I came across this interesting article in the Australian version of CIO magazine. Lot’s of good stuff about the need to manage the customer experience across the multitude of customer interfaces that proliferate as a customer grows.
“The kind of changes we recommend to the way companies manage the customer experience requires an overall alignment of strategy and execution that touches all faces of the organization,” Rayport says. “It’s because it’s so major that our sense is that it must be driven from the C-level across the entire firm not relegated to particular silos in the marketing and sales organization as is often the case in many organizations. Indeed considering all interfaces with customers as important empowers the entire organization to deliver at the highest quality and helps bring the culture together.”
Managing the web of interfaces and reviewing how customers and staff use them must be a cross-discipline task requiring cooperation of marketing, technology and human resources just for starters. It is not an issue that can be quarantined as something fixed either in the back office or in the front office. It requires a more holistic management approach.
I agree with Rayports sentiments here, that the issue of customer experience needs to come from the C-level initially. It is a horizontal problem essentially that must cut across the vertical silo’s that companies generally form into.
Francis Buttle is professor of marketing and CRM at Macquarie Graduate School of Management and he believes that as companies get larger and more remote from the markets they serve then the role of technology at all the touch points becomes much more important. “Technology is a function of size and remoteness,” he says. Yet Buttle says not many traditional company marketing departments understand these things. “The notion of customer experience has only been around for four or five years.”
This is a very interesting perspective, and on the whole I would agree, that as most companies grow, and they more they use technology to facilitate the customer relationship the more remote they become from the market. But this is only the case if the technology create’s distance from the market, interactive voice response systems, bad CRM script driven interaction, irrelevant FAQ’s all drive a wedge between the customer and the company. But what about the companies that get bigger and put technology in place that makes the customer part of the companies value network? Social software, blogs, wiki’s, open source content that customers can manipulate and make more useful, where customers are part of the value network, it seems as the companies grow, the more important the customer becomes and the more intimate the company becomes with the customer.
While companies such as Bunnings, Myer and Taxis Combined believe there is competitive edge in being one of the first to adopt this customer-focused approach, Brown is not sure that alone is enough or, perhaps, even too much of a supposedly good thing. Long term he wondered whether customers might actually get sick of being too close to their vendors. “The traditional marketing approach advocates servility, pandering, abasement, oily obsequiousness and what have you. We’re creeps basically,” he stated.
And for a little balance I love this little bit here, it speaks wonderfully to the fact that the customer interaction needs to be “appropriate”. I’ve never been that keen on blockbuster folks saying “enjoy your movie Karl”, it always felt fake, forced. And am I the only one that just wants to get off the phone when I’m finished with customer service, I really don’t need dissertation of how much you enjoyed helping and asking me if there is anything else I can do for me…. just saying thanks and bye would save me having to politely listen to the pitch when all I want to do is hang up.
“We peddle an unattractive mix of pseudo empathy, pretend intimacy and fake friendship. I suspect most customers yearn for the days when purchasing a bar of soap didn’t mean entering into a lifetime value relationship.”
Here’s the full article:
CIO | As You Like it
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