Why self-service is critical to the future of CX
Convenience and time are the most important commodities in the experience economy. That's why self-service is critical to the future of customer experience.
Welcome to the 17th edition of this newsletter. To all of y’all that continue to shower me with praise and adulation for these missives, please stop. You’re my sister for crying out loud!
What shall we discuss today?
Lots of work being done behind the scenes on word-smithing and messaging. Not much that can be shared there, it has essentially slowed down the conversations. Sometimes, you just must work – KWIM?
This is going to be a little short, there is not a lot to report on mind expansion (without drugs), but we do have a great one to start: another video.
The franchise for “I Don’t Know What I Am Doing With Friends” has been a little quiet as of late because we have been doing some internal organizing and paperwork stuff to improve distribution and promotion. We are nearly finished, but since I did not want to run out of videos – I slowed down deployment of what I had until I could start recording more.
This one is a great one.
Ray Gerber has a prestigious background and is a keen thinker when it comes to journeys and customer experience, also is well-experienced in these technologies’ things (like me). He built one of the best tools I’ve seen in a long time, Thunderhead, and as the CTO and I wanted to have a chat with him about what customer optimization means and how it is done. (He also recently wrote an article on customer intent that is <chef’s kiss>.)
How much do you know about journey analytics? Optimization? Not sold yet? Watch and learn – it’s a great discussion.
Fight night: When experts disagree
I told you a few weeks back that as I was doing some interesting conversations on psychology and research a good friend talked about biases – well, I wanted to get a better perspective on that, and I found this gem – the Big Bad Book of Biases.
The book is not yet released, but there is a downloadable piece right now, kind of a teaser, which is the periodic table of biases. It is a handy tool to have around, and I thank Pogrebna, G. and K. Renaud for letting us get to it before the book is released.
Continuing the concept of biases, and this is a good segue – trust me, I want to give you a link to some content that you may find interesting.
The concept of JTBD (jobs to be done) which is used a basis for service design and a few other CX topics is – in my most humble opinion, and some would say wrong – too academic for corporate America.
Understanding the actual intent of the customer need (which is what it’s addressing) is far above the level where most organizations live, work, and die. It is not, don’t get me wrong, it is simply a little too academic.
Of course, my friend Mike Boysen (who has been doing a lot of work and research and writing and talking) would disagree with me vehemently – which is why I am trying to bring him to do a video with me, hope this convinces him – on this and would use some choice words and examples to show me otherwise. And – this is the key – he would likely be right, but in very limited environments. This is, again, my main beef with this concept – very limited applicability for most complex, multi-level solutions that exist out there in corporate America.
He has been writing about this for a while, and he has produced some great content, and I wanted to highlight one of them I recently come across. This is a good alternative way to think about CX – and he makes very interesting arguments. Read it, comment, and hopefully – we will be discussing this soon on a video.
CX, proactivity, problem resolution: Loyalty-builders or expected customer offerings?
Finally, told you it’d be short, we have this very thought-provoking article from Matt Watkinson on how to not have to worry about CX (and something that remains dear and near to my heart for over 25 years): proactivity.
The purpose of CX and CRM had always been (in my very humble opinion) to automate as much as possible the interactions between customer and organization.
No customer wants a relationship with an organization – period. Customers get no value of that, and the organization does not care (fine, we can pretend and say humans are important, blah-blah-blah, but in reality – this is not about relationships). They want resolution – or even better: no problems.
If you have problems, use automation and escalation to resolve them.
If you want to do better, use the same tools you use for automation to build proactivity and prevention – so you never have to worry about resolution (cannot resolve a non-existing problem – that’s a whole different discussion).
Matt wrote this article to explain his point-of-view on this, and I agree quite a bit on what he says – a few debatable points on function versus form – and it is a pretty good place to start thinking about this.
I am also trying to convince him to come do a video to chat more about that – so there’s the shameless adulation for the purpose of this…. And follow Matt if you don’t already.
That’s it for this week – thanks for reading. We’re close to two milestones: the 6-month anniversary of this column (will create a special summary edition), and the re-launch of the video series. Stay tuned for both.
Will see you next week – with any luck can remain somewhat regular…. On publication intervals, geez…
