Customer Experience 3.0: Why So Many Struggle to "Walk the Customer Talk"

December 2014 | ©Nicolette Wuring | nicolette -‐at-‐ wuring.nl 1

Experience 3.0: Why so many struggle to

‘walk the -‐customer-‐ talk’

It’s no longer about what the customer thinks about a company or a brand, but what

the customer feels. Where product and price relate to the rational, the experience hits

straight in the heart of the emotion. Increasingly, it is the customer experience that sets

a company apart from the rest. That’s what makes a brand human, generates

preference and loyalty.

Many companies are struggling with this. Lately, several sessions with executive and

operational marketers, made me realize there are three disconnects at the core of this struggle.

1. Leadership in many organizations is not aware (enough) of the organizational impact of the ‘Age of the Customer’.

2. The misinterpretation of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a KPI that can be used at all levels.

3. Marketers, who lack the operational experience and competencies to make the

connection with the customer facing side of the business, have claimed the domain of customer experience.

The issues arising from the first disconnect is that leadership struggles with securing

‘customer experience’ in the organizational structure in a way that it enables the

organization to make the desired impact, causing a disconnect between strategic and operational goals, both from an operational (efficiency) as well as a revenue perspective.

The Net Promoter Score is the proverbial tip of the iceberg (see Figure). A loyal customer

can be dissatisfied with an incident, be it a product, customer service or a specific event,

but still be a promoter. It takes a number of incidents (on average at least three) before dissatisfaction turns a promoter into a passive, or worse, a detractor.

Unfortunately, leadership has taken to treating NPS as a ‘silver bullet’, the ‘be-‐all and

end-‐all’, causing narrow-‐mindedness, and people down the line to create things like tNPS (transactional NPS).


NPS is especially useful to measure the ‘total relationship’ (see A, figure). However, it

doesn’t give you the kind of actionable feedback you need at the levels B, C and D (see

figure). In other words, is tells you how a customer feels about your brand, but doesn’t

tell you how he perceives the separate denominators that create the total package.

Neither does it give you a handle on what specifically you need to change or improve

where in your organization to improve your customers’ experience, and balance it with

your operational efficiency, or things like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Recency, Frequency, Monetary value (RFM), Share of Wallet (SoW), etc.

And that brings me to the third disconnect. Marketers have claimed ‘customer

experience’ as their domain. It’s a misunderstanding to think that planting a team of

analysts who translate all digitally available information from both internal and external

(for instance social media) sources is sufficient. And a team of ‘customer experience

experts’, marketers, who compile ‘customer journey maps’, telling the customer facing

side of the business what to think, feel, say and do at any given moment in the process.

Measuring things like ‘tNPS’ at the levels B and C (see Figure) without a holistic view of

all constituent parts, and without involving operational people, and/or looking at the KPI’s the operational side of the organization is measured by (D; see Figure).


One of the key findings in Accenture’s ‘Global Consumer Pulse Report 2013’ is that

companies promising one thing, but delivering another globally frustrates 84 (!) percent of customers.

Key to ‘walking the -‐customer-‐ talk’ is consistency between ‘who you are’ (DNA/culture;

vision, mission, values) and ‘who you say you are’ (internal and external

communication). This requires company-‐wide alignment AND deploying all experience

and competencies that exist within the organization. Marketers only oversee a few

pieces of that puzzle. The true innovation power, co-‐creation power, and realization

power where it comes to ‘walking the -‐customer-‐ talk’ requires bottom-‐up (and top-‐

down) engagement and involvement of the customer facing side of the organization, the people who are dealing with customers on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be about who successfully claims the domain

‘customer experience’, but about how can you lign up the constituent parts of the

organization the best way, both from a customer and an internal perspective (measuring the right things at the right levels), to serve your customers.

December 2014 | ©Nicolette Wuring | nicolette -‐at-‐ wuring.nl

Marketing

Customer Experience 3.0: Why So Many Struggle to "Walk the Customer Talk"