So many brands have reached a glass ceiling in the effectiveness and quality of their customer experience and engagement.
The evidence: a widening gap between the quality of experiences businesses think they deliver compared to what consumers say they are getting; a ten-year low in customer satisfaction; a mismatch between what’s important to consumers versus what brands think is important; .
Today, the debate on why centres around a ‘broken’ CX - poor service, a lack of CX experience or CX skills, and discussions about who ‘owns’ CX. Some are true, some are irrelevant, but all miss the point. An understanding of the consumer has failed to capture their new behaviours and wants, and the consequences are showing: customer experiences have become stagnant and brands are falling prey to digital sameness.
The consumer wants different
Whilst digital can leave consumers feeling full, it can also leave them undernourished for the human connectivity and emotions that are vital to loyalty.
Has digital improved consumers’ lives? Yes, it has. And it saved lives during the pandemic. But much of the digital world we’ve designed to connect consumers to brands doesn’t deliver its promise—too many digital fails and too much hiding behind technology in the name of ‘convenience’ when, if we’re honest, it’s too often about more ‘efficiency’. CMOs leveraging the convenience and simplicity of connected digital experiences now need to design for differentiated benefits. Every brand offers the same digital experience because they all address the same customer needs, use the same technology platforms, and design for the same mobile use case. QSR experiences allow diners to pay in advance and skip the line; hotel apps allow travellers to open their room door; fashion and beauty experiences look eerily similar. It’s just a new level of table stakes, not differentiation.
CX needs to look beyond functional experiences in order to break out of its CX rut.
Digitally enabled realities remain a poor substitute for what consumers desire, such as human connectedness, curiosity, excitement, or something that moves them or helps them achieve. Why? For two reasons; when almost everything is commoditised, bland and linear and experiences are based only on less friction and more speed, they are me-too, easily copied, generic and too bland – making differentiation tough and engagement weak. And, whilst digital delivers fast, easy, and convenient it can also deliver disconnection, habit instead of loyalty, and feeling full but feeling undernourished.
How do we close this gap? By unthinking today’s typically stalled CX proposition. When consumers say ‘better’ they actually mean ‘different’, so it isn’t about CX being better at ‘better’. ‘Different’ is about unthinking what we’re doing and pivoting to the emotional and social changes that are pulling consumers into their futures - and successful brands are helping them get there.
This decade has already become a dizzying array of changes, and it’s gathering pace. A pandemic. Anxiety. Fear. Loss. War. Economic disruption. Nothing is the same anymore.
Consumers are longing to belong to something that means something.
We can’t optimize ourselves to relevance
It’s the slow decay of the ordinary. What has broken engagement isn’t poor service but that consumers have moved on. ‘Things’ are being replaced by ‘feelings’; all generations are thinking differently; a pandemic, isolation, fear for the future and conflicts have touched everyone and combined to create epoch-making shifts in needs, wants and priorities across almost everybody. Successfully answering those needs is what drives engagement. The labels customer, consumer and citizen have merged as motivations, needs, purpose, authenticity and social move into the foreground. Optimising processes and fixing the broken is necessary, but won’t fix the fundamental issues.
We’re over-focused on digital. I concede we’ve had to — our brand survival depended on it. But in the rush to digitise we’ve left human needs behind. Now we’re paying the price; not just bad service, but consumers relegating irrelevant brands into the background, brand polygamy, and consumers demanding more profound, more human connections from brands they choose to use.
Some brands get it. Many don’t.
So fix today, but discard the belief that ‘simple’, ‘speed’ and ‘convenience’ and ‘better’ will make the difference - because when everyone starts doing that well, there is nowhere else to go for engagement. If our ambition is merely to deliver what consumers expect as table stakes, then we’re lost.
We can re-balance. By understanding consumers’ wants we can bring the best of digital together with a renewed effort to connect with customers on a human level by helping them achieve their new needs and purpose.