Is Customer Experience Dead?

In the last few years, it seems like I’ve been having more and more really bad customer experiences…across all industries…and I’m not alone. I have a hypothesis about this, that customer experience is a victim of one thing - people just don’t care anymore. There are many factors that have led to this, including COVID, endless budget cuts, quiet quitting, general apathy, bad automation tech, outsourcing, an unhealthy focus on the bottom line, and obsessive growth (at any cost) disorder. I believe we’re in a perfect storm where these factors are converging to cause a new low point in customer experience. Without a renewed focus, we may collectively tolerate the new malaise, which could lead to “customer experience eradication.”?

Eradication is a strong word, but if I think back (a decade or two), most companies were preaching a non-negotiable culture of “customer centricity”. This focus on the customer would not only deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX)”, it would also drive growth, and cement competitive advantage. Remember Zappos…the customer-focused eCommerce company. They were acquired in 2009 by Amazon for $1.2B and were the poster child for creating exceptional experiences that were embedded in their DNA.?

To me, customer experience (CX) refers to how a business engages with its customers at every interaction - whether it be between humans, customers and products, or customers and technology (IVR, Chat etc). Every single “experience” a customer has with your brand, people, products, technology and processes, defines the experience. It’s also true that a single interaction or experience can define the ENTIRE (sum of all) experience(s).?

Interactions occur when customers gather information, buy, use products, try to find information to help them better use products, get support, and everywhere in between. Even interactions that are not in a company’s control, but occur along the customer journey, and are performed by external parties or products can have a massive impact on the experience and perception of the brands involved.?

This is why customer experience needs to be thought of holistically and requires a shift in mindset. The new way of thinking must be a customer experience mindset. This means no interaction (whether owned or not) can be ignored, broken, or poor. For example, air travel involves various interactions that include researching flights, buying tickets, travelling to an airport, walking through the airport, checking in, checking bags, security, waiting, boarding, collecting bags, and sometimes, customs. It’s true that the airline doesn’t own or control many of these “other” interactions, but it doesn’t matter. To a customer, the experience of air travel includes them all. If airport security consistently provides a bad experience, then the air travel experience is bad and people may not fly. A bad experience may mean that an airline loses customers, and revenues, because people opt to not travel, or travel less, because “security is a nightmare.” This is precisely what’s happening in Toronto, at Pearson International Airport, rated one of the worst airports in the world for customer experience. The combination of parties (security, customs, airport authorities, airlines) continues to deliver horrible experiences. Many Canadians are now driving several hours to Buffalo International Airport (steering clear of Pearson), driving, or simply not flying.?

It seems as though many sectors today are okay with delivering bad experiences. It’s like they’ve given up. My recent “bad experiences” span restaurants, airlines, hotels, banks, ISPs, tech companies, physical retail, eCommerce, grocery stores, gyms, and vacation rentals (to name a few). I’m not the only one noticing that CX across many sectors sucks. That’s why I’m asking the question - is customer experience dead? Does anyone really give a sh*t about customers, their journey and their experiences anymore?

We’ve been out of COVID for some time now, and technology enabling superior experiences has never been better. It seems, however, like many businesses are blowing it, or blowing smoke up our collective asses. A prime example (no pun intended), is Amazon’s top leadership principle of “Customer Obsession”. I recently went through the experience of self-publishing a book, using Amazon’s Kindle Self Publishing tool (called Kindle Create). It’s buggy, doesn’t format content properly, and is missing all kinds of support information. In short, the product, support, and “experience” sucked. You’d think Amazon would have done extensive testing on the product and actually used it as a customer would. Nope! I ended up using Google Docs instead.

How about airlines screwing customers by losing bags, stranding passengers, cancelling flights, threatening customers, and not offering compensation (see complaints about Sunwing , Flair Airlines , and Air Canada to name a few). There are too many stories to reference, the truth is that airlines simply don’t care. Here’s one very recent fantastic story of a Canadian couple that used AirTags to track their “lost” luggage from an Air Canada flight. The couple knew where the luggage was, but Air Canada refused to “find it” and claimed it was lost. The customers tracked their bags and went to the location. They found their luggage, along with hundreds of others in a storage locker (not too far from the airport). Apparently, all the luggage had been “donated” to charity, with little to no compensation to passengers, and no respect or empathy for people and their possessions. Needless to say, the police are now involved and are investigating. Most Canadians feel like our air travel industry just doesn’t care, and the continued awful experiences support this belief.

Other examples of poor experiences include restaurant staff taking way too long to serve customers. Big Box stores with no staff to be found. Funnels that include horrible, frustrating, useless IVRs, or worse, useless Chat Bots. The latest trend is service “ghosting” - trying to get support from a company that simply ghosts you and your request.

In Canada, we have wait times of several hours to see a doctor or dentist that make us wait (the patient MUST be on time, but the dentist/hygienist never is). And banks are the worst of the worst. Want another account? Impossible. Want a single view into all your services? No way, you need 5 apps. Want to exchange or move money? It’s like it’s the 1800’s and you have no right to your money. Connect third-party services to my bank ( RBC )? No way! I’m a business and personal client, and I STILL have to go into a branch to open a US dollar account. The worst part is how antiquated the processes are. The banks have a never-ending dependency on paper forms, physical signatures, and in-brand meetings. Yesterday I logged into my account and had to log out and log back in to book an appointment. How does that make any sense?

The list of companies and employees delivering bad experiences is endless. With the advent of social media, many Instagram stories, or TikToks are showing and promising exceptional experiences, when the reality is far from it. A recent discussion I had with some agency friends was about how you can lure customers with stories and images, but their very wise and vocal if the experience doesn’t deliver what was promised.

A recent article was written on Medium titled “Why Customer Service Pretty Much Sucks Everywhere.” The article names several reasons for the nosedive in experience including cost cuts, lack of resources/capacity (due to COVID cuts), an unhealthy focus on lean operations and profit, and higher costs of labour.

None of these factors should have an impact on the quality of the experience if it’s a mindset and everyone is accountable and responsible. These factors are all excuses by management and employees to justify and enable a culture of CX apathy. This is so shortsighted, as Customer Experience is essential to the long term success of the brand, the economic well-being of the firm, and the ability to continually attract both talent and customers.?

Maybe most companies are simply thinking about CX incorrectly. How many businesses do you know that view customer experience as an essential, non-negotiable value, or as a profit centre? Probably few if any. Usually, CX falls to Service/Success and Support and covers only post-purchase. Those areas are rarely considered “strategic” by management and are often viewed as cost centres.?

If an organization truly values CX and what their humans (both customers and employees) experience at every interaction, then they need to make it a strategic imperative, a non-negotiable corporate priority, and create ongoing organizational alignment. This will create an environment where it’s part of the culture, everyone owns it, and is measured AND rewarded on it. It becomes part of the corporate DNA and spans the entire organization across every interaction, and every function in the organization works together to deliver against creating the best experience possible.

To do this, employees need to eat their own dog food and spend the time to truly understand the customer journeys, experiences, and interactions - and from a customer's perspective. Employees need to care and ensure all interactions are designed to delight. This requires customer empathy, understanding the outcomes customers are seeking, and delivering them in the best way possible for the customer. To do this, you need care, effort, patience, thought and time. Things need to be mapped and documented, processed need to be created, and employees need to be empowered to take initiative, make things better and make things right (if need be).

I recently had a situation where I wanted to book a service appointment for my Acura sedan and wasn’t able to do so online (the booking experience was too confusing and I couldn’t get through it - a fail in itself). While on the site, I got chatted by an Acura rep to help. After asking for all my details (name, phone number, address, vehicle details, type of service etc.), the rep told me she would forward my info to the service to get in touch with me by phone the next day. I lost my mind! How was this helpful to me? Now, I had to wait for Acura to call me to book an appointment. This created extra steps in the booking process and made things more inconvenient for me. Why couldn’t the rep simply book the appointment? Ridiculous.

Companies would do well to conduct ongoing CX audits. For every product, process or interaction, have someone who maps it, determines the breakpoints and fixes it (many call this “walking the field”). Sounds simple enough, but this rarely occurs. I recently had a bad experience with Westjet’s Mastercard program (RBC), where it was clear nobody had actually tested or tried the application and approval process. Needless to say, it was a cluster fu*k, and I churned out of the program. The lack of testing will surely not only cost both parties tens of thousands of customers and millions in revenues, but it will create a lot of detractors.

What if companies treated the experience as an untapped, massive profit centre? Thought about armies of happy customers acting as brand ambassadors - selling peers and the world on the company. WOM marketing is probably the most powerful kind of marketing, period. And great experiences power WOM. WOM also lessens the burden on marketing to do the toughest job in the world - find new customers.?

It’s no secret that there’s a direct correlation between experience and value. The better the experience, the more valuable. The more valuable, the more that one can charge (and people will pay). It’s a self-supporting, extremely efficient, profit-growing cycle (flywheel). Gartner estimates that customer experience drives more than ? of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined.?

It’s also no secret that happy customers:?

• Stay as customers - so CX improves retention (lowers churn), and lowers the total cost of acquiring new?
• Spend more - pay more, and buy more stuff?
• Have higher lifetime values - which improve marketing/CAC efficiency and lowers costs
• Spread the word - which helps build a brand, lower marketing costs, and drives further growth

In addition, many prospective customers today (prior to making a buying decision), will audit the customer experience. This was especially true in fintech, the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) space, where prospective retail partners would audit customer reviews, view Reddit comments, and read customer comments on the brand. BNPL was a service offered to the retailers' customers, so retailers wanted to ensure their customers were treated extremely well, were happy, and that the BNPL provider would treat their customers as well as they would. Negative reviews, customer complaints, and unfavourable Reddit comments, cost many BNPL brands multi-million dollar deals with retailers and provided a competitive advantage to those BNPL providers with better experiences. So if you have bad CX, you’ll lose business - but who measures the impact of bad CX on revenue and profit - nobody!?

Great experiences drive the marketing and sales flywheel and make those functions much more efficient. When execs are talking to their boards, they should have the formula to support the continued investment required to deliver ongoing alignment to exceptional customer experiences. This may require looking at things in the inverse (retention rates, marketing efficiency (spend to revenue, profit), referrals, NPS etc. These are bottom-up metrics that build revenue, profit, and expenses. They can even talk about a shift upward or downward in NPS and what that would do to the only things the board cares about.

If you're like me, then you too have recently had bad experiences across sectors. In this day and age, there’s no excuse. People need to care. Every interaction, owned or not, matters and defines the experience. This is why customer experience needs to be thought of holistically and requires a shift in mindset. CX must be a strategic imperative, a non-negotiable corporate priority, and create ongoing organizational alignment. This will create an environment where it’s part of the culture, everyone owns it, and is measured AND rewarded on it. Companies need ways to continually monitor and audit their CX, knowing that it’s an untapped, massive profit centre that drives the sales and marketing flywheel. And most of all, it’ll make me, and millions of others like me, a whole lot happier.

Do you agree, disagree, or have a POV on this topic? I'd love to hear.

#customerexperience #NPS #customersatisfaction #