By Janus Boye
The analysts at Digital Clarity Group has a new tagline that reads
Because Experience Matters Above All Else
Whether that’s a stretch, I’ll leave to you to decide, but these days everyone is really talking customer experience and how to use data to improve it.
At the Boye Aarhus 16 conference, we had a new customer experience conference track and the focus on experiences is also on other tracks and sessions, including by Jesper Nørding Pedersen, director at Copenhagen-based agency Advice. Advice has made it it’s mission to unify communication and customer experience — often shortened CX by technologists and in this brief article, I share some recent insights from a conversation with Jesper.
Sometimes customer experience is being discussed as if it were revolutionising technology; something easily applied to any situation. However, customer experience is first and foremost a paradigm shift that calls for collaboration.
Businesses will have to be holistic
Advocating for a holistic business approach isn’t exactly something new, and finding a CEO who doesn’t want his or her business run holistically would probably be a difficult task.
However, the new part of this is that businesses will have to be even more so when what used to be separate disciplines are coming together to pursue a better customer experience. As Jesper says:
“As consultants, our first priority is now to get people from IT, marketing and communication in the same room”
I will elaborate on this point in a moment, but first we need to bring data into the equation.
Data as a way of providing value to the customer
There are a lot of ways to use data. It can be used for targeted marketing in ways that customers might deem unethical — or at the very least extremely annoying. Using data in a constructive way is trying to figure out how, when and where we can provide value to the customer.
Physical and digital interactions are increasingly merging. Using data from the physical store to personalize the online shopping experience is one example, but different practices will become even more widespread in the years to come.
At the same time customers might be hesitant to provide personal information — extensive use of push marketing tactics is partly to blame for this. Luckily companies are increasingly realizing that the reason for obtaining personal data is to provide real value to the customer. This is where different disciplines will have to collaborate. Applications will have to be developed with a higher degree of insight from Marketing, and Communication will increasingly need to build bridges, both internally and externally.
From information to networked intelligence
An increased focus on customer experience has many benefits. Jesper Nørding Pedersen points to Don Tapscott who in his TED talk explains why the world is increasingly moving towards openness.
When information and resources are shared, it becomes networked intelligence that can benefit everyone
As Jesper says with reference to Don Tapscott.
The future of data and information is a two way street. If customers are to provide information that will help personalise their experience, companies will have to adopt the same mindset of openness in collaborating with customers and other businesses alike. This is what we will see in the years to come.
Good ethics is also what Boye Aarhus 16 conference keynote speaker Pernille Tranberg advocates when she says that defining your company’s data ethics is a great opportunity and competitive advantage. And at the Boye Aarhus 15 conference, Tim Walters from Digital Clarity Group gave a very highly rated keynote on the total impossibility of customer experience management.