CX – Which C Are We Talking About? – PART 4

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 have already looked at consumer, customer, and client experience. This last one opens the aperture wider to consider domain of social services in general, what one might call constituency experience.

Constituency Experience

Social services are those funded through taxation and delivered to their constituencies at a reduced charge or no charge at all. How much the citizens of a country care about the experience of the person consuming the service varies greatly with the service itself, and in the case of marginalized constituencies, this variance has resulted in deep divisions within our society. That said, there are at least two areas where most citizens agree it is important for society to deliver a consistently positive experience—health care and education—and it is to these that we will turn our attention here.

Both health care and education are challenged by a similar mismatch in expectations versus funding. That is, what people want is a client experience adapted to their specific profile of abilities and needs, but as we discussed in the prior blog, such experiences are expensive to deliver and normally do not scale. What does scale is a much more transactional model with standardized deliverables operating within a relatively inflexible system, and that has represented the norm for both education and health care during my lifetime. The problem with this approach is that it can only go so far, and even to do that, it requires economic sacrifices on the part of teachers and health care providers. 

The net result is that there is widespread dissatisfaction in both arenas based on unrealistic “client” expectations being imposed on what is essentially a “consumer” operating model. The fact that this is radically unfair does not make it any less prevalent. What it does provide, on the other hand, is a terrific opportunity for digital transformation. To frame the problem squarely, how can we provide client-level services at scale working off a consumer budget?

As unrealistic as that may sound, it parallels almost exactly the challenge that faced U.S. manufacturers in the 1980s when they were confronted with Japan resetting the price/value bar across many industries, leveraging their advanced quality models. How could we compete with goods that were much lower priced than ours and had better quality to boot? The answer turned out to be, we had to reengineer our supply chains, end to end, and we had to leverage a whole lot of digital technology to do so. 

Today we have the same opportunity to do so in the social services sector. This year’s pandemic has shown us that we can dramatically impact productivity by leveraging video communications. By itself, of course, this cannot move the needle so much as just provide tactical relief in a very challenging time. But it is clear that if it were part of an integrated program to reengineer “client interactions,” a lot more progress could be made. The digital infrastructure required is, to be sure, a capital expense to be funded, but in comparison to the interstate highway system, it represents a paltry outlay. Moreover, the returns on universal digital access would accrue to almost every enterprise on the planet. 

The big challenge is the social reengineering required. Social services have historically been governed by bureaucracies and administered by professional guilds, both of which have worked hard to secure gains for the workers involved. Reengineering puts those gains at risk, and this is inherently threatening. We can solve for these problems, but it will take time, talent, patience, and empathy to do so. This will only be possible to the degree that we can overcome the divisive rhetoric that is currently so pervasive in our society and that demonizes people who do not share our point of view.

In short, grappling with this “opportunity” is not for the faint of heart. Rather it takes the mindset of the French General, Ferdinand Foch, who in one battle is quoted as saying, “My center is giving way. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking.”

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube