Alan Pennington

Member Article

The great customer experience design scandal

By Alan Pennington, author of The Customer Experience Book

According to a probably conservative eMarketer view, the global spend on brand marketing in 2015 to create expectations about brand experiences was US$592 billion.

Yet when it comes to the investment in the active design, management and measurement of the critical customer experiences that customers of those high-spending businesses receive, no figures exist – but we can be assured that it will be the tiniest fraction of the brand marketing figure.

The result is disappointment for customers and increasingly, in this hyper-connected world, a lack of trust and inevitably lost revenue. If less than 10% of the advertising spend were diverted to designing consistently deliverable customer experiences at critical moments we would all enjoy the benefits, whether customer or business.

What business would pay another to develop brand advertising that is not connected to the ability of the business to deliver on the expectation that is created?

Of course the answer should be no-one and yet that is exactly what happens every moment of every day! Advertising is too often such an idealized view of the company offer that is disconnected from the reality of what can be consistently delivered.

Instead of the old adage of “under promise and over deliver” it is about over promising and under delivering, and then dealing with the consequences. Yet can you remember the last time that an advertising agency was fired because the business did not deliver on that brand-led expectation? Neither can I and therefore there is little reason for them to live in the ‘real’ customer world.

It is undoubtedly true that it costs more to deliver a poor experience than one that delivers on the brand promise. The problem is few businesses seek to quantify this, yet it is pretty easy to do. For example, just look at complaint handling, lost sales, returns, sickness and absenteeism of stressed staff. In these instances you can choose from a world of measures that will prove how easy quantification actually is for a company to do.

The trouble is that because the way businesses plan and account have hardly changed over the years these costs are built into the business plan year on year and seen as a cost of sale rather than what they are: a drain on profits and reputation.

What is not built into business plans is the need to invest in design/redesign and management of the high impact critical customer experiences. By that I do not mean the processes and plumbing that are required to deliver but the actual physical experience.

The result is that any team engaging with this element has to beg, steal and borrow budget in year from already committed sources – hardly a recipe for success.

So why does this still happen in otherwise well-run businesses and how do you stop repeating the same mistakes - doing the same things and expecting the outcome to be different?

The short answer is you have to think differently and challenge the existing conventions.

At its heart Customer Experience (CX) is still so young in terms of business thinking that it struggles to make it onto the Organisation Chart, let alone the Business Plan– the lone voice in the wilderness – often sitting under Marketing/Brand and rarely effectively represented at the board level.

Consider this; would you have a business without a sales director? I think not, so you have a whole division selling in the expectation but the actual delivery of the experience is then dispersed across a myriad of departments from operations to IT and logistics; none of whom really see the design of the customer experiences as central to their raison d’etre.

In the end there is no real identifiable ownership or accountability for the overall experience ownership, just a series of departmental versions that manifest itself for us as customers in the inevitable hand-offs to different teams and inconsistent experiences.

What leaders have failed to grasp is that Customer Experience is much broader then Customer Service. The latter focuses on a very narrow interaction with customers; the former embraces all departments and considers how the whole business is both set up and how it contributes to the end customer experience.

But if you look at where this thinking is built into the whole training, education and learning for executives then you see that there is a huge hole. Customer Experience as a discipline and powerful business tool is not taught. Leaders are not equipped to know what to do to influence it or how to influence their teams to deliver CX benefits.

Fundamentally, it is down to a lack of confidence; borne out of a lack of knowledge, lack of familiarity and understanding of what and how to focus on the key aspects of customer experience at the top of the business, and then through the layers.

At its most basic level you need to understand what it feels like to be a customer; to be able to identify the critical interactions versus the less important; to identify out of all the interactions those that have the real impact on customer behaviours.

The good news is that there are some businesses that are really grasping this fundamental shift in business strategy, that is being driven by changes in customer behaviours that are in turn silently hitting the bottom line.

The ones that do act now have an opportunity to put clear water between themselves and their competition and create a competitive advantage that will be sustainable as competitors try to play catch up.

The Customer Experience Book (Pearson) by Alan Pennington is out now, priced £17.99.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anthony Harvison .

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