Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

And when we first got involved with the area of customer experience, it wasn’t even called customer experience back then. It was called customer service. And in fact, if you remember, if you went to the customer service center, it was usually because something had gone wrong, like the product broke, and that’s where they had the spare parts and the people who could fix it. Or something didn’t happen the way you thought it should. And so service was really all about service recovery, and we would track things like error rate or number of mistakes or quality that wasn’t acceptable or first-time fix. Something comes in, and did we fix it right the first time so it didn’t have to bounce back and forth? And then, and there’s still this is still happening. And they’re focusing on things like reducing the number of escalations where in order to solve that, can we do it right here when we first meet you as an upset customer with a problem? Or do we have to escalate it to a higher level technical or managerial support? You guys with me? Some of your companies are still doing this today and it’s normal, but it’s no longer the next chapter.

So we’ve gotten to the point now where things generally work. And with predictive analytics and preventative maintenance, if you have physical machinery, there’s less recovery going on. But that means that when there is recovery needed, it’s even more important that the experience for the customer be a good one. Cool. And then the whole field evolved. The next chapter showed up. I call that one the chapter of Customer Satisfaction. Did we deliver the way you expected? Are you fully satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not satisfied, very unsatisfied? Remember all those survey forms? In fact, that was the whole era that we called CSat. And, you know, many companies are still focusing on this whole area. Like the question here that you’re asking is how did we do? Notice they’re not asking, what could we do or what should we do. How did we do? Are you satisfied? Fine. A whole era involved then. And I think most of you are sitting here going, “That’s not where we are today.” Merely satisfying everybody is no longer a key to competitive success.

So then the next chapter showed up. And instead of just satisfaction, we jumped to this area called delight. And this was things like, you know, Google offering lunch to all the employees. It didn’t mean that everything that working at Google was delightful, but it was delightful that the lunch was free and it was so good. Or we’d be doing something in the form of our service and we’d go [bing!] and have that special little extra. And there are books about it calling it moments of magic, moments of, you know, extraordinary touch. Right? The moments of truth. But notice it’s all about moments of delight. And the challenge with that, as much as it could happen, is that it was episodic, like sometimes it even depended upon who was working that day or what was the mood of something or other. Or did we really, you know, consider you valued, or were you a new employee or somebody who had the experience to know what to do in that situation?

So then the chapter got turned again. And instead of saying, well, we want to just make delight moments. And then another amazing moment and then another delight moment, we said, no, no, no, we need to look at the whole experience. We’ve got to be looking at the overall CX of the client from when they’re learning about us through our marketing, trying something out, but they haven’t yet made a purchase. When they actually have the purchase experience, when they’re actually then being onboarded, whatever version that might be. It could be a software, it could be a physical thing, it could be an installation, it could be a delivery. Then how do I actually use it? How do I enjoy what it is that I got involved in here? If I had any questions during the experience, how do I get those handled? How is the billing and collection being done after that. Oh, and by the way, some of that is on the phone. Some of that is on the chat box, but some of that is on the messaging platform. Some of that is by email and some of that is in person. Omnichannel. End to end. The full journey- experience. And you know, we’re pretty busy with that right now because it’s not just the end to end experience or the different channels. You got all those different customer segments, you’ve got all those different avatars, and what is it that they prefer at these different moments along the journey? This is pretty much, you know, where we are.

But the chapter keeps turning. And so you start to get people who say, we want to create a great experience, but we also want to deepen that relationship. And so the focus from now on, let’s get some higher loyalty. How do we not just create a great experience, but do it in a way where people want to share about us, they want to promote about us, they want to tell other people about us, and then we’re going to start to calibrate our success, not on our CSat score, not on the number of recoveries. Those were long ago. I mean, they’re important, but come on. Well, what you’re now looking for is no longer something like what is the likelihood that you would recommend us to a colleague or a friend. But instead we’re saying, have you recommended us to a colleague or friend?