Published on the 18/08/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Customer experience is not about devices…

There’s an odd paradox which arises in our increasingly online and connected worlds. While we connect using smartphones, laptops and other gadgets, we are still people behind them. That’s something which can get forgotten in the quest to deliver outstanding customer experiences, said Ben Morgan, director of Accenture Interactive.

“It’s easy to say that customer experience is the new battleground, but it is necessary to have some context and see it in terms of the lens of a digital society,” he said.

That ‘lens’ is one where the pace of change is increasing and the tools to drive the pace of change are so accessible that it can be faster to build, rather than buy, “Any type of experience you’d like to. There are no constraints and that is an amazing place to be.”

Morgan noted that particularly in mature industries, customer experience is one of the few places left to differentiate; apparently, design-driven companies have shown a 10-year shareholder return of 219 percent over that of the S&P 500 index from 2004-2015 (that was according to the pitch, which also said 89 percent  companies believe customer service is the primary basis for competition versus just 36 percent four years ago).

But with technology so readily accessible Morgan said it’s probably a good idea to focus on people and not devices. “All organisations are tackling big challenges with technology, but those are all human challenges when you break it back, whether it is booking an airline ticket, buying things online, paying for services. That means the issues are mostly complex, emotional and human.”

Differentiating on customer experience, therefore, might involve design and technology, said Morgan, and in the past a lot of organisations spent plenty of time on just that. But it isn’t here that the advantage will be found. “That comes from the experience delivered and that depends on the people focus.”

Hitting the right note is a tough target because there are a lot of moving parts. Morgan said this includes “The ‘liquid expectations’ of customers which are constantly influenced by the experiences we receive in our day to day lives and then take back to our interactions with traditional companies like banks, energy companies or airlines.”

In other words, the ease with which you use Google, Uber or Facebook creates an expectation of experience from other organisations. Those companies change fast and with that change, your expectations change too.

Morgan said the new era will be defined by ‘living services’ and driven by the digitisation of everything. “We’re going from a web generation, to a mobile generation and we’re now entering a new world of living services where connected devices will talk to us and provide us with useful information.”

While our contention is that this is all about convenience, Morgan reckoned it is about value – and individual perceptions of value differ. “Living services means personalisation. Those that can create services which have the ability to deliver potentially millions of individual personal interactions will win. These organisations don’t look for customer loyalty. Instead, they are loyal to their customers.”