Do you want your dentist to be a toothbrush?

How Can Customer Experience (CX) Become Creative and Service People more Free?

Companies that are not creative are unlikely to survive the rough-and-tumble changing world of demanding customer experience (CX). Answering the question that I have put – how companies can become more creative in bringing about customer experience – is not only practical but turns out to have an important ethical and even philosophical dimension. But I will stay grounded. And in so doing, provide logical grounds for improving companies and their performance, improving the experience of working in them, and improvingthe experiences customers gain from them. It answers the question, How can a company be a community of free action and not merely an assembly of automatons, a community that is at the same time serving common goals?

Limitations of creative freedom

A painting may be imaged, printed and reproduced indefinitely. The original painting we can assume was the result of a creative act. The original designs for the materials and machines involved in the printing may also be assumed to be the result of a creative act. Also, the idea to produce a print of the painting. But the indefinite repetition is not itself creative. Indeed it is of the essence that the indefinite repetition consists of an exact repetition. This is achieved by causal constraint – in other words all the equipment is designed to minimise variation and to do exactly the same thing again and again.

Most of the physical offerings – or goods – that people buy are like this. The minerals that compose an electric toothbrush have been transformed by various industrial processes and designs to produce a piece of equipment that reliably works in the same way in the execution of its service. They operate according to the constraint of natural law and human design. So the creativity goes into the design. What happens then is the unfreedom of the toothbrush as in the unfreedom of the printing machine. Only if there is an error will its regularity break down.

 How to reduce creativity!

What is the difference between a toothbrush and the dentist cleaning your teeth? If it was simply that the dentist was less reliable (inferior therefore) or more adept or better equipped (superior therefore), it would be reasonable to conclude that the dentist was no more free than the toothbrush. And if we expected the dentist to be like a toothbrush, we would essentially be expecting the dentist to be unfree.

I would argue that a good deal of CX service design involves the routinization of behaviour, with the effect of diminishing or eliminating the freedom of service personnel. In effect they become the equivalent of the horse that has been broken by its trainer and is now being guided by its rider. The guidance comes in this case from sets of specific objectives, corporate procedures, training, computer software and/or instruction, typically under supervision. All such human behaviour – whether it is in religion, political activity or service execution – has the characteristic of diminished or eliminated freedom. Added to whatever might actually belong to the body, there is an external imposition of motive and design idea. The person executing these is a mere implement, the implementer of strategy. Like a toothbrush.

The potentiality for free creativity.

Now it can be demonstrated – although I will not proceed through the full rigour of the logic – that human beings possess the capacity to be free. This freedom arises when the individual produces an idea which serves as the motive for their action. If they then execute their idea using whatever skills, techniques and knowledge of the world, which they have acquired, but according to their own idea and will, then to that extent they are free. In the decision to do this or that, they make an ethical choice.

On this reading, any training that service personnel gain in the ways of the world and techniques of mastery may add capability and value; far from being sneered at, if they are any good, they constitute an advance for the individual and therefore for society and for those who may be served. But if these are so structured as to take away the freedom of the individual, then in due course, if not immediately, the downside will outweigh the upside. No doubt most readers who have got this far will easily see why. It is likely to reduce the quality of the experience for the customer and in fact become demotivating or at least dulling for the service person, who not being a machine is not likely to continue reproducing the service action in the best way.

All motivations added to the service person that lie outside the CX event itself reduce freedom. These involve all forms of measurement and metrics extrinsic to the event. If a dentist notices that there is some plaque on a tooth, s/he is getting feedback from the actual field of service and intended experience of the client. Any such feedback that enables the service person, or professional, to improve their own performance according to their own motivations, will be useful. But all objectives and measurements that lie outside this field reduce the freedom of the service person and impose an external motivation, to the detriment ultimately of all – including the performance of the company.

The dentist’s freedom.

The dentist who has chosen to be a dentist and whose motivation (we assume) is to do a good job (whatever is needed for the teeth in front of her, in this case, cleaning teeth, at another time inserting fillings, and so on), this dentist may be acting out of freedom and her own choice of motivation. The dentist also required professional training, which included many ideas, dos and don’ts. To the extent that such training provides concepts and ideas, the operating principles, for successful dentistry, and that ongoing professional training provides continued information about what has been discovered, there is a good chance that there will be a significant level of possible freedom. If the training says, Thou shalt polish for 37 seconds, then it imposes an unfree standard. If on the other hand the dentist is told that research shows that polishing for more than about 35 seconds seems to make little difference, it is information the dentist can personalise as technique and does not affect the freedom or core motivating idea of what she will do.

It follows from this that there are practices in training and feedback design (especially real-time) that equip the service person with technique and experience without reducing their freedom. There are others that reduce or eliminate freedom and with it creativity.

The motivation to belong and the community of action.

The dentist is part of the profession of dentistry, is qualified by that profession, absorbs various practices and standards, and benefits from the continued maintenance of its reputation and resources. The individual dentist contributes to their profession more when they are free and effective than when they are a slave of professional standards (I maintain).

In the same way, a person in a company learns from the company, makes use of the resources of the company, is only able to provide services as a result of the situation that the company provides. From both an ethical and practical stance, we might assume that we would expect the leaders and owners of companies to want people in that situation to be free and to be acting out of their own free ideas and motivations. The alternative is to imagine that such people want their service personnel (of any type, of any level of seniority) to become either like machines or slaves or merely animals behaving according to instinct and indoctrination. However much it might feel like that in some institutions – and it does – that cannot be the standard that human beings endorse. I shall assume I do not need to defend that.

How then can a company bring it about that its people, at all levels (which includes from the CEO), have ideas and motivations that fit, and are confluent with “what the company is about”, and specifically delivery of value through CX? This would be a community of action and not merely the actions of an assembly of individuals.

Creative ideas are being generated from the moment that a company is first conceived, indeed, they are its source. These ideas (concepts) become mental pictures. Just as the picture of the painting can be reproduced, so can mental pictures be reproduced in action. To explain this further: A human concept (idea) has a universal quality, which becomes personalised. Triangles, kindness or nations are all concepts that are universal in the sense that they can be understood by each person; in the process of understanding them the idea is understood independently of whoever first produced it and indeed independently of any physical representation of it (such as a particular triangle, kindly act or country). Each person may think this concept or idea; they may also adopt their own personal mental picture of this universal concept. They can potentially move between a universal (non-specific) concept and a personal mental picture. The latter is likely to have some emotional response which becomes involved in the motivation to act in certain circumstances.

Individualizing commonality

To follow this calls on imagination. Netflix has recently (April 2017) offered a biopic series on the forming of Playboy and biography of Hugh Hefner. There is a moment in which Hefner recalls from his college days how he featured a particular (female) coed as the “coed of the month” and translates this idea and practice into an idea for Playboy, making use of the term playmate, coined by one of the associates. To the extent that his idea remains personal to Hefner and is judged against Hefner’s own mental picture, it will always be the case that it is judged by Hefner: he has to decide whether any particular image or playmate is appropriate. Anything else requires that some universal principles (criteria of choice) are understood independently of any particular actual playmate. Particular playmates and images of them might be cited as representative examples but the idea has to become free of these examples, however useful they may have been en route. Each agent must then produce their own mental picture of what he or she is doing, but drawing on the universal.

It follows that if a person does something because their boss tells them to do it, and they then do it the way the boss explains, they are initially acting according to the boss’s mental picture, even if they subsequently form their own (correct or incorrect) representation of that in their own personal mental picture. In this way, the boss makes people unfree. (One of the problems of hierarchy is not the hierarchy itself but the process of cascading unfreedom, often in ways that bifurcate and conflict between functional units and teams.) But if each individual individualizes a commonality, a universal of the company, something quite different arises.

The universal in a company builds community

What is universal in a company are its fundamental functional identity principles. Ideas that guide it.

When these are understood as universal concepts – however much they may be illustrated by particular examples – then it becomes possible for a person in the company to subscribe to them, to understand them as universals and make them their own and in so doing act in their own freedom. The same will be true, with suitable variation, for teams and processes. The dentist’s receptionists have their own professionalism within the ethos of the practice.

Thus: exploration of identity is not only an ethical dimension but also progressive: if done in the right way, it leads to the evolving freedom of the individual within the company community. Each becomes more free to decide whether they want to be part of the company community in the first place (i.e. without deceptions) and more free to act. Moreover, as feedback techniques are improved, enabling individuals to judge their own progress against specific goals, it becomes increasingly possible for people to decide for themselves whether they are doing a good job and in the process become more creative in action.

If when you go to a dentist you want your dentist to behave like a toothbrush, then everything I have said will be a waste of time. But if that is not what you want and you are a leader of influence in your company, then you may find ideas here of value. I hope so.

With thanks to my dentist, Peter Churchill, who is now progressively retiring but has looked after my teeth for some 30 years.