Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

You’re right. I’ve been involved in this field for 34 years, and I’ve seen the evolution of this whole phenomenon of customer experience or customer service or whatever you want to call it.

So let’s go way back. I remember as a kid when the service center was where you brought something that broke, right? You would tell them, you know, it broke, so you take it to the service. Why? Because there were the people who were competent and they had the tools and they had the spare parts to be able to basically do service recovery. And that’s what the service center was, remember?

But then what happened was that, you know, everybody got better in terms of quality of product or consistency of materials or whatever it was. And it became, well, we don’t want to just be stuck down here in recovery. Everybody aimed for customer satisfaction. Remember that? It was called CSat. And you know, there’s still organizations today that say satisfied the customer. And if they’re back in that, you know, era of evolution, you may also hear them say things like, the way to satisfy a customer is to meet their expectations. And the very next thing they’ll say, because a satisfied customer is a loyal customer. Whoops. We know today that’s no longer true. It’s too easy to switch, a click away. Too many alternatives. Too many options.

So we went from service recovery to satisfaction. And then some company said we’re going to differentiate. We’re going to differentiate. We’re going to do it by Moments of delight. Right. You know, moments of magic. We’re going to, we’re going to do these exceptional things. And that was fine. Except it was far too, what I would call episodic. So it would depend on which customer in which situation and who was serving them. They could do what… And so very quickly that became yeah, that’s just a moment. But what about the overall experience? And that’s kind of where many companies are today when they talk about customer experience. And they realize you’re talking across everything from learning about you, buying from you, receiving from you, using from you, improving from you, solving a problem with you, upgrading with you, buying again from you. Whoa! And that could be across multi-channels. So when people talk today about that overall customer effort or they talk about the end to end journey for the customer, they’re at that level.

Then it went to the next level, which is, which is not create a great experience. Let’s do it in a way that causes that customer to become an ambassador, to become an advocate, to give us the positive reviews, the five star, the attaboy, the positive comment and the focus became loyalty. Not just customer experience, but customer loyalty. How do we, you know, actually produce that kind of ongoing, we’re part of you, you love our brand, we love you. You know, enough for the future together.

And today, right now, I’m seeing the evolution to the next and maybe the final level. But don’t count me on that, because who knows how evolution will continue to go. It’s really the concern for customer care. And what customer care really means is a concern for and a commitment to the well-being of the customer, not just taking action to create value for the customer, but actually understanding or being curious about. Customer wants this. Why? Because they value that. Why do they value that? What is it that’s actually going on in their life, in their team, in their family, in their health, in whatever area it is? And when you can build a culture where people care, they have concern for a commitment to the well-being of their customers and their colleagues and their community, and the environment. Then you’ve built a culture of genuine care.

Some of our clients, for example, LUX* resorts based in Mauritius and Maldives and many other places around the world, one of the top hospital luxury brands, they now have a contest which we’ve helped them evolve into over 12 years called the CEO Circle of Care. And every one of the resorts, every year has to come up with a project to demonstrate taking good care of guests. Another project, taking good care of the well-being of colleagues. Another project, taking good care of the communities in which they work. And a fourth project on taking good care of the environment. That’s where we’re all going, folks. That’s the kind of evolution you as a leader or you as anybody who works in any organization, want to build in your organization and if you’re a customer, those are the kind of companies that you want to favor with your customers.