CX – Which C Are We Talking About?
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
CX normally translates as Customer Experience, but that can be misleading. Depending on the business you are in, you need to choose from the following list:
- Consumer
- Customer
- Client
- Constituency
In the Age of the Customer, all enterprises need to deliver better experiences to whomever they serve, but how to go about doing so, and what to prioritize, is different for each case. In this series of blogs, we are going to look at each one in turn.
Consumer Experience
Great consumer experiences divide into two classes, depending on whether they feature delighters or eliminate dissatisfiers. Apple has been the king of the first class, Amazon of the second. In general, digital apps for consumers are based on delighters (or perhaps we should say, addicters), be they games, social media, or wearable/portable devices. The idea is to do something highly differentiated that causes the end user to rinse-and-repeat, potentially endlessly. This is what most people think of first when they talk about CX, so it is important to note that delighters are not, or at least should not, be the focus in any other context. The car industry, for example, routinely goes astray here, trying to create delighters out of context, producing confusers and annoyers instead, because each car is differentiating on features that users do not want to have to read a manual about to use.
Amazon’s approach to consumer experience is different. For its business model, the goal is to optimize consumption by eliminating dissatisfiers. It begins with order confirmation followed by shipment notification—when will I get my package? The goal was not to speed up delivery but rather to reassure consumers as to the expected time of delivery and to give them visibility into current status. It extended to one-click buying for habitual customers, and then to Amazon Prime with free shipping, and then to stores that have no checkout lines, and now apparently to palm reading as a way to verify identity. These are not delighters—the great experience comes from the elimination of distractions. It is as if Amazon applies Six Sigma practices to the delivery chain and then systematically innovates to eliminate any wasted motion. Since each moment of waste causes some reduction in consumer participation, this approach maximizes consumption, which is the number one success factor for a retail business.
(NEXT UP: Customer Experience)
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube
Product Management, data analysis, and product community organizer
4 年Consumer's are fickle. No denying that delighters and disatisfiers play into their psyche to repeatedly return and engage with your product. However, I'd offer that these are secondary characteristics once a consumer's basic need is addressed. Neither of these will matter much if attention and understanding to why your consumer is consuming your product is glossed over. Individual delighters/elimination of dissatifiers won't stand on their own. They need the support of the base platform. Apple products wouldn't get the rinse/repeat treatment if the ecosystem and store wasn't there to engage consumers. Amazon would only get so many chances if stock wasn't available. Tesla would be just a cute car without the performance factor. Consumer delight follows a solid consumer understanding. Thanks for expanding the concept of "customer" because it does vary. Knowing who your end "C" is offers clarity for all.
I've been a big fan of your vocabulary since the Chasm. These are good words to describe a path to success wrt consumer experience - delighters and dissatisfiers. It's still about habit-forming; whether satisfying a persistent psychological itch, or offering the smoothest path towards meeting an objective. I still like "systems of record" and "systems of engagement", although the merging/integration has happened even faster than predicted. Looking forward to your next installment in CX.
Information Technology Executive
4 年One could also define the elimination of dissatisfaction as a feature to delight...a very smooth and effortless buying experience (after all, Amazon is in the retail business) IS something that delights consumers of that service (e.g., customers). Think of the traditional car buying experience...how many consumers (myself included) would likely purchase cars much more frequently or at least more frequently at car dealerships that adopted an Amazon-like model (elimination of dissatisfaction)...the traditional car purchase experience is based upon dissatisfaction being used to wear down the customer.
Being lockstep with the customer and engaging them in Beta testing can help align on delightful feature or removing dissatisfiers.