Thanks to everyone for the nice, warm welcome to my debut post last week.
What kept me entertained this week? What wonderful and interesting conversations and research was uncovered? Let’s see…
Happening in CX this week: Rethinking customer journey mapping
First, this conversation in LinkedIn. An EXCELLENT discussion on customer experience and service design, contributed by some of the smartest, and most forward-looking people in the industry. This is as close to Nirvana for conversations about CX and SD as it gets, I tell you. What’s that? No time or patience or care to read it? No worries, let me summarize the key points.
Graham Hill proposed an interesting question: Should we map customer journeys or company pathways (basically, the company’s response to those journeys – badly and briefly stated). If you know me, and most of you reading heard me say this before, I believe that there’s a scourge in the CX industry, and thy name is customer journey mapping.
The concept of journey mapping is okay, almost interesting and has limited value; the problem arises from the implementation of that idea. Most organizations are happy with turning customer’s dynamic journeys into static documented ones. There are two main reasons for this: 1) the tools we had made it hard to impossible to address changing journeys; 2) most practitioners believe that once it’s documented and addressed, the organization has done its job to understand the customer and they “will get to update, once a year or so.”
Meanwhile, customers continuously change their minds on their expectations, demands, and needs, making those static documented journeys obsolete very quickly. Company pathways, by contrast, are more dynamic and not as detailed – and therefore can be optimized together with the data and processes that power them.
Sounds like a win-win solution, right? Except that in some cases, those pathways become static themselves and – well, you know. Thus, this LI post and the successive discussion (please make sure to read the comments, where the value is) on how to improve these practices. Very interesting comments from well established giants of the SD world in there, totally worth reading.
Pondering platforms: Interactions and operations
Second, there’s this article from MIT Sloan on the future of platforms. I tried reading this four times. I thought I could skim and get soundbites from it, then thought it was too deep, then could not make sense of it – however, when I blocked 30 minutes and took on it the right way, it was an excellent article to broaden conversations on platforms.
Truly some great points and some concepts to think about for those interested in where to from here on platforms (and that should be all of you, y’all hear me?). A few points I disagree on but will let you find yourself how you feel about it. If you don’t want to read it, and instead want to know my comments on it, here they are:
One, platforms have been around for a while. The author of this article (and accompanying book) has been doing this for 30 years, which despite my claims that cloud computing started in 1939 (see my last pinned tweets from four years ago), it was before we had the modern version of cloud computer. In all this time, he has investigated major consumer platforms (one of the reasons I had to re-read this article – I was looking for enterprise platforms, mea culpa) but virtually all the lessons and insights from this article apply well enough for today’s cloud computing-based enterprise platforms.
Two, although the author talks about two type of platforms, innovation and transactions (create a new solution or run the business), I want to change that for enterprise platforms to the two similar operations we have (although we do have innovation in enterprise technology, it’s not as necessary as it is in the consumer market), the correlation in my mind is interactions and operations.
Of course, in turn this is front- and back-office, and that leads to the conclusion that providers that can master both front- and back-office (interactions and operations) as those in a better level to succeed at the game. And this — biased thinking warning — is why I am doing what I am doing at SAP. I see this conflating of operations and interactions as the key to what enterprise architects, CIOs, and CTOs are demanding from vendors these days.
Forget multi-cloud and different providers, that is what infrastructure and platform providers for the enterprise battle about, and focus on the results, the outcomes your organization seeks in a platform world.
And third, love this quote from the article as a way to explain what a platform is:
“They use digital technology to create self-sustaining positive-feedback loops that potentially increase the value of their platforms with each new participant. They build ecosystems of third-party firms and individual contractors that allow them to bypass the traditional supply chains and labor pools required by traditional companies.”
I mean, this is what we are talking about for CX – the ability to provide ever-optimized, infinitely-personalized, outcome-driven platforms that leverage the best logic out there in a single operational solution.
Non?
Bee’s knees, giggle water, and CX strategy
Finally, something a little more “light” and less worry about deep thinking. I was rabbit-holing on something or another last week and ended up looking where the phrase “bee’s knees” comes from. Because that’s what people do when they are going down to the darkest, deepest parts of the internet. Found this short page that talks about one of the uses for the term in the 1920 as a way to qualify something that is excellent. What kept me there though was a further entry for “giggle water” (an alcoholic libation, as good friend Paul Greenberg would say).
The reason this caught my attention, and then the weird turn to CX from there, is because I remembered the original Fantastic Beasts movie. The movie was set in the 1920-30’s in NYC and one of the things that was being served at the magical bar was – you guessed it, if you have not seen the move – giggle water. The difference was that when you drank this one, made you giggle.
The Harry Potter franchise made an extra effort to not only get the historical references right, but also to co-opt them and adapt them to both deliver to their brand promise or an alternative magical universe, and correlation to the human universe. In other words, they set out to create a great experience based on real life, and they co-opted these terms and concept, and adapted them to their use, to do so.
This shows how organizations should come to CX – with an idea of setting and delivering on their brand promise, but also understand how the consumers of their brand and brand promise would and should react and adapting their narrative and their promises to that. Little bit of a stretch? Maybe, but an interesting consideration – and you know you can always challenge what I say and what I share, conversations are what drives me.
What do you think?
P.S. — Simply because it created a little bit of noise, and had some eyeballs, but not because it adds much to the conversation… I had this idea of comparing Michelin-starred restaurants and CX programs, and a little conversation ensued. This is more entertaining that educational, but fun to read in my opinion (and I wrote this, so you know my opinion is fully unbiased)
