We, as a business community tackling customer experience (CX), are certainly getting better. But is it happening quick enough? Do existing platforms provide an agile ecosystem? Why are we still holding onto some of the old mindsets when designing operating models?

What are the top five things that really annoy me?

1. Receiving paper communications with no customer preferences to move to digital.
2. Receiving a digital communication without a seamless experience to respond back.
3. Inconsistent tone, branding, and experience on all the products / services across an organisation’s brands and/or business lines.
4. Organisations missing out on more of my business because it is too onerous for me to engage the way I want and when I want.
5. Organisations not optimising my engagement time by failing to inform me on relevant new products/services when communicating with me on my existing business.

It feels like we are stuck in some kind of CX time warp….like we are watching the iconic 70’s movie - The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

Never has it been more important to retain and grow an organisations customer base as we move out of the pandemic.

According to NewVoiceMedia, an estimated $62 billion is lost by U.S. businesses each year following negative customer experiences

What makes this even more challenging is the larger percentage of customer persona’s now moving into generations where loyalty is earnt, not assumed.

In Australia, SAP’s Australian Digital Experience report surveyed 3000 customers and 47% were unsatisfied with the digital experiences delivered by the tier 1 brands

?Gartner provides an interesting insight into customer engagement through their CX CORE model (Customer Organisation Relationship Experience).?

One aspect of their model is the “experience membrane” where both customers and organisations can create intentional or non-intentional barriers to communication.

We, as customers, can make the membrane hard to penetrate when we disengage due to poor previous experiences. Organisations can thicken the membrane with the use of sub optimal channels and complex interactions. Our goal, as CX change agents, is to create a transparent membrane where the volume, type and ease of interactions is optimal for both the customer and the business. Sounds easy? The answer is of course yes, if we strategically transform to a customer centric operating model and leverage the right technology to underpin our core business processes.?

Source: Gartner 2021 Symposium, Architect Experience with the New Customer Experience CORE Model. By Don Scheibenreif.

Here are my top 6 items a Customer Experience Management (or Customer Interactions) platform must be able to provide to ensure the interactions membrane is optimal.

2-way interactions

A single integrated platform to provide a) outbound communications to any channel and b) inbound capabilities to receive customer data from all channels. Blending communications with critical customer data collection.?

Composable business architecture

Every organisation is different with varying levels of maturity / investment on their other key technology platforms such as CRM, Product Engines, Workflow/Business Process Management, Integration etc.

A customer interaction platform needs to be composable and integrate into other platforms seamlessly to ensure a customer journey can be not only mapped but also executed. Being composable, organisations can choose the “customer interaction” components that are best suited to their enterprise ecosystem. Of course, the business operating model must drive and govern the technology. A composable business model ensure continuous thinking on customer needs, adapts the business architecture appropriately and drives the technology change / adoption.

Total Experience

Total experience (TX) is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by interlinking the user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), multi-experience (MX), and employee experience (EX) disciplines. TX encompasses the complete company experience, from the employee to the customer and the user. Source: https://www.walkme.com/glossary/total-experience/

A customer interactions platform must manage the experience from customer, employee, user and through all channels / applications.

Full customer orchestration

The ability for the platform to control the full customer journey orchestration, optimising both the inbound and outbound interactions for ALL channels. This provides rapid change capabilities and centralises the experience.

Centralised distribution

All channel management should be centralised for ease of change, compliance / auditability, consistent experience, and the ability to measure all interactions for improvements.

Business agility

A single platform enables all customer channels, orchestration, and associated integration to centrally managed for rapid business adoption and change. New experiences, products and services can be implemented in days rather than months.

Unlike the Rocky Horror Picture Show, let’s not do the time warp again ?? Us, as CX change agents, must not accept that lazy customer experience is ok. We should be identifying the key drivers to truly change and begin the journey for organisations to step into the new world of Total Experience. A good place to start is to review your business operating model against customer centricity and ask the question – is your organisation supporting technology preventing the business transforming to its full potential?

About the writer

Anthony is a Senior Consultant / Advisor for CoTé Software Solutions. CoTé provide a central platform to build industry specific Applications Layers with an underpinning CXM solution. Anthony has spent a large portion of his career supporting tier 1 clients around the globe. He has deep domain experience transforming businesses to modern digital operating environments.