Back in the late 1990s, I was working at the John Lewis Partnership (JLP), looking after their customer database system. JLP had invested several million pounds in their database. In those days you needed a supercomputer to process the millions of customers’ records including years of transactional data.
So why exactly was the investment made? Well, because it was believed at the JLP and indeed at most if not all major retailers that a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system would increase sales and result in happier customers. Yet despite enormous investment and what seemed to be at heart a logical approach, CRM is comprehensively believed today to have been a failure. There is a consensus that the CRM story has been one in which a large number of organisations made significant - and in many cases very large - investments, mostly in technology, and saw little return.
Why was this? In my opinion, as someone who was deeply involved in CRM, there were two reasons: firstly, there was an over-reliance on the technology itself, and secondly a preoccupation – or indeed obsession – developed with intricate theoretical segmentation, that was rarely of much use in the real world.
These two problems were coupled with the unhelpful and even disastrous catalyst of a fundamental lack of understanding of what customers actually need. Instead, CRM was used to push products and services that the organisation wanted to sell rather than as a tool for obtaining profound and wide-ranging insight into customer needs.
Fast forward to now, and I can see some unsettling parallels in today's CX industry with what happened with CRM. Recently there have been a number of thought piece articles raising the same worries from well-respected sources such as Marketing Week, EngageCustomer and the luminary, Ian Golding.
The customer relations industry has become overly focused on single metrics, internal process and journey maps based on the organisation's view, rather than on what really matters: the customer mindset or indeed moments of truth.
In addition, and partly due to a lack of success, CX initiatives have dived into ever more complex customer strategies that are difficult to understand internally, would not be recognised (or appreciated) by their customers, and are probably not appreciated or remembered by frontline colleagues, who may even resent such strategies. It is in fact all another example of the age-old problem human beings have in empathising and caring about the agenda of others. Sometimes you even get the impression that at many retailers, customers are regarded as a sort of necessary evil.
So how can we save CX? After all, few people nowadays would argue against the obvious but momentous observation that providing an exceptional customer experience in all its dimensions does generate increased revenue, improved margins and happy colleagues.
After thirty years in the industry as a practitioner and adviser, I think it’s time to return to a simpler age. There are only really three things we need to get right to deliver exceptional customer experience.
- We need to understand and deliver the fundamental things that customer just want us to get right every time - meeting their Needs.
- We must define the small but absolutely crucial number of things that add value to the customer experience, things they notice and sometimes will pay extra for – that is, their Wants.
- When things go wrong, we need to over-deliver on the recovery process creating genuine delights that your customer will talk about and in doing so enhance the brand - Delighters.
If we focus on implementing these three crucial strategies as CX professionals, we can, I believe, finally deliver the vast potential that CX offers to organisations and customers alike.
Not only this, but I think any other approach is going to lead to failure, disappointment and even disaster.