Oprah, Obama and the story of how customer centricity hit widespread adoption.

When Oprah talks, the world slows down to listen. And when President Obama is in town (just like with any President), everything else grinds to a halt.

So when Oprah, Obama, Ashton Kutcher, and Richard Branson all sat down with Ryan Smith, the CEO of Qualtrics at their annual conference on the future of customer experience, the 10,000 people gathered there were locked in rapt attention.

But what in the world would political leaders and cultural tastemakers have to say about software platforms and helping organizations improve their customer experience?

Why we're here: Oprah defined the grand narrative of customer experience.

She made an observation about the leaders in the room that clarified for me why SAP spent $8 billion to acquire Qualtrics last year, and why we should be hopeful about the impact that customer experience management can have on our organizations.

She told us that “now, we’ve actually trained people to sit and listen, and hear what [other] people think and need… There is value in not just listening, but in letting other people know they’ve been heard.”

Wow. Thanks Oprah!

With the clarity that so often can come from someone who’s in a completely different field trying to understand how the people in front of her make sense, she cut to the heart of it and saw gold.

The survey and feedback platforms of customer experience management are such a great, concrete example of a much bigger movement that’s making our work and our organizations more customer-centric.

It’s a movement that’s found real value in listening to what other people have to say, and is putting that type of listening and learning right into the day-to-day work of millions of people.

And that’s the core responsibility of customer experience leaders – to build organizations that where everyone – from the frontline to headquarters - deeply understands our customers and makes them feel that way.

In a bit of synchronicity, that’s also how Oprah came to understand her own role on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She observed many of her guests would ask her after their interviews ‘“Was that OK? How was that?'" What she started to learn "was this question of, 'Was that OK?' really is, 'Did you hear me and did what I say mean anything to you?'"

She went on, “so this idea of validating and letting people know that they are heard and what they had to say matters to you was a huge breakthrough moment because what I understood was people were more willing to share of themselves and share of their story if they feel safe and if they feel seen."

I love it. Which led me to the next question to figure out while I was at the conference.

How did thousands of people in business and government start believing their organizations should start acting like Oprah?

How we got here: How surveys, journey maps and NPS became the icons of customer centricity.

As a longtime student of the fields that put customer insight into the heart of design and innovation, it’s been fantastic to see such strong interest in customer experience growing over the last 5 years.

To be honest, I’ve never quite understood the central pull of customer feedback platforms in that movement. There are so many other important tactics, strategies and efforts that great customer-centric organizations also use – why have these platforms been so effective?

Two things became clear to me when I saw Oprah and Obama on stage with thousands of CX leaders gathered around them. First, we’re reaching mass adoption of customer centricity in our organizations. Which is great! And second, it’s been the surveys, journey maps and metrics of customer experience management that got us here.

How did it happen? Sometimes when you’re working on several things at once, the complexity of it all fades away and common insights just pop.

The morning before the conference, I was finalizing a guest lecture for Notre Dame’s Technology and Innovation Ethics class. One thing I shared with the students – undergraduate engineers, data scientists and designers - was the history of technology adoption.

You’ve probably heard the term “early adopter” before. It comes from Bryce Rogers and Neal Gross’ research of the adoption of hybrid corn seeds. The theory was nicely summarized by Everett Rogers in Diffusions of Innovation. They studied why people adopt new things, and how that adoption leads to social and cultural change.

It turns out that different people adopt technologies for different reasons, according to what unmet needs they have, their risk tolerances for this particular type of change, and where they sit in certain social communication networks.

The innovators (2.5% of folks) are bigger risk takers – they’ve got the means to simply try new things even if they might fail. The early adopters (13.5% of folks) tend to be more selective. Which means that lots of other people in their network check in with them to understand what’s new and whether they should pay attention. And the early majority (34% of folks) tend to wait until they truly understand how something new will fit with their lives.

So how does technology adoption relate to customer centricity in organizations?

You can think of the idea of customer centricity like an operating system on a computer. It’s a great big framework that helps our organizations run better – aligning all of our activities and decisions around a common purpose (serving customers’ needs) and a shared objective function (create value for customers).

In that way, the pace of adoption for customer centricity is moving forward just like any other technology. It started out with a few highly innovative organizations trying it out. It progressed when some early adopters picked it up. And now we’re seeing many more organizations and departments being driven to put customer experience at the heart of what they’re delivering.

This shift from the innovators through early adopters into the early majority typically doesn’t happen just by chance. Some innovations take a long time to make this shift, while others do so rapidly. The mainstream has very different needs than the innovators – and those needs require a different type of solution.

What’s causing the adoption of customer centricity to speed up?

It turns out that it’s possible to design for the adoption curve. There are six different design strategies that companies can take in order to accelerate adoption from one stage to another. The design strategy that works best in driving adoption into the mainstream is the curate strategy.

In the curate strategy, you create icons that are both desirable and choiceful in their functionality. You polish the design down and remove extra features so that the big idea that you’re trying to communicate comes through loud and clear.

This is what VisiCalc did for the personal computer. It’s what Apple did with the iPhone. It’s what TIVO did with DVR. It’s what Tesla has been doing with electric cars.

What caused this jump for the customer centricity movement? Surveys, journey maps and the NPS score. Those three things became the icons of customer centric experiences, and adoption soared.

These three features worked together to explain the value of customer centricity to a mainstream of people who didn’t appreciate it before. Finance departments wanted to prioritize investment decisions. Operations teams wanted to find problems that were costly and not valued. Marketing teams wanted to agree on what message to send. Suddenly, all these different teams found a way to listen to their customers and use it to make decisions.

And that’s why Oprah, Obama, Richard Branson and more were gathered with 10,000 people in Salt Lake City. It wasn’t just about people using a software platform. It was a snapshot of the customer centricity movement reaching the mainstream.

What's next for customer centricity.

There’s another lesson hidden in technology adoption theory. It’s about what’s likely to happen next.

If a curate strategy is the best way to design to accelerate adoption into the masses, an integrate strategy is the best way to take this momentum to the next level.

Many people take their time when adopting new ideas. They only do it when they can see exactly how this new idea fits into their life or way of working. Once you’ve reached the early majority, the integrate strategy is about designing solutions that fit easily into people’s existing habits and routines. This means creating ways that the solution will adapt, connect or respond to the other things people are already using. 

And guess what? The keynotes and demonstrations at the conference were overflowing with people talking about exactly this.

Qualtrics and SAP talked about their vision of a platform becoming about X+O data. That’s the intersection of “experience data” and “operational data” – or the integration of how companies have always used their enterprise ERP and CRM platforms (analytics on their internal operations) and how companies are beginning use customer experience management (learning about their customers).

Bruce Temkin presented on customer experience moving beyond platforms and into the practices and perspectives that link efforts together across an organization. McKinsey presented on how to “integrate four elements to create the future system.” A panel of B2B customer experience experts talked about tuning CX and its ROI metrics, one by one, for each department they support.

Qualtrics’ CEO even came out and said “I have deep concerns about how most companies are running their experience management systems” because, right now, they’re too simplistic and not comprehensive enough. He compared it to flying a plane and showed a picture filled with gauges. “Most businesses are running CX on just one instrument. You can’t fly a business on a single instrument.”

As successful as surveys, journey maps and NPS have been for getting the customer centricity movement to the scale it’s at today, folks seem to agree that what’s next is going to be much more deeply integrated across an organization.

That makes a lot of sense. But it doesn’t have to be all about massive technology investments and change management. There are easy, experiential and everyday ways to help take customer centricity to the core. It’s the work of strategy and culture.

I’m on Oprah’s side. The more that our organizations can have a widespread sense of empathy and understanding for our customers, the more likely it is that all of us will be doing the best work of our lives.

Email me at [email protected] or message me here if you want a copy of Jump's most recent white paper – An Introduction to Customer Centricity. Would be so happy to toss a few best practices your way.