Why Improving Lives Is Value Creation At It's Finest

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By Brian Kabisa,CCXP posted 11-22-2020 12:41 PM

  
As customer experience professionals, you are surely well aware of the skepticism that organizations have when it comes to investing in designing purposeful experiences. While operators certainly hope that their organizations are delivering interactions that satisfy their customers, making it a priority becomes a great challenge when it's connection to bottom line outcomes isn't made abundantly clear. Even the notion of studying customers to understand the key attributes that drives their decision making often gets confused as altruism for the sake of it. But that is where we come in.

As practitioners, advocates, and lifelong students of customer experience management, we see the bigger picture. Just like with marketing or product development, small changes can have monumental impacts overtime. And when it comes making small improvements to experiences, you begin to make monumental improvements to people's lives. 


Why Happiness Is The Real Currency

Though they don't admit it, I'm willing to bet that most executives actually want to invest in customer experience. It is the natural human condition to want to actually make people happy, and when it comes to running an organization, leaders feel the weight of their role in shaping what happens to the customers that they serve. The problem is, the data driven nature of modern business has lead us to an overcomplicated state of affairs. 

Every action, every business decision, has to be in the support of moving a "number". To combat this, the customer experience community draws on scores of conclusive research studies that highlight how common KPIs such as Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are tied to customer churn and buying frequency. Using estimations, such as customer lifetime value, we are able to plot out how changing "X" or "Y" may then improve our "number" and thus, increase sales or decrease costs.

While I am not saying that anything about this is wrong, I do think that appealing to a more basic argument for experience management will prove to be more effective overtime. After all, most businesses cannot sustain growth without investing in marketing and sales consistently. As businesses grow they constantly need to be investing in hiring more resources and empowering better technology to able to handle their increased demand. These are non-negotiables. As these organizations make impossibly hard decisions to try and stay ahead of powering all of these moving parts, the prospect of introducing new constraints within their organization to drive targets that they never measured before, is a hard pill to swallow. I think that together, we can further simplify.

At a basic level, all we are doing in creating a better marriage between customers and organizations. Creating one in which both sides are engaged, fulfilled, and looking forward to a future together. Why? Because they will be happier. 

While this may sound rather delusional, it doesn't have to be. Whether you are a front-line employee, manager, or executive, you have no-doubt seen a customer experience joy from an interaction at some point in your career. We all know it is possible, but we don't weight it's significance. Some gets a nice kudus in the company newsletter and then every goes about their day, forgetting the little lesson behind it all. Back to the human condition, we naturally gravitate towards what makes us happy. We think about it, talk about it, and find ways to enjoy more of it for as long as we can. This is a notion that doesn't require a spreadsheet to understand. Every story that has ever been told, supports this theory. Every day of our lives confirms it. So how do we help guide leaders back to this simple truth?

We Must Find A Way To Embrace Human Nature

Despite all the constant speculation about AI and the possibilities of widespread automation, business is still, and will always be, about people. People part ways with their hard earned money because the hope to receive a value back from it. As organizations mobilize their resources in pursuit of the same, it is important that we remember what people value most, experiences. Organizations are rallied together to serve a common goal and understanding how their makeup impacts human lives will allow them to do that more effectively. Maybe the answer is communication. Maybe it isn't about opening their eyes to the mistakes their making, but rather the experiences that they can be creating. Both for their customers, employees, and overall brand. While I don't have it perfectly figured out, I do think that the answer will be in how we tell the story.

Let's Figure This Out Together

I hope you have enjoyed this article and I would love you hear your thoughts as well. If you are passionate about using experiences to drive value for organizations, I'd love to get in contact with you. I am so fascinated by the subject of understanding the impact of customer experiences that I recently launched a podcast to build awareness around it. I would love to host anyone who would be interested in discussing how you approach delivering experiences in whatever capacity you are in. If you are interested, people reach out to me via my email below.

Brian Kabisa
Principal Consultant, Kingman Consulting Group 
brian@kingmanconsulting.com




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