Why clear focus in CX transformation is crucial, and why customers are more forgiving than we think

This is my final piece centered around marketing novelty syndrome, claiming basically that Marketing (read CX) trends are often more of a linguistic iteration, than true novelties, and following them blindly hurts long term CX improvement.

Do me a favor and browse marketing trends in the last 10 years (I will deliberately not do it, so you have rather good chance to prove me wrong): I can bet that Marketing trends in 2010. had at least 3 major trends contributing to getting the customer in the center of company efforts. Since then, Martech and Adtech advanced at uneven pace, but managed to (more or less) steadily improve in serving those trends, but if we neglect the lingo change (or buzzwords evolution if you will) and use just one self-explanatory blanket term (I don't see why we need more) of customer centricity, I bet that the major trend from 2010. onwards would sum up to:

2010. customer is very demanding, and marketing needs to put the customer first and in the center of their efforts

2012. looks like the customer is even more demanding and marketing needs to get really serious about it and put the customer even more central

2014. ok that’s it, the customer had it, so the company needs to intervene and tell marketing that customer relationship is what we all own, not only marketers. Actually, it is a journey, not a sum of transactions.

2015. company decides to revolutionize their market approach by taking the syntagm customer centricity from marketing and making it company mantra

Fast forward to…..

2020. ?PANDEMIC!- online shopping, curbside pickup etc. is the new norm- and customer growing demand is predominantly digital. Customer demands Amazon customer-centric kind of experience from every brand they interact with.

2022. Customer continues to get spoiled by those brands who meet their high expectations, especially if customer centricity is delivered through sustainability principles and with less of a carbon footprint….

And so on, you get the idea anyway. I am afraid to google Marketing Trends 2023. Don't get me wrong, some clever things are for sure written there by the people that are smarter than me, but that stubborn insistence on reiterating the notion of how customers are getting more spoiled and demanding every quarter is a bit redundant and often quite untrue.

Customers are often bounded by the convenience (mental and physical availability- B. Sharp, How brands grow, 2010.), habits (better the devil you know) and simple lack of time-so that the perceived effort needed to change a brand or supplier is greater than perceived benefits of that change.

In other words, brands can afford themselves far more time (and mistakes) than it is often presented in the always hectic “augmented reality” of marketing and CX yearly manifestos . That doesn't mean we should stop working on customer centricity at every important touchpoint, it means simply that the journey is very long (if not endless), and although very nonlinear, still mappable. It is very easy to be distracted by the marketing gimmicks along the way, and unnecessarily divert from the course.

That is the reason why every company needs a clear strategy on how to gradually improve CX. You might begin with this simple, but powerful check list on how to improve your CX. Approaching it honestly and systematically is a good start to begin crafting your own strategy, that will fit your pace and deal with CX priorities first.