Do you know this rule? Today I talked about an pioneer in CX, Amazon. It looks like they care less about this and have maybe more a 70/30 or 80/20 rule in place. Which rule do we have in place? 30/70?

Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) are going hand in hand. If we place everything under the customer we loose our self. Only if we are happy with what we are doing, if there is a work-life balance and the salary is at a level which is ok we are full of power to do more and more… not because we need to, because we want to.

Let’s have a look into one example. We have a customer service department which is overloaded with work. They don’t feel well and are happy if the week is over. they ask for solutions to reduce workload. One big workload are questions regarding invoices. Their target group is B2B and the German “Mittelstand” (small and medium business companies). Typical here is, that they care about invoices outside the normal business hours at night or on the weekend.

If the customer service people are joining the office on Monday morning they often want to get back into the weekend immediately do to the amount of mails and calls are dropping in.

One request is, can we use artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the workload. WOW, this sounds great, for sure we need to start an AI project. We are running to the IT department and they tell us how great this is, what we need for it and how long it takes…. huge amount of money any many many month to get it done. Before we can start it we need dozens of strategy meetings.

Is this the solution? Artificial intelligence means a self learning system, while other “intelligence” concepts just use intelligence algorithm.

What the requesting customer service department is requesting help for them. Is this the right request? first of all we should think about how we can help the customer with the invoice and second how can we additional reduce our workload with this.

Vodafone started an individual invoice video with not a default invoice, with exactly the positions and numbers of the individual invoice. They explain it step by step, so their customer don’t need to call and spent 10 minutes till having a real person to talk to. They get help right in time, quick and 24/7. You can see this Vodafone example here: https://esser.me/vodafone-and-my-customer-experience

What has this to do with the 60/40 rule? If we just extend the service ours where customer can call, maybe also on the weekend, this isn’t good for the Employee Experience. So we should 60% pay attention on the customer and think about the points for them first, but we shouldn’t lose sight of ourselves. this wouldn’t be healthy. So 60% view on the customer and 40% on our self / our company.

Let’s stay healthy and full of power to impress our customer and build a long term trusted relationship.

Think about your situation today. Amazon looks like to be on 80/20 for the customer which isn’t the best solution…. but where are you, where is your company? Maybe on 20/80 or maybe 40/60?

The world isn’t black and white. What we need is the right mix.. and the right mix is changing dramatic. So we need to break the existing rules where the brand is 70-80% and the customer 20-30%.