Walk The Walk Before Everyone Stops Listening To Your Talk

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Where are your customers walking and are you following their footsteps?

Where are your customers walking and are you following their footsteps?

Apparently Customer Experience is all the rage…If the statistics are to be believed, more people are talking about and working within the various aspects of this new Customer Experience world than one might have ever thought possible.  According to “Markets & Markets” $3.7 Billion was the estimated CX Spend in 2014 and that will grow by a whopping 220% to $8.3 Billion by 2019!  And according to LinkedIn there are already 9,459,640 LinkedIn Members that have CX in their current job profile .

Perhaps these data points surprise us.  But should they?  After all, isn't the inherent importance of CX and the centrality of customer-centricity immensely clear to all of us?

The bottom line is that we may have let ourselves get distracted by the cacophony regarding "Digital Transformation,” “DMP’s,” “Social Media,” “Programmatic,” “Omnichannel," etc. etc. In order to hopefully bring some clarity to all of this noise, below I have outlined seven essential truths that have likely been true dating back to Athens and the Agora and should remain so in any future regardless of what new technology will surround (invade?) us:

Truth 1.  Customers Are It.  Customers always have been and always will be the lifeblood of any business.  Stating the obvious does not make it any less important.  If companies do not organize around their customers as the central driving force for which they exist, then I would suggest that perhaps they do not have a right to stake a claim to the future.  The best companies have aligned, from the top down, around their customers and the need to constantly seek ways to better serve them - all within a clear measurement construct that looks not only at NPS but also at Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) as well as ROI.

Truth 2.  Be Humble. Humility and with it a sincere willingness to listen to and learn from BOTH customers and customer-facing employees remains mission critical for any company that truly seeks to better understand and thereby serve its customers.

Truth 3.  What We Do Is What Counts.  What we say only counts if it is 100% consistent with what we do…or as I like to say, “Walk the walk before everyone stops listening to your talk."

Truth 4.  Strategy Must be Measurable, Dynamic and Flexible.  The only strategies worth discussing are ones which are supported by accurate, up to date, customer based insights. As customers inevitably change in this era of accelerating innovation, so must our strategies change.  When customers needs and desires evolve so must we evolve our ability to meet those needs and desires.  What does remain constant is the necessity to measure performance, to listen to one’s customers while leveraging all of the power that modern methods and technologies provide and to then react both intelligently and quickly to what we learn as part of this never ending process.

Truth 5.  Think Holistically and Integrate.  Customers do not experience and perceive brands based upon isolated, single moments in time.  The sum total of many such moments, channels and experiences all inevitably link together to define what customers think of those few brands with which they chose to interact.  This requires us to integrate:  our data sets, our analysis, our applications, and our organizational structures - they all need to support a singular goal of maximizing customer value. CRM, CX, eCommerce, Customer-care - these are all important aspects of the same multidimensional puzzle and need to be optimized with a single view of one’s customers and absolute clarity as to how the many pieces must fit together in a complementary fashion.

Truth 6.  There Are No Silver Bullets. I am sorry to say that truly serving one’s customers and being expert at CX while perhaps conceptually straightforward, is just plain hard work. Despite many vendors assertions to the contrary, there is no single application, no one technique, no one channel or approach that will solve for all of your CX needs.

Truth 7.  Not All Customers Are Created Equal. Yes, customers are everything; however, not every customer warrants the same level of attention and investment. Distinct customers / customer segments have highly differentiated actual and potential value.  Different customers are at a vast number of varied milestones along their ever-evolving journeys.  The Pareto Rule (1896) still basically holds true and with it the need to differentiate the strategies, tactics and investments we apply to our various customer segments.

So Customer Experience is indeed on fire.  Nevertheless we are in an industry that arguably has not even reached its adolescence.  As we learn to grow up and tackle these complicated issues, focusing on these few key principles should hopefully help all of us get to the next stage with greater success and most importantly…many more delighted customers.