No doubt, Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Centricity will be the key success factor and the key change driver of the next years. Is our ecosystem ready for this?
As stated here, there is something after the CX hype which I called SX… the Solution Experience. SX is the combination of the 5 elements Customer, Brand, Company, Market and Competitor. This is for sure the next evolution, but let’s stay within CX for now.
First off all we need to ask us some questions. Ecosystem means not just technology, it means corporate structures and mindset also. What we need is to re-question everything, but not trashing everything.
Brand & Customer Centric – A discrepancy?
Building up a brand means defining the values of a brand. Often they are mapped to what the company wants to be. Through the hype of Digital Transformation and IoT the customer centric view is moving into the center. Is this a discrepancy or are this both topics (brand and customer centric) complete themselves?
Our motivation behind everything should be the customer and not the brand in the first stage. If we pay into the customer this will also pay into the brand later on and with a long-term effect.
Are Sales & Marketing still contemporary?
Often we see CX as part of marketing. Is this the right positioning? For sure it’s the best place in existing company structures… but to be honest, it needs to be independent within an own, new department because marketing has – like sales – also revenue goals at the end of the day. This maybe not always directly but reach and awareness are just used to generate revenue. There is a long way how companies needs to transform in times of CX which is not easy. This let me to the next point.
Corporate Leadership & HR
The ecosystem of the past we have seen was (and still is) corporate driven. “Many organizations are still driven by intellect & ego. In such an environment goals are more important than values. This results in suboptimal and toxic work environments (aka the “old workplace”) [ref]Reiner Kraft @ LinkedIn[/ref]
Values must be the core DNA of a company. Managed by HR and lived by the corporate leadership. This values must include the customer. With this we have the need for customer centricity which needs to be adopted in all processes. Just one question: How can a company be customer centric if their employees have corporate goals (like revenue)?
Corporate structure, employee goals, employer attraction, teaming, trust, common vision to work on, etc. There are many topis to work on which are not typically seen if we talk about CX, topics which are not managed by marketing. Marketing can just bring up such things and push it.
The Ecosystem
We have seen the meaning and positioning of CX now and got a feeling what’s wrong and how it should be in future. If we understand, that everything counts into the customer we need to have a holistic view on him and build a central profile. Not new, but today we often talk more about these buzzwords instead of really doing it. A transformation is needed, not just a translation. What does this mean? See this article.
If we look into the marketing of today we have different channels with different customer profiles. We didn’t managed one customer profile within marketing…. much less we didn’t managed a profile combined with all other areas like sales, corporate CRM or external areas. What we need are so called industry cloud solution which is closest to an ecosystem with a true and real holistic view on the customer which is combine with all internal sources.
Do we really understand the customer? Can we – as a company – understand him by ourself or do we need others?
This let us to the ecosystem we need. Facebook, Google or Apple have build their own. This dimension we can’t reach, so we need others and can’t act by our own. What we need are solution partner like software (cloud vendor), consulting companies and industry partner (maybe competitor?).
