A fresh and old perspective on customer experience
In my previous Maximize your experience article I talked about the importance of setting expectations when designing a customer/employee experience program to support sustainable growth.
In this blog I explain why we as consumers are asking organizations to exceed our expectations and why just meeting our needs is not satisfactory. In keeping with my personal interest in history and society, I’m using a few, rather different examples than the norm to illustrate the way customer experience was taking shape from early days until the present.
I suggest that the need to create the WOW effect (and its connection to the draw of the Customer Experience) is something that has roots back in ancient times, it is actually a deep human nature that is true in all walks of life. While we spend a lot of time speaking about how things are today and how the future will look like, we might gain some interesting insights if we step back in time and watch our ancestors.
Bear in mind, as you read through the stories, two aspects that illustrate the layers of the power of Customer Experience and the need for the WOW. By this I mean:
1) Inside the story itself – why did the characters/organizations act the way they did? What were the drivers in decision making and the triggers? What made the experience so attractive?
2) In the telling of the story through generations – what resonates then and now with the symbolism and the affinity with the characters/organizations and the situation they are in?
Prepare your hammers, brush-up the swords, let’s open the door to the world of our ancestors…