What "Customer Experience is the New Marketing" Really Means

Experts in the Customer Experience industry continue to tout that customer experience is the new marketing. This rubs me the wrong way for a number of reasons: mostly for its careless disregard for the talented and dedicated people who work in marketing but also, Customer Experience is an inclusive field. CX isn’t anything new, it’s just informed and exceptional business design, and marketing people totally get that.

Company-wide Involvement and Team Ownership are Key

Customer Experience professionals base their entire platforms on ‘breaking down silos’ and getting teams to take ownership (in each of their departments), and together - to win as a team. Except for marketers, apparently. You guys have to go sit in the corner and redefine your careers. We’ll be in the break room eating the pizza you bought with your own money and celebrating our new titles. Thanks, bye!

Later, marketing peeps!

The goal is to bring teams together, to inform them about what their customers want, so they can design better strategies - as a cohesive unit. The right hand talking to the left hand. A sustainable, repeatable business model that the entire company owns and is proud of.

How Does the Role of Customer Experience Influence Sustainable Business Design?

To be a great Customer Experience professional, you need to love data. Lots, and lots of data. You also need to know which data markers to implement for companies to track and decipher.

One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make is either not tracking any data or tracking the wrong data to make customer-driven business decisions. Data informs companies about pain points and delightful moments along the customer journey.

By the year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator

A lot of CX’ers use Journey Mapping - a tool used to drill down into the pain points and moments of delight in your customer’s day - it’s a deep dive into the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your customer so you can understand their brains and how they make purchasing decisions.

In addition, you need to know anthropological research methods such as: how to interview customers, design surveys, observe people, processes, and systems to gather unbiased data about organizational culture (ethnography), how to implement culture change and gain company buy-in.

If we do our jobs well, we break-down silos in organizations and get people talking to each other. We help people understand current and future trends in their product or service categories so leaders can make smarter decisions for raising customer satisfaction & loyalty, raise sales quantity and revenue.

Raise, revenue! RAISE!

Anyone can design a product or service, smart business leaders design EXPERIENCES

If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last 20-years working for startups, small to medium-sized businesses, and major media corporations, it’s that the further you get away from serving people, the further you get away from success.

If your employees hate you, they won’t stay (fun fact: On average, it costs about $13,000 every time you have to replace an employee). If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business (another fun fact: It is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one).

The sooner business leaders start thinking about the customer’s experience as a differentiator, the sooner those businesses will implement sustainable, repeatable, and smart strategies designed by the people, for the people.