What happens when you get three Customer Experience Pioneers together to discuss the past, present, and future of Customer Experience? This episode of The Intuitive Customer, for starters. Recorded in celebration of the recent CX day, Colin joins fellow experience experts and champions Lewis Carbone and Joe Pine to talk all things Customer Experience. 

Lewis Carbone is the author of Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again and the founder of ExperienceEngineering™.

Joe Pine is the author of the book that started it all, The Experience Economy. He and his partner, Jim Gilmore, are true pioneers of the Customer Experience movement and the founder of their consultancy, Strategic Horizons, LLP.

Key Takeaways

There are a few things from this discussion everyone should remember in today's business environment, which include:

1. Each of us has failed at some point during our career in one way or another.
   • For my part, I often operated with the mindset that valuing the emotional connection that the Customer Experience evokes is an opinion everyone shared. However, I learned that tying your work to measurable results is the proper way to obtaining that shared mindset, and it is a value that I espouse to this day. If you don't tie your work to results, you will likely find that your mindset is your own. 

1. • Pine made the mistake of underestimating how difficult it would be to get companies to be the first to undertake a Customer Experience improvement program. Failure is a possibility, and, for some organizations, too much of one. Pine learned that what you design and what you deliver might not produce the results you intended when you mix in real-live customers. As a result, he advises his clients to reserve around 20 percent of their budget to make real-world adjustments for those parts of the experience that aren't working as they had hoped. 
   • Carbone said his mistake was not being clear enough with people what the real meaning of Customer Experience is. There is not the depth of understanding that he assumed, and he believes that to fix it, we need a new way of talking about experiences that use distinctive language that better defines the concept for people.
2. The future of customer experience is infused with technology and data.
   • I have a passion for a new concept called Customer Science, which combines technology with artificial intelligence and mountains of data to predict customer behavior. The data-based approach Customer Science provides is an excellent path to anticipating your customers' needs and increasing your emotional bond with them. 
   • Pine agrees, adding that the shift from physical to digital experiences occurring with the COVID-19 Pandemic has accelerated this fusion of technology and psychology. He sees the value that an organization can generate by amplifying in-person experiences with digital ones and capitalizing on their desire for meaningful experiences that they value more than stuff. 
   • Carbone sees the future of Customer Experience in the cultures of the organization.  Champions of the concept should build a culture that echoes the sentiments of their desired experience within their organizations. Moreover, the idea that science and art combine to create a higher level of experience management has begun to transform how companies approach business-as-usual. Carbone says using technology and humanity combined can create what he describes as Experience Management 2.0.
3. There are things you can do right now to prepare for the future of Customer Experience at your organization. 
   • In addition to tying your efforts directly to return on investment (ROI), I advise champions of Customer Experience to determine the lifetime value of customers they serve. Often this amount helps justify expenses for an experience program that demands an organization's resources. Also, I encourage organizations to identify ways to improve the experience that take advantage of the most significant opportunity rather than only fixing the problems. The ROI on delivering a solution for a substantial opportunity is far more valuable than repairing a small problem that has costs associated with it.
   • Carbone suggests deepening your understanding of how customers think vs. what they think. When you understand the role of unconscious thought and emotions and the influence they exert on our actions, you have an opportunity to surpass the benefits of customer centricity and reap the rewards of a customer-driven business model.
   • Pine says preparing for the future means making a few adjustments to your thinking. First, he wants organizations to realize they are in an experience economy, not a service-providing one. Next, he encourages businesses to consider what they would change in their experience offering if they charged admission for it. That mindset is the correct one for innovation and the creation of a good experience that customers think is worth having. Finally, he wants a focus on the individual reactions that highly-customized experiences deliver.

To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com

About Beyond Philosophy:

Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.

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