It's Time to Move to the Business of Experience

You don’t have to follow business news and insights to know that we all talk a lot about experiences. User experiences, customer experiences, product experiences, and the so called "Internet of Experiences" are but some of the ones that have defined the so-called “Age of experience.” So I’ll understand if you roll your eyes at the idea of moving to a “business of experience”, as it might sound like more of the same.

Except that it isn’t. In fact, the term “business of experience” (also known as “experience business” or “BX”) is a normal evolution that contemplates businesses adjusting to new customers, markets, and even worldwide behaviors and conditions. It’s not a coincidence that such a notion is gaining popularity right now, a time when a global pandemic has prepared the ground for it to thrive. 

The post-pandemic business landscape we’re beginning to see is a confluence of trends that have been slowly rising for years, others that the pandemic itself has accelerated, and new ones that no one could have predicted. This reconfiguration is forcing companies to evolve as well to meet the new and ever-evolving needs of customers. In that context, the kinds of experiences we delivered not so long ago aren’t enough. We have to embrace a new approach - the business of experience.

What’s the business of experience?

At first glance, the business of experience might seem like a new fancy way of naming customer experiences. That’s understandable, as both BX and CX are highly focused on delivering a superb experience throughout the customer journey. But there’s a substantial difference between the two and they have to do with the approach on which they are based on.

On one hand, CX is about selling goods and services by accounting for customers’ emotions, 

feelings, perceptions, motivations, and behavioral intentions in the entire customer journey. It’s about providing an excellent buying experience for the customer from the moment they come in contact with a specific need you can satisfy to the moment they leave a review after they’ve bought from you.

BX, on the other hand, goes a step beyond to address a relatively new phenomenon. Customers have gone beyond just comparing businesses within the same industry and are now comparing companies across the entire business landscape. Think about it - it’s highly likely that you do it, too (I know I do!). 

That’s because, as customers, we come to expect the best possible experience assessing general aspects applicable to virtually every company out there. It’s more than just price and superior quality - it’s about simplicity, intuitiveness, customer support, speedy delivery, lack of friction, alignment with our values, and purpose. 

Of all those aspects, perhaps the key to understanding the business of experience lies in the last two. While we can argue that CX already contemplates all of the other aspects I’ve mentioned, I’m fairly certain that it never worried too much about purpose (and only tangentially about values). BX embraces both of them to redefine everything about how we do business and might be, in fact, the foundation of a BX approach. 

So, BX is about redefining the entire company to provide better experiences. It’s also more than just about customers because a comprehensive experience impacts clients, employees, partners, and suppliers alike. It’s a more thorough approach that completely forces you to reimagine the way you operate. 

What you can do about it

From what I said above, you can read between the lines that you need to reinvent your business to truly stand out from the crowd and better align with the post-pandemic business climate. Doing so implies meeting the new customer demands while embracing a new approach to how you do things, one that puts values and purpose at the very heart of your operations. 

How can you do that? We can say that the best course of action if taking 4 major steps:

1. Use customer needs as your guiding light

I know I’m not discovering anything if I say that you need to meet your customers’ demands to improve your business. What’s truly new, though, is how you can do so. Rather than leaving it all to the marketing department to figure out, you should start paying attention to customers' needs in real-time. So, instead of just segmenting audiences and creating marketing personas, enrich your strategy by gathering data from as many channels as possible and pay close attention to what you get.  

Putting real-time data strategies at the center of your operations can help you uncover new needs as they emerge as well as identify market shifts as they happen. This contextual information can relativize your audience segmentation and provide your segments with more depth. All in all, this can help you tap into subtle opportunities that might be flying under your radar, a key to BX and its goal of leveraging quantitative and qualitative insights to design actionable paths.  

2. Aim for an innovative culture

If BX is about providing customers with what they expect based on their interactions with all the brands they engage with, then you need to be a true innovator to stay ahead of the curve. That means that you have to be alert to the changes happening all around you in order to quickly respond to them accordingly. What I’m trying to say is that your company has to be able to offer new ways of solving customer problems, solutions that can come from checking the competition, other companies, and the data you gather. 

Of course, doing that is easier said than done. I’ve already discussed innovation a couple of times in the past so I’m not going to get too deep here but basically, innovation is a significant positive change. In other words, it’s about substantial improvements you apply to things that exceed your products and your marketing resources. True innovation is about changes that are more fundamental and cultural. Ingraining innovation in your daily operations is the only way to truly become a BX company. 

3. Involve everyone in your company’s definition of experience

The experience a customer gets from a company doesn’t just come from a particular area within it. Sure, marketing can shape up customer expectations and customer support can make a bad move and ruin everything but those are just isolated events that aren’t the true reflection of a BX company. BX is about tearing down the divisions between your areas and making them cooperate more closely. In other words, experience is more than just the move from one station to another in the customer journey - it’s about the journey itself. 

The key here is to become more agile-driven, as your operations (in a company-wide sense) will have to adapt to the dynamic nature of today’s customer demands. You can’t do that if you have separate divisions that barely talk to each other. You need to prevent silos from forming in your company, and you can do so by fostering a collaborative nature guided by data-driven practices that guarantee the visibility of critical information across the board. 

4. Leverage the power of tech

I’ve been saying this for quite a while now but I’ll repeat it here: tech is the only path to becoming a more flexible and adept company capable of adjusting to the increasingly changing conditions of today’s business environment. Through digital acceleration, companies can modernize their infrastructure and inject agility into their operations, making all of the above feasible. 

Naturally, the kind of tech investments you make will depend on who you are and what your industry is. But, generally speaking, you’ll have to make a jump and digitize your tasks through some of the latest technological advancements, including AI, data science, and cloud computing. Doing so will help you build and foster a BX culture in your business, which is the only way you’ll navigate the uncharted waters ahead. 

The Time to Act is Now

We can’t still foresee all of the consequences of the pandemic nor understand its true impact. But that’s precisely why becoming a business of experience is so crucial. I think that uncertainty will be the defining factor of the years to come and the best path to deal with it is fundamentally changing the way businesses operate.

BX offers a clear roadmap to do so, one that mixes a new approach to the customer journey, a spotlight for data science, and a prominent spot for cutting-edge technologies. All of that is knitted together with purpose and value - the idea that you’re in business not just to make a profit, but also to make this a better world.

As we move forward, all of these things will become abundantly clear for companies of all sizes and industries. So, there’s no better time to act than now, as doing so can better prepare you for what’s to come and provide you with an edge that might prove crucial in the future.