Editorial
The Gist
- Engagement across teams. A robust customer experience strategy requires cross-departmental engagement, ensuring that every employee understands their role in enhancing customer satisfaction.
- Understanding customer journeys. Effective customer journey mapping is vital for identifying pain points and opportunities, allowing organizations to tailor their services for improved experiences.
- Metrics matter. Measuring the impact of your strategy through key metrics and feedback loops is essential for ongoing improvement and success.
It has been 30 years since the establishment of customer experience as a discipline, and very few people who do not work directly with it can accurately define what it encompasses.
A major challenge for CX professionals is making sure that everyone in their organization is fully engaged with CX when they are not sure what it is, how it is measured or where it came from. A simple but effective way to engage people in conversations around customer experience is to begin with its history.
To help people who are not specialists in customer experience understand just how far back it goes, business leader Maria Moraes Robinson and I developed the following visual illustration of its history (further below in the article).
The illustration is particularly effective to present at the start of a workshop, and it demonstrates a range of core customer experience practices and frameworks. It also highlights the contributions of human factors and human-computer interactions in the development of user-centered design practices.
The Origins of Customer Experience
Customer experience evolved naturally from the efforts of many visionary entrepreneurs, engineers and business leaders, starting with the first documented customer service methodology developed by Richard Sears, one of the co-founders of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. In 1897, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog presented Sears’ four-step method for providing excellent customer service, which would become one of the main influences in modern customer service practices:
- Be specific. Describe your products with as much detail as possible.
- Be trustworthy. Build trust with your customers through honest and transparent communication.
- Be helpful. Assist customers with their inquiries and needs promptly.
- Offer guarantees. Provide quality assurance and satisfaction guarantees to customers.
The invention of the telephone would revolutionize the retail sector by offering new channels of communication for customers, allowing them to speak to representatives from home rather than needing to travel to resolve issues or complaints.
The emergence of human factors in the 1940s — with its scientific focus on the psychological dimensions of human interactions with machinery and interfaces — also made major contributions through what we know today as user-centered design and agile software development practices.
Further innovations such as credit cards and call centers continued to evolve customer service in the 1950s and 1960s.
User-Centered Design Practices in the 1980s
As computers became more complex and began to be used in both workplaces and homes in the 1970s, a new area of human factors emerged: human-computer interaction. Through this framework, marketers focused on user interface development and designing computers that anyone could use, not just engineers, scientists or computer enthusiasts.
These user-centric design practices contributed to the mass-market success of the Apple II personal computer in 1977, and that was followed by the Macintosh in 1984, the first personal computer with a mouse and graphical user interface.
Related Article: Understanding the Shift From Customer Journey to Customer Experience
Innovative Approaches to Customer Experience
At the same time, several entrepreneurs and business leaders, driven by a major desire to achieve excellence in customer service, began to develop new methodologies. One notable example is Jan Carlzon, who developed “moment mapping” as the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines in 1981. This new framework was used to identify and improve each stage of the buying process by empowering customer-facing employees to make decisions quickly.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Ron Zemke and Chip Bell outlined the details of customers’ actual journeys on giant posters on the walls of company boardrooms. They referred to this process as “the cycle of service mapping.”
The Role of Global Advocates
While new methodologies like this were demonstrating how businesses could improve their service design, the nascent movement still required global advocates before it could really take off.
Transitioning to a Customer Experience Strategy
I began my career in CX in 1992 as a psychologist working in the Human Factors department of British Telecom, focusing on improving the usability of voice interactive services. The usability trials with our customers allowed us to track their interactions in real-time and hear them express their frustrations. We entered their inner worlds as opposed to just observing their outer actions.
At the time, BT’s marketing teams had a product lifecycle focus, and they would bring us in after the launch of a new service to ask if it was easy to use, rather than saving time and resources by involving us at the earliest stages of development. A small number of colleagues and I set out to develop a customer-centric approach focused on every aspect of the customer experience, and the result was a new strategic and multidisciplinary methodology we called “Designing the Customer Experience.”
In 1995, Mike Atyeo and I published our first paper, “Delivering Competitive Edge,” outlining our methodology. This was shortly after Lewis P. Carbone and Stephen H. Haeckel published their article, “Engineering Customer Experiences,” which introduced an experience blueprint that divided a customer experience into a number of discrete phases.
Together, these two articles explore the key design methodologies of customer experience and the strategic significance of the customer lifecycle, marking a shift from the previous decade’s focus on user experience design to a new era of customer experience practices.
Integrating the Customer Lifecycle into Your CX Strategy
Simply developing our methodology was not sufficient, of course. We also had to network extensively to bring the concept across the entire BT Group. The energy and enthusiasm I had toward promoting CX would lead me to become the BT Cellnet business development manager responsible for smartphones in 1996. In 1998, I would go on to become one of the cofounders of Genie Internet, a mobile internet startup developed inside of BT Group.
In both roles, our major guiding framework was the customer lifecycle. We sought to understand not only which new services and infrastructure we should develop for smartphones but also how these elements could reduce churn, create brand loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.
Many people believe that customer lifecycle management as a formal methodology was only developed in the 2000s with the introduction of customer relationship management applications. But the truth is that many businesses had already understood its strategic importance a decade earlier. Those who succeeded the most did not develop it as a marketing tool but as their central framework for achieving excellence in customer experience.
Related Article: Is Customer Empowerment the New Customer Engagement?
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Customer Experience Strategy Tips for Companywide Engagement
Ideas for improvements in the customer experience strategy can come from anywhere inside an organization. I would like to end by sharing the following five key takeaways to help you fully engage all your colleagues and teams in CX.
- Work with senior leadership to demonstrate how customer experience is not just a subdivision of marketing but also the responsibility of every single person in an organization.
- Help teams understand the strategic role of the customer lifecycle in managing churn and increasing customer loyalty. This is accomplished by fostering alignment and engagement across all functions, rather than focusing solely on customer communication.
- By providing people with an expanded understanding of CX, they are better able to determine how they can contribute to it, which relationships they need to develop, and which processes they need to improve.
- The illustration of the history of CX can be used as a tool to help share ideas about CX within your organization, which encourages engaging and diverse conversations among all employees.
- We are now in the era of deep tech with artificial intelligence reaching human levels of cognition and reasoning. Excellence in customer experience is needed more than ever to provide more humanized and ethical products and services.
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