By Rachel Cope, CCXP
CXPA Europe Regional Council Member
What I took from the Engage Customer Summit that took place in London last week.
Last week I spent a day at this conference in London. The sessions covered very different industries, but a handful of ideas kept coming up. The common thread was that customer experience is a long game—and a very human-centric one.
For commoditised markets the pull towards competing on price is strong. A discount is a moment in time. It gets a transaction, but it does little to build a brand, because the customer rarely remembers who gave it to them.
One session gave a clear definition of what that means in practice. True customer centricity is about long-term customer value, which means deciding what you’re willing to trade off, even when that is painful internally.
A transaction is a moment in time, and great service in that moment isn’t enough. What sticks are memories, because they create emotional associations.
One speaker offered a five-part test for CX investment and partnerships which I really liked:
Several speakers made the same point from different angles: design your customer journey on the assumption that something might go wrong. If you know where friction is likely, you can plan for it up front, and that does more to reduce it than fixing it afterwards.
I found one particular observation striking. The first experience a customer has with a complaint is a major driver of whether they feel it has been resolved. How you handle that first contact matters more than what comes later. It also means digging deeper to find the real driver of the complaint, not just the stated one. And listening, properly, takes energy. It’s a skill, not a default.
Of course there is more data than ever and some great examples of using it to the customers’ benefit. Much of it is predictive, but prediction isn’t insight. A missed payment might be an indicator of debt. Or maybe the customer has changed bank or has had a life event. Without understanding the why, you’re guessing at what to do next, and guessing at scale in customer conversations can go badly wrong.
Whether it’s pricing, partnerships, complaints or analytics, the best examples had something in common. They treated customers as people with context, not as records or segments. That takes more effort and more tolerance for trade-offs, but it builds the kind of loyalty a discount never will.
What’s one thing your organisation would have to trade off to be genuinely customer-obsessed?
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