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The Modern Customer Experience Framework

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Customer experience truth-teller Augie Ray says customer experience is an attitude, not a process. Customer experience is, "sure we can do that for you!" It's "I'm so sorry for your frustration, let's fix it." If this customer-minded company were a person, it would be the most knowledgeable people-pleaser you've ever met.

Companies today cannot afford to turn their back on customer experience. Entire industries are blowing up overnight (some in a good way, and some in a bad way). In fact 89% of the Fortune 500 from the year 1955 are gone. In the last three years the entire landscape of how consumers do business with companies morphed. Enter the sharing economy.

Today the nimble companies are the ones that gain customer loyalty--not the companies that hold on to their legacy infrastructure. You can almost imagine if the conservative unchanging corporation were a person, that person would say, "You will have to pry it [our old ways of doing business] from my cold dead hands."

Disruption has no thought or concern for legacy. They will be cold dead hands.

But I have compassion for these companies--particularly the employees who want to change the company but are unable to do so. Change is hard. Sometimes you need to throw everything out and start over--and the decision makers aren't willing to take those risks. And taking a risk is the only way to save the company from obsolescence.

Six years ago we were still having the same conversations about customer relationship management we're having now. According to a 2009 article in Harvard Business Review the most common CRM objectives are:

increase sales, drive cross-selling, minimize resources, reduce ancillary expenses, and lower the number of costly channel interactions. Those objectives indicate an inside-out view that implicitly treats the processes and internal metrics as more important than the customer.

This was 2009! These customer-crimes are still being committed by companies every day. It's six years later and most companies are still focused on driving customer costs down. The attitude is "customers are inconveniences to be dealt with." Another popular one, "Let's spend as little money as possible. Let's send them to half-baked self-help options, automation, and lengthy articles where they need to act like Indiana Jones to find an answer."

It's not that these are bad ideas. I will be the first to admit that a lot of customers like self-help. I love not having to call a person to get my problem solved. But the problem is so many of these solutions don't consider the customer experience. In most customer service scenarios customers are treated like unwanted out of town visitors.

Many companies are absolutely unaware of how customers actually experience their brand. The same way that many people go through their lives unable to solicit, hear or process feedback from other people---companies today are mostly oblivious to the actual experience of the customer.

Maybe that's because the truth hurts. Often getting the facts about what's wrong with the customer experience would demand a full overhaul on the approach. Customer experience is hard to do at a big company. The bigger the company, the more layers. For the company to improve that customer experience, they have to uproot all the layers. While it may seem labor-intensive to "start over," without it you risk losing your customers. Without customers you won't have a business.

Customers today are glad to leave behind companies they've worked with for years. Customers are ready to be treated well, they're ready for convenience, and the end of the prevalent nonsense rampant throughout customer service.

The P.O.S.T. Framework

In the framework I've created (seen at the top of this article) I've used an old categorization to talk about the elements of the modern experience. P.O.S.T. includes People, Operations, Strategy, Technology. Customer experience doesn't take a genius to figure out. You either have a company that values it or you don't. It's part of every decision, every hire, every new product release. Big companies today have a disadvantage, and that is their legacy. It's very hard to re-wire a culture once it's embedded in that company for decades.

Today we're seeing companies blooming across the bridge from me (that's the Bay Bridge) and they're hungry, energetic and they get "it." What's "it?" It's the fact that customers are the lifeblood of their company. They are producing unbelievably innovative products, and hustling to win with customer experience. Referencing that statistic earlier in this article about how many companies are around from the '50s, look around you today at the Fortune 500. How many of these companies will be around in 15 years?

Even if you are a big company that hasn't valued customer experience in the past, it IS possible to fix it. But it will take a hard look in the mirror and questioning everything you've done in the past, and what you plan to do to fix it.

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