3 Truths About Customer Experience
By: Vimal Rai
Tags: Travel, Customer Experience, Emotions, Retail, Aviation

Quote un-attributable. Meme created on memegen.com

If you follow me, you might know that I post quite a bit about Customer Experience. Given my background in a high-touch industry like travel, retail and aviation, like many insiders, I too, often take for granted that we all just know what “customer experience” means. Having done some research in order to refine my hypotheses, I’ve also posted about the proverbial difference between customer service and customer experience, about strategically leveraging social media as a tool for improving customer experience, and even about the role of emotions in the understanding of what goes into delivering great experiences. Yet, today I want to take a step back and take stock; question assumptions and perhaps re-orientate perspectives.

Why? Because of the never-ending quest to put some structure into a discussion about Customer Experience. Practitioners are only too keenly aware of the struggle to accurately measure and assign relevant metrics to something as subjective as “experience”. Decades of books, scholarly articles, audits and surveys seem to have not really helped some of the oldest businesses in the world deliver great customer experiences.

In fact, the inventor of the foremost tool that organisations use to “measure” customer experience (or satisfaction) — the Net Promoter Score (NPS) — Frederick F. Reichheld, did a survey back in 2005 (yes, nearly 15 years ago…) that showed that while 80% of companies surveyed believed that they provided a superior experience to their customers, a mere 8% of customers held that same view. Shocking.

But I know what you’re thinking, so let’s fast forward to 2019. Unfortunately things haven’t really improved. In a survey done recently, nearly half of the respondents said that brands don’t meet their expectations and almost two-thirds could not recall when a brand exceededexpectations, while 87% of marketers thought they were indeed delivering engaging customer experiences. The Experience Gap is very much alive.

So we know the gap exists today, and it’s still alarmingly large. Unfortunately we also seem no closer to understanding why it does, nor being able to do something about it. Don’t misunderstand me; I know we have all sorts of surveys and audits that try to measure satisfaction levels of customers at various touch-points along their journey. As I’ve alluded to before however, all of these are lagging indicators; it’s too late to do anything to improve if a failure has already occurred. Plus, we are assuming that the high satisfaction levels on a 5-point scale equates to the respondents having had a great experience. Ask yourself when was the last time you completed a survey that coincided with having had a great experience.

Paradigm lost?

This in turn suggests that, from an organisational perspective, we might do well with a new paradigm and a new operating system around customer experience management. Paradigms are meant to guide thinking, and based upon exhibited patterns and examples. What have our paradigms been based upon thus far?

A picture often paints a thousand words, so here goes:

Never mind everything else, just consider the evolution of the digital age globally. Don’t we remember when bookshops were where we bought books, TV was where we watched movies — on a schedule — the radio, mix-tapes and boom boxes fed us our music, we shopped in real physical shops and price comparison was done in paper notebooks etc.? Then, everything (no really, everything) changed (and kept changing) with the emergence of camera phones (2000), the iPod (2001), Skype (2003), Facebook (2004), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006), iPhone and Kindle (both in 2007). I could go on, but I’m sure you see where this is heading.

It’s clear to anyone that, as information seekers, browsers, buyers, customers and consumers, our behaviours have changed dramatically, largely due to all the technological advancements within the 1st decade of the 21st century. Arguably, our behaviours continue to change significantly as we end off the 2nd decade; customers now have more power than ever before when searching, considering and deciding whether to purchase…but more on this some other time. The question is whether organisational “customer experience” paradigms have changed in tandem with — or even ahead of — the way our customers’ expectations and behaviours have.

Depending on who you speak to, the answer is likely to be mixed. From a known individual at my neighbourhood grocery store, I’m now an Amazon data-point. Where once, I could call and speak to a real human being on a telephone, I’m now at the mercy of (usually badly-programmed) IVR or chat bots. TV advertising allowed me to take a break, take a leak, get a snack, and OOH advertising (billboards and bus stops) blended into the scenery; now we are hounded and targeted on our laptops, mobile phones, and all other device-led interfaces. And because of the sheer volume of “consumption” happening digitally, “customer experience” has largely become the domain of expertise for UX designers.

Marketing paradigms have clearly evolved — from “moments of truth” to loyalty and beyond. But customer experience paradigms? Let’s be clear, the former is a communication model, i.e. inside-out and driven by the organisation; the latter is outside-in, experiential and necessarily subjective. Another way of saying this is:

We’ve refined the way we target our communication to our audience, but we still seem to be lost when it comes to delivering excellent experiences to our customers.

The point of this blog post is to get back to re-examining some of the assumptions, in the process hopefully revealing some new ideas around “Customer Experience” and its management paradigm. So let’s get back to basics then.

What is a “Customer”?

The first basic thing that warrants examination is this seemingly innocuous question. We tend to interchangeably use words like “client”, “buyer” and “consumer”, and in the travel industry, we also frequently use “passenger”, “guest” or “traveller” — all of which roughly equate to “customer” in our minds. But is there all there is to it? Bear with me, this isn’t a semantic storm in a teacup.

There’s perspectives, context, relationships and even legalities that tend to influence or (in the worst case) actually regulate the use of the various terms. Legally for example, a customer is the person who buys directly from the seller. A traveller is “someone who patronizes inns” — imagine that. And a passenger is legally “a rider who has paid a fare on a train, bus, airline, taxi, ship, ferry, automobile or other carrier in the business of transporting people for compensation”. But my point isn’t to try to make sense of it all legally; I’m not out to redefine the accepted basis for contract law.

What’s interesting for me is most, if not all, definitions have their basis in commercial transactions. Is this enough though? Shouldn’t we start using more updated definitions of “customer”? Legally, people who visit your website to browse and search aren’t really your customers (yet), or visitors to your airport who are not travellers, aren’t really your customers, until of course they buy something you’re selling. Are you — as a service provider or retailer happy with that?

And what about your employees? When they agree to come to work every day to represent your brand, can it be argued they are “buying into” what you’re selling? Whether they are or aren’t, what role do they play in the experience your customers have with your business?

What is “Experience”?

Experience, unlike “customer” doesn’t have a legal definition. There are qualifiers (like “professional”), which basically help to define “experience” as a noun, being the practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity. Also not very satisfying, methinks?

A medical sciences definition is probably much closer to what we think of when we talk about customer experience: Experience is “the feeling of emotions and sensations as opposed to thinking; involvement in what is happening rather than abstract reflection on an event.” This is clearly, a lot more relevant when it comes to understanding customer experience.

But, here’s a real interesting nugget that I came across in my research: The words experiment and experience have the same root in Latin: they both derive from the word experior, which means to gain knowledge through repeated trials. I love etymology (the study of the origin and historical development of words and their meaning) because it allows me to get back to the root and core of language, when humanity and life were a lot less complex.

There are therefore 3 key elements from the history and various definitions of experience:etymology talks about knowledge, and involvement, while medical and neuroscience talks about emotions.

Knowledge, Involvement & Emotions — 3 truths about Customer Experience

These are the 3 intertwined truths about Customer Experience. Intertwined because — while each one on its own is important — it is only when they are consciously incorporated altogether as part of an organisation’s customer experience strategy that we can establish an effective new paradigm for customer experience management. This also means that customer experience is the proverbial coin with 2 sides — the organisation and the customer.

Knowledge is both unknown and useless unless acquired, and only valuable upon effective use. An organisation that does not understand its customers, their needs, wants, expectations, preferences and changing behaviours, will not remain in business for long. Customers aren’t customers without knowledge of facts, features or the existence of a business. If (customer) experience is about the gaining of knowledge (value), then necessarily, service providers need to ensure they are delivering that value to customers. If not, you’re simply not valuable; effectively a commodity indistinguishable from others providing the same products and services. Remember, with very few exceptions, customers don’t wake up in the morning thinking “I want <<brand>>”. Customers have a need, desire or expectation that requires fulfillment, often independent of which brand delivers it. The value for the customer is in the fulfillment, not the provider.

In other words, provision of relevant products and services must have the necessary involvement of customers, without which acquiring required knowledge would be impossible. And for organisations, knowledge acquisition typically happens through its frontline employees and systems that interact with customers. Ineffective (un-involved) systems and employees can actually harm your business, in more ways than one. Involvement is what happens each time there is an interaction between customers and employees (or systems). Think of every interaction as an experiment, a trial. Speaking of trials, I love the idea that trials — in life — are generally considered with a negative connotation, while trials in the scientific or business world represent experimentation towards a different, usually better, outcome. It gets even better: the Latin word peritus(meaning “tested”) shares its roots with “experience” and “experiment”, and once again, has both negative (peril, risks) and positive (the strength of statistical probability) connotations, depending on context.

Finally, if experience is is the gaining of value through repeated engagements and trials, then it follows that emotions will be at the heart of the matter. Medical science confirms, in fact, that experience is really about memories, emotions and feelings, rather than only about logic and thinking. You simply cannot be involved in an interaction without feelings or emotions coming into play.

We human beings are just not wired that way.

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But this isn’t meant to be a blog about etymology, semantics or medical science. It’s about uncovering some new ideas that can be used to formulate a new customer experience management operating system.

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An ex-airline and travel retail specialist, I am driven by Customer Excellence. I enable startups/scaleups and established organisations within the travel domain to connect, grow and scale their business internally and externally, thereby delivering Customer Excellence. This is achieved through the strategic mix of social marketing, modern selling, operations and HR advisory consulting, mentorship and occasionally angel investing.

You can find my content on LinkedIn & Twitter by following the hashtag #flyvrai.